Combined Practitioner’s Narrative and other Synthesis options
(Draft 3/14/02.  Not yet finalized by CCT Faculty)

In the Synthesis Project students review and reflect on the integration into their professional lives of critical and creative thinking skills and strategies and demonstrate mastery of competencies and skills appropriate and relevant to their disciplines.  Students have a number of options to choose from, which are listed in the Graduate Bulletin.  

As an experiment, the synthesis instructors have decided that students may combine a practitioner’s narrative related to one's development during your CCT's studies (option 2b) with a reduced length version of any of the other options.  The practitioner’s narrative "is an occasion for the writer to think deeply about his/her own practice—its origin, dynamic nature, influences, commitments, and future directions—to yield useful insights and discoveries."

The recommended way to undertake this kind of practitioner’s narrative is to prepare a "process review portfolio" consisting of exhibits with one-page annotations and an overall introduction, afterword, and a paragraph overview (to be included with your synthesis abstract).  These exhibits should be selected to convey your process of development during your studies, not only your best work or your final products.

Ideally you would have been saving material for exhibits all through your studies.  We recognize that it will not be an easy task to reconstruct and review your process after the fact.  To help warm up your thinking about whether to pursue this option and about how to select your exhibits and compose the accompanying narrative, we recommend that you start by doing an early draft of part II of the exit self-assessment.  This is structured around ten goals related to "developing as a reflective practitioner, including taking initiative in and through relationships."  For each item, you should identify and describe:
a) something(s) that reflects what you have achieved well related to this goal, and
b) something(s) you have struggled with/ need more help on/ want to work further on.
(This two-part structure relates to the goal of the CCT Program that graduates are life-long developers, not a completed "product" at the end of the Program.)
Any given exhibit can speak to more than one of these goals.  It is recommended that multiple exhibits relate to the first two of the ten goals, namely those about incorporating knowledge and perspectives and on processes, experiences, and struggles from CCT and other courses.

Models and additional rubrics will be distributed as the CCT faculty gains experience in helping students complete this form of Practitioner's Narrative.  (The "12Rs of the CCT experience" at http://omega.cc.umb.edu/~cct/12Rs.xls may be helpful.)  If you think you might wish to pursue this option, talk about it with your advisor as soon as possible.  Once you have settled on the expectations for the two parts of this hybrid option, you will need to provide plans, outlines, and drafts of the Practitioner's Narrative for  your advisors to comment on, just as you are doing for the other part.