Journal Writing - Task 2A - Reflective Practice

'Writing is a means puzzling through what is happening in our work and personal lives.' Boud (2001)

Writing in a journal or diary is not something I haven't ever regularly done. I have tried to start a diary on a number of different occasions and maybe lasted a few days. I bought a 5 year diary last year where you are meant to write a line every day for 5 years - I think I lasted a month!

Despite not being very good at doing this in the past, I was excited to start, especially as this serves a purpose and I feel that as there is more motivation for keeping up the journal writing this time that I should stick to it, and hopefully I will get into the habit of writing and keep this up even after the course has finished.

When having a one to one with Paula around 6 weeks ago, she suggested I start writing my reflective journal. I started by keeping my journal on my tablet in a word document, however, I quickly realised that this wasn't the best format for me. I am quite old fashioned when it comes to writing, and I would much rather put pen to paper and write, rather than type on an electronic device. I had a really nice journal from W H Smiths that I had never used, so I thought this would be the perfect excuse to put it to use.

Task 2 A asks us to start keeping a journal for reflective purposes, and that it will not need to be seen by anyone, but that we will need to show appropriate extracts later on. This got me thinking about the best way to write my journal, if I write the whole journal in black pen, when I come to look for extracts how will I know where to look? I love colour and usually do all my writing in coloured pens, rather than just black or blue. So I decided to title each of my entries in a different colour and if during an entry I change subjects, for example if I am writing about the course, teaching, personal life I will put a relevant title, which will quickly allow me to look through my journal and identify what I am talking about on each page.

As you can see from the images I have showed examples of my use of colour and titles. The bottom image shows some of the resources I use for the course. This includes the handbooks and readers, my tablet which I use to blog, my small notepad which I use during any Skype calls to make notes, and also my journal.

I have been using my journal to write about all aspects of my life, from writing about how I am feeling about the course, how my blogging is going, any Skype calls I may have had, I write about teaching, I write about my teaching course I am also currently studying for, I write about my personal life including family, friends and relationships. At first when I started the journal I would just write about what happened during the day, and although writing about what happened was a way of reflecting on my day, I have started to reflect at the end of each entry. I do this by writing about what I have learned during the day, how it made me feel, if anything had gone well I would acknowledge that and if there was anything I felt that could have gone better during my day I write about different ways I could approach this in the future.

I feel that I am recognising my experiences and learning from them.

'Turning learning into experience' (Boud, 1995)