OLC40P: Ontario Secondary School Literacy Course

Unit 4: Reading Informational Texts - The News Report

Activity 7: "Inside Out" – Self-Reflection

Content

Journal Writing: A Review

In writing your journal, refer to the journal entries you made after completion of the activities in this Unit.

First of all, we will look at the following three questions relating to journal writing in general:

• What is a journal?
• Why keep a journal?
• How to write a journal?

What is a journal?

A journal is a record of your thoughts about your learning within a course or professional setting. In journals you describe events, experiences and issues associated with your study or professional placement and also analyse and reflect on them. Your journal will show that you have been thinking about the process of your learning and the development of your understanding.

A journal can be one or more of the following:

• a regularly kept and systematic record of factual information about events, dates and people or a record of notes and ideas about your reading and research linked to a course.
• a more detailed account of events and situations which record observations, anecdotes, conversations as well as your subjective impressions of these.
• a reflective account of your own observations and interpretations of events that allows you to examine your experiences to understand them better
• an analytical process in which you record your ideas, examine your data, deal with issues or problems that are raised by it and identify alternative solutions

Why keep a journal?

You may be required to keep a journal as part of the assessment of a course.

Journals are useful because they can help you to:

• record your development and progress through a course
• process your learning by focussing on particular readings or issues and recording your insights and questions
• increase your self-awareness through the process of observing and clarifying perceptions, feelings and thoughts
• evaluate your personal and professional growth and perhaps bring about a change in your professional practice as a result
• gather documentation that you can critically reflect on and incorporate into an assignment.

It is very important to carefully read the guidelines and instructions that are given in your Course so that you are quite clear about the sort of journal you are required to write and how it will be assessed. Your journal may be assessed on a given number of entries over a specified time period, or it could be graded as a whole. In either of these cases, you may receive a grade or a non-graded pass. You may also be required to submit your journal or parts of it to support a summative paper that you write based on recurring themes or issues that you identify.

How to write a journal

How you write a journal will depend on whether you are writing the descriptive, analytical or reflective elements of the journal. In some cases you will be asked to write responses to specific questions about the content, readings or learning processes in a course or you may be expected to frame your own questions around events and issues.

Descriptive elements

The descriptive elements detail the particular events, experiences or issues you choose to record. This aspect of journal writing needs to be done regularly and as close to the time of your experience as possible. Jot down key ideas or words in a notebook so that you don’t forget the details and then write up the entry within a few days. You then have a record of the information that you can reflect on more deeply at some later time. The following questions suggest the type of details you may include. Not all these questions will be relevant for each kind of journal, so choose the ones that will help with your writing:

• What was the setting?
• What were the circumstances?
• What happened?
• What was my role?
• What did I do?
• How did I respond/react?
• What were the key points?

Reflective and analytical elements

The analytical and reflective elements focus on your thinking about the issues, experiences or events and encourage a deeper level of thought. To be critically reflective, your journal needs to analyse your experiences and record any shifts in your views. Sometimes you will be asked to identify and challenge your underlying assumptions and emerging beliefs and views through your journal writing. Another possibility is that you use your journal to consider ways of bringing about a change and afterwards to reflect the outcomes.

Reflective writing is done after you have had time to think about the implications of your experience in relation to the ideas and theories you are studying. Some of the following questions may help you with this writing:

• What were the important elements of the experience, event or issue?
• Why did I behave as I did?
• What was I thinking and feeling at the time about the experience, event or issue?
• What do I think and feel now about what happened? Why?
• What should I be aware of if a similar situation occurs?
• What did I learn?
• What insights did I gain?
• How or why was this significant for me?
• What aspects of my practice or learning do I want to focus on?
• How can I apply my theoretical knowledge to this situation?
• Have my assumptions and perspectives changed as a result of this experience? How?
• How can I apply what I have learned to my life or future career?

Reflective summary

If a reflective summary is required, you need to examine your journal entries as a whole and identify patterns that appear throughout the journal. The journal itself is organised chronologically, listing the events and thoughts that occurred over a period of time. The summative paper, however, is usually organised on the basis of themes identified in the journal. This means that before writing the summative paper, you will need to go back over your journal and underline or note the main themes and patterns of thought, as well as key insights and implications.

Some questions that will help you with this process are:

• What are some of the recurring issues, problems and insights in my journal entries?
• Is there a pattern to my responses to these issues, problems and insights? What is this pattern?
• Is there any evidence of changes in my knowledge, perspectives or skills over the time I kept the journal?
• Did these changes show any clear pattern?
• Were the changes associated with any particular kinds of experiences or insights?

Stop or Before You Proceed

If you have any questions, please ask your teacher before proceeding to the activity.

Resources

GLOSSARY:  

Journal: A journal is a personal record of occurrences, experiences, and reflections. In this case, your journal will focus on your understanding and self-assessment of your own growth in Literacy – in this case reading skills and writing a summary.

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