Reflective Journals

Reflective Journals (worth 30%)

The reflective journals are designed specifically to allow students to reflect on theories and concepts relevant to management, in response to activities that take place in their learning. These reflections provide an opportunity for you to experience the learning-in-action element as well as the boundary spanning aspects of roles you may be involved in. It helps you to own your part of the work environment. The first reflection should focus on teams and teamwork, the second on the nature of expertise, while the third on project management (although your specific focus within these broad topics is up to you).

Reflective experiences are highly valued by the academic community within management studies. For example, Warren Bennis, in his book titled On Becoming a Leader states:

There are lessons in everything, and if you are fully deployed, you will learn most of them. Experiences arent truly yours until you think about them, analyse them, examine them, question them, reflect on them, and finally understanding them. The point, once again, is to use your experiences rather than being used by them, to be the designer, not the design, so that experiences empower rather than imprison (Bennis, 1989).

These reflective journals are distinct from traditional assessments in that they aim to more accurately reflect the type of challenges which students face in the workplace. Learning to solve adaptive challenges is a skill that is increasingly important, and which cannot be done by one-way transmission trainings from experts. As managers, you must grapple with the complexity of daily challenges by continuously taking small actions to learn more about the nature of the problem and how progress can be made.

The reflective journal method assists this by guiding students through a step-by-step process in which they:

1. Describe the situation: What is the stimulant for reflection? (incident, event, theoretical idea). What are you going to reflect on?
   2. Assess your feelings: What were your reactions and feelings? Evaluation: What was good and bad about the experience? Make value judgements.


2. Analyse the situation: What sense can you make of the situation? Bring in ideas from outside the experience to help you. What was really going on?
   4. Conclusions: (general) What can be concluded, in a general sense, from these experiences and the analyses you have undertaken? (specific): What can be concluded about your own specific, unique, personal situation or ways of working?


3. Personal Action plans: What are you going to do differently in this type of situation next time? What steps are you going to take on the basis of what you have learnt?

Through this process, you are pushed into your zone of proximal development. By being forced against the limitations of your current way of operating, you are forced to stretch and grow.

(Each reflective journal should be around 1000 words and needs to be referenced appropriately).