Abstract

Sentence completion is a technique used in personal development, psychology and other fields. It blends elements of enquiry and projective techniques. My experience of using these tools as pedagogical practice in the higher education space has been overwhelmingly positive. Sentence completion is an effective tool at the disposal of educators to help set an open minded-reflective tone during workshops and seminars, which may also help mitigate students’ confusion and overwhelm.

Session and activities

Sentence completion is a technique used in personal development, psychology and other fields. It blends elements of enquiry and projective techniques – an assessment tool used to understand someone\’s personality, emotions, and motivations.
The key idea is that people tend to \”project\” their own inner world onto the stimuli. In other words, their responses reveal more about themselves than they might if they were directly asked about their thoughts and feelings. Participants are given incomplete sentences (stems) and asked to finish them. I have been using sentence completion techniques as part of a larger suite of consciousness-raising tools in the UAL classroom, aiming explicitly to increase engagement, and opening up space for reflective thinking.
My experience of using these tools as pedagogical practice in the higher education space has been overwhelmingly positive. From workshops about crafting creative futures with intent, to how to polish up your LinkedIn profile, sentence completion has helped students tease out their thoughts, attitudes and values. Answers produced have often given direction to coursework and creative output.
Sentence completion exercises, when run anonymously and using post-its, have also produced important data for myself and unit leads on students’ anxieties and aspirations. It is my experience that asking a student to complete an unfinished sentence, rather than answer a question, elicits a different quality of response. The delivery however, matters. For example, I have run my Hopes & Fears exercise in many a classroom, and would be happy to run trainings for fellow faculty and staff on how to ensure the best results.
In conclusion, this paper argues that sentence completion is an effective tool at the disposal of educators to help set an open minded-reflective tone during workshops and seminars, which may also help mitigate students’ confusion and overwhelm.