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 