Is a smile enough_ September 2013.docx

Is a smile enough?

What I know through my CAS experience.

Instructions:Please read the introductory comments under each CAS component, then complete the tasks where it says Your response.Save the document carefully and await instructions for upload to CAS site. Your responses here should be very honest (we learn a great deal from failure and stuggling) and use examples from your OWN CAS experiences. These responses will be used by your CAS supervisor to help them evaluate your learning in CAS.

Service

Students often comment that the smiles on the faces of children and clients during the Local Service programme and Project Week are the best evidence that they are providing a genuine service. But is it really?

Task 1: Please comment on how sure / unsure you are that you are actually providing a service that the people you are intending to serve have genuinely benefitted from your presence. Have you any other evidence and how reliable is it? Ways of Knowing might provide a framework for your response, but this is not compulsory.

Your response:

Task 2. Has your experience of Service changed your ethical positions and / or behavior? For example, are you now more or less convinced that compassion for the less fortunate is an essential human virtue? Have your moral judgments about, for example, HIV/Aids or prostitution or begging or child labour or scholarship programs or environmental responsibility changed because of what you have witnessed?Your response:

Action

It is said that you learn more from losing than from winning or that you can only learn to ride a bikeby actually riding a bike, but then its never forgotten.

Task 1. Please describe how you have learned to improve your skills and performance in your sports, dance or adventure activities. What plays the biggest role in your learning of these physical activities: Coaching? Practicing? Critical evaluation of your performance? Mental training?

Your response:

Creativity

Creative imagination and expertise is not confined to those who are naturally gifted in the Arts (artists, musicians, actors, etc.) and even those that are gifted have to continually develop their talent.

Task 1: Please describe how you have developed your creative knolwedge. Is the process intuitive or does it rely on critical reflection and goal setting? Have the opinions and skill - transfer from experts made the biggest impact or does practice make perfect?

Your response:

CAS in general

You have learned a lot through CAS, much of it due to your own efforts.

Task 1. Aside from yourself, please say who has had the biggest impact on your learning in any of these activities and explain why. A Service Client? Coach? Friend? Parent? Teacher? Leader of an Organisation?Feel free to name more than one.

Your response:

Task 2: Please describe the most valuable knowledge you have learned through CAS. This could be a skill, an attitude, an understanding. It could be something very meaningful or just very useful.

Your response: