Responding to an internal prompt here at Henley to provide a Steering Committee charged with moving from one Virtual Learning Environment to another with a rationale for the importance of Learning Journals, I have made a few notes about why I think the Journal is (or should be!) an important part of the MBA. I would be interested to know what others think.
Simply put, the Learning Journals are intended as a mechanism for Programme Members (PMs) to do three important things:
Record – in the act of transferring their introspection from experience or thought to the written word, PMs are in fact processing those “raw” data and transforming them to learning that might otherwise remain elusive or unexamined. As a business school we place great emphasis on the importance of critical thinking skills for management decision-making, and this is another instance of this in practice. In addition, the recorded nature of that written archive then forms a basis for retrospection and comparison – a way for an individual to see how far they have come in their thinking.
Reflect – the iterative nature of keeping a written diary, blog or journal of the impacts, confusions, and insights from the rest of the MBA programme (as well as the Personal Development module) is in fact a modelling of what most authors on the subject agree must be the reflective learning process. When a PM finds their “voice” on the page, the results can be quite emancipatory.
Share – the line taken by Henley in PD is that introspection is necessary but not sufficient for reflection. We need to encourage a dialogue or conversation where members enrich each other’s development. Many members find that their own thinking is made clearer to them when they read (and comment on) others’.
Chris Dalton's Personal Development Blog 
Agree and like the Record and Reflect parts, however I have some uncertainty on Share. How could we do “sharing” effectively? the experience seems that people tend to focus on their own thinking and more try to seek evidence to prove their thinking or opinion rather than actively listen or read others opinions, or try to understand others.
Hi Lucy, thanks for this comment. I agree that it often feels as though the sharing step may be liable to ineffectiveness if the other person has an uninterested agenda or is only on transmit. However, in the coaching session we ran at the workshop two of the foundational ideas suggested for a useful and insightful conversation were ‘positive intent’ and ‘genuine curiosity’.
So listening with respect is important, and more than this I think the idea of sharing reflections with others stands on the first PD Principle in my list, that of acknowledging without being judgmental about it the truth of where you are. Sharing really brings this into focus, and once all these elements are in place it is my experience that the results can be remarkable.
Hi Chris, thanks for giving the hint on the “What is”. I re-read that article and would try to apply the principle of acknowledge the present with genuine curiosity and without prejudice to both myself and others (to confess, sometimes it is hard for me to be objective). This article led me to think about the 4th Window of Joahri’s personal awareness: the aspects hidden from ourselves as well as others. I have been thinking about whether there is a way to reveal or decrease the size of the 4th Window. would ‘acknowledge the what is’ help to reveal a bit of it? and would it be possible for some people to have no 4th Window – i.e. they have full self-awareness?