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Structuring your assignment

Introduction (up to 20% of your assignment)

If you are going to make this assignment real you have to apply it to a real life situation. Often enough you have identified a dissonance in your organization between espoused vision, mission, values and beliefs and the lived experience by those in the organisation. Consequently, this context for the problem must be unpacked. This section should be concise. In practice, this means providing some background knowledge of your organization and an appropriate precise analysis of you situation, culminating with a description of your problem. It is often helpful to think of this process illustrative of as a "V". The analysis is leading to the reader understanding your problem. This is a prerequisite to your generating the next pivotal section.

Within the last introduction paragraph

You address two things

  • State clearly the purpose of the assignment

  • Develop a thesis or argument focusing on how you will address the purpose. Within the argument you will articulate four to seven issues or themes that invite "unpacking" or elaboration. These will form the basis of topics to be explored in addressing the purpose of the assignment.

    It is inadequate in merely STATE these themes. They have their basis in some argument you have generated in your mind. You are required to make overt this argument in this first section. This in fact is your thesis. The purpose of the rest of the paper is to present an argument to defend this thesis. The foundation of any argument is logic and evidence. You have already displayed the logic of your argument in stating the thesis in the introduction. The evidence is displayed in your judicious and critical use of literature you have read in the books of readings.

    The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of human personhood, which underpins Third millennium's message, as well as to offer some illumination of the sentence: "The Catholic school sets out to be a school for the human person and of the human person" (par9). Clearly, this exploration is a personal response and the paper may be accused of being idiosyncratic and not reflecting accurately what the Vatican intended. However, the offered interpretation is believed to be theologically orthodox. The argument which structures this paper is that the Catholic school can legitimately set out "to be a school for the human person and of the human person" (par 9), because Catholic teaching contents that:

    humans somehow image God and this imaging is fundamental to understanding the human person;

    since Christ is perfectly human, to become fully human is essentially to become more like Christ;

    spirituality is a characteristic of all of humanity and therefore to become more human is to become more spiritual;

    to be fully human presupposes relational and communitarian dynamics, which demand the honouring of social justice imperatives.

    The next sections have headings that are the themes, which you have stated in your thesis.

Themes 1-7

Each theme is a building block in the assignment argument, which has its basis in the articulated research problem. Likewise, each section within each theme is part of an argument concerning the themes part in the overall argument.

Each theme is a result of a synthesis of your critically reading the literature. Within your argument you must cite evidence for your position. Below is an example:

Parent choice of school is also a topic of wide research interest in the late 1990's in the United States and the United Kingdom. (O'Keefe & O'Keefe, 1996, p.299). Likewise, parent choice of school is a forceful, subtle influence on the Australian political agenda, and is now on the cusp of renewed practical and theoretical interest, given the Federal Government's 1996 decision to revise the national "New Schools" policy in favour of increased choice for parents of non-government schooling (Marginson, 1997).

Consequently each paragraph with each section should have a topic sentence. A topic sentence flags the content for the rest of the paragraph. Ideally, it should be possible to read each topic sentence of each paragraph within each theme to follow the argument of that theme.

Likewise it might be appropriate to describe real contextual issues from your situation and argue from the literature how your thesis addresses the issue.

The last paragraph of each theme has the role to relate how the argument pursued in the theme is addressing the purpose of the assignment.

Conclusion

The final paragraphs are a conclusion in which you demonstrate that your thesis carefully argued does address the research purpose.

Papua New Guinea, like other developing countries, is energetically maintaining and expanding an education system based on a western model inherited from its former colonial power. It has been argued that while developed countries have taken centuries to shape and focus their educational systems, most developing countries are attempting to establish an effective formal education system within a couple of decades. In most developing countries, the struggle to maintain a formal education system inherited from colonial powers may be described as a "Catch 22" situation. Considering the rate of population growth, demand for educational expansion, qualification escalation, and restricted employment opportunities, PNG education system is likely to be forced to operate in a vicious circle (Bacchus, 1987). The PNG Government is continuously accepting foreign assistance in educational funding. Unfortunately, foreign aid to education is often conditioned to guidelines from Australia that may in the long term be of more benefit to the Australian economy than to PNG education. Likewise, it is imperative that education initiatives are not divorced from the wider social, political and economic context of PNG and that PNG decision makers enter into negations that more emphatically promote PNG's common good in contrast to the prosperity of the relatively few individual Papua New Guineans.

The process of developing your assignment

The process of reading and writing for your assignment can be illustrated by the diagram below. I will explain during the workshop.

flow-chart: The process of developing your assignment

Writing Style

Using the concepts generated from your new understanding of the literature, you need to argue a logical "story" concerning this conceptual issue and the research problem. Below is an example. Note the topic sentence at the beginning of paragraph one. Likewise, appreciate the argument being developed and supported by the evidence. Observe that the citation of the researchers' names is muted in contrast to the use of their conclusions to craft the argument. The last sentence is the logical conclusion.

Developmental goals for educators

The key conceptual premise from this perspective is that teacher development is a form of adult development (Thies-Sprinthall, 2986:15) and that effective teaching is a function of higher stages of development (Hunt, 1975). As a result, it is argued that "cognitive developmental stage theories have strong implications for adult development within teacher education programs" (Ojai, 1978).

There seems to be considerable evidence to support this contention. Indeed, there is significant positive correlation between reflective teaching indices (use of the learner's frame of reference to plan, initiate and evaluate performance) and

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