Presidential Daily (Empathy) Brief: a short, engaging, critical thinking assignment

Below I have pasted the instructions for an assignment in my capstone course that I referenced in a previous blog post. I mentioned in that blog post that I broke up the critical thinking goals for a larger assignment into separate assignments, and that these assignments had the benefit of engaging the students more than the larger assignment did. So I thought I'd take the opportunity to make my case for this smaller assignment in terms of critical thinking.

So take a look at the instructions:

Module 2 writing assignment

Presidential Daily (Empathy) Brief

Every day the President of the United States (POTUS) gets a briefing (or report) about the threats to the security of the United States. I want you to write a briefing about empathy instead of national security.  

This Module contained articles about several important social issues, and the role that empathy plays in them. Now that you have this information, I want you to think about how we could use this information to improve the world. If only psychologists know about this information, what good is it to the world? So imagine that you could write a Presidential Daily (Empathy) Brief, and you could be sure that s/he would actually read it and is open to the idea of taking some action because of it. What would you want the President to know? (You can have our actual President in mind, or you can imagine a generic President. The important thing is that the President has a lot of power to make things happen.)

Start off by briefly summarizing the research that you think it is important that s/he know about. Remember two important things about the President: s/he is busy, so keep it short and to-the-point, and s/he is not a trained psychologist, so try to avoid using a lot of jargon.

Next, provide some concrete actions the POTUS could take in light of the information you just delivered. What do you think the POTUS could do if s/he wanted to address the social problems you mentioned using empathy to do so? Imagine that you have unlimited funds, and even an unlimited time-frame. Also imagine that Congress will agree to the POTUS’s actions (that seems more far-fetched than the unlimited funds thing at the moment, but we can fantasize, right?).

I want at least three solid proposals from you. The important features of the proposals are:

• that they have to be based on the research about empathy that you read and described to the POTUS. I want your proposals to essentially be about ways to use empathy to address the social problems. Please make the connections between the research and your proposals explicit.
• that they are specific proposals for action (not vague ideas like “make people more empathic” – how?)
• and that they address serious social problems.

Notice that ‘feasibility’ is not a criteria. You can’t propose to do something impossible (like replace everyone’s brain), but expense and time are unlimited. It would be great to have a proposal that could work in 1 year, but your proposal could have a 20 or 50 year time frame if you think that is required.

They could all be about the same social problem (like prejudice), or they could each address different problems, it’s up to you.

Two more questions to answer (DON’T FORGET THESE!). Please address them in a separate section:

• Comment on the predicted effectiveness of your proposals. Assume everything goes as planned – how much change (and where and what type) in the world would you expect? How would the world be different if the POTUS enacted your proposals?
• What would be the significant hurdles or barriers to the effectiveness of the proposals?

This is your chance to be creative and ambitious. I’m offering up the power, prestige, and resources of the Federal Government! Use it!

Module 2 writing assignment

Presidential Daily (Empathy) Brief

Grading rubric

Content	Points possible	Points earned
First proposal
based on research about empathy	2
specific proposal for action	2
addresses serious social problems	1
Second proposal
based on research about empathy	2
specific proposal for action	2
addresses serious social problems	1
Third proposal
based on research about empathy	2
specific proposal for action	2
addresses serious social problems	1
Comment on the effectiveness of your proposals	2
Comment on the hurdles or barriers	3
Total	20
Points lost because of writing errors
Final grade

Good writing is important. I expect there to be no spelling or grammatical errors in your paper. It’s worth your time and effort to do multiple drafts (even better would be to have another person read and edit your paper).

Please copy this page and paste it to the end of your paper.

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Hopefully you can see that in order to complete this assignment students would have to think critically about the readings in that Module. Here's how I see it:

1. The proposals require them to remember and understand the readings on a deep level. Before you can propose a program, you need to understand the scope and limitations of the readings.
2. A proposal like this is really an application of ideas to address real-world problems. That's really at the core of the assignment.
3. By requiring that they consider the barriers or hurdles to their proposals I have required that they evaluate their proposals against certain criteria. 
4. The three proposal require students to create programs. 
5. Pointing out the time and expertise limitations of the POTUS requires that they take the perspective of the reader, or consider their audience.

By my count that's 5 of 6 types of critical thinking (according to Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001), and I bet I could make a pretty good case for the remaining one, analysis. Plus the audience issue.

I've gotten some really cool proposals, and some students created documents that take the P.D.B.-aspect of the assignment seriously and included formatting so that it looks official. Again, that's work that goes beyond what is required. Some of the proposals have been quite ambitious as well, including significant education reform, empathy camps, and National Empathy Day.

So this assignment requires several types of critical thinking, engages the students so much that they often go beyond the requirements, and produces papers that are fun to read to boot! It also gets students to connect the material we are reading to the real world, perhaps even enhancing the civic motivation!