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Flexible Route to Headship Notes on Reflective Journaling: Keeping a Learning Journal is useful in providing insight into self-awareness:
What you do (behaviours). Why you do it (values, belief, assumptions, aspirations). How you feel (emotional intelligence). How you think.
Journaling can expose contradictions, misconceptions and even conflict. Journaling can help you turn every incident into a new potential learning experience and opportunity. Not merely a chronicle: it is important to understand that journaling is not just the act of chronicling one’s experiences. Writing about one’s experiences can be useful as it helps to make explicit knowledge or practices that one may have learned and practiced implicitly for better or worse. It may also help to provide perspective, structure and meaning to daily events that sometimes appear random or chaotic. However, research suggests that active reflection is needed if true transformational learning is to be realised. Journals work best when entries are:
regular and made on a consistent periodic schedule truly reflective – i.e. not merely descriptive chronicles of events, but critical assessment/analysis of particular situations and behaviours transformational - i.e. meaning that specific, realistic strategies for change are identified and subsequently implemented.
Note: entries need not be lengthy to be meaningful.
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