Keeping a Journal

 
 Keeping a journal of your own thoughts, action research projects and general teaching observations and progress can be enormously beneficial, but it’s important to think about how you structure this and what to include. 

Keeping a Journal

 
 Keeping a journal of your own thoughts, action research projects and general teaching observations and progress can be enormously beneficial, but it’s important to think about how you structure this and what to include.

Why keep a journal?

 • Keeping a journal can form an important part of your autonomous development and allow you to reflect on your teaching practice and help you to analyse and draw conclusions from some of the data you will be collecting.

 • The process of having to write down your thoughts and reflections in an organised way should help to focus your mind on the lesson your teaching and what happened within the classroom.

 • The journal can form an important record of your thoughts and developments over short and longer periods of time.

 • If you are writing journal entries shortly after teaching, reviewing these a day or two later can be very informative as your perceptions and evaluation of what happened within the class can change quite a lot.

 • If you review a number of entries over longer periods of weeks or even months, this may well help you to see common trends in your teaching and help you to isolate areas where problems regularly occur, where you need to do more work or where you have developed real strengths and overcome some obstacles. This can help you to set new goals for future research projects and developments and see real progress in your development. 

How to structure the journal and what to include?

 There are a number of ways you can structure your journal entries. When you first start keeping a journal you will need to experiment with a few different methods to find the ways that best suit you and the research that you are doing.

 Here are some different methods, which you can try:

 • Set a small number of specific questions to yourself that you will answer after each lesson.

 • Write a descriptive entry stating what happened in the lesson

 • Pick just one aspect of the lesson that made an impression on you and write about it.

 • Choose a specific heading, for example ‘What I learned from teaching this lesson’ Or ‘How I would teach this lesson better next time’ and write only about that.

 • You can write your journal entries in the form of comments on your actual lesson plan and keep them in your journal. This will help you to understand what the comments refer to and can help you remember what changes you want to make to the lesson if you teach it again.

 • If you are undertaking a longer structured cycle of action research you might want to define specific things that you want to learn from each lesson. If this is the case write your aims for the lesson in your journal before you teach it for example, ‘By the end of this lesson I want to know …’ and then respond to yourself in the journal entry. 

How much to write

 Be careful that you don’t set yourself unrealistic goals and overload yourself with work. Writing in a journal can take time. To be useful you’ll also need time to systematically review and reread your journal entries and the more you have written the longer this will take.

 If you are writing detailed entries in your journal, it is wiser to only write about one specific group / class of students or information relative to the specific aim of your current action research project, rather than trying to keep a detailed record of every lesson you teach.  

The tone of you journal

 Think about the tone of your journal.

 • You could write as though you are writing to a fellow teacher. This will ensure that your explanations are clear to someone who may not have been present in the class and so help you to understand the entries when you review your journal weeks, months or even years later.

 • You could write just bullet point notes to yourself. This saves time, but you need to be sure you will understand them when you come back to review your entries.

 • You could write entries as a third person observer of your class. This may help you to be objective about the class.