Weekly Journaling

Weekly Journaling to Organize, to Experience, and to Reflect Upon Your Project

As you move through this project, you will be actively exploring new territory, interacting with others outside of Penn State and taking on new challenges. Your project will be an experience and keeping this weekly journal will help you reflect on these experiences and learn from them along the way.

• This Week's Accomplishments and My Project To-Do List.  Chronicle your project activities and observations for the week to help stay organized. From a personal perspective, talk about new contacts, interesting tidbits, planned visits, press coverage related to the topic or event, things you are excited…or concerned…about, new questions that have arisen, something you had misunderstood but now have right, areas where you are stuck (need help, info or questions answered) and your overall progress on the project (on track, behind, ahead). Think about this component of the journal entry as a running to do (and done!) list.
  • Tasks completed; progress made
  • New questions, inconsistences, or assumptions that you may be rethinking
  • Feelings about the project's progress and status
  • deliverables for the coming week

• Additional Issues to Consider.  Experience your project fully. Go beyond the surface facts—invite yourself to think, feel, raise questions, make connections and have new ideas. As you write, step back and think beyond the summarizing of your concrete accomplishments of the week.  What does this relationship with your Community Partner mean to you?  Are you learning something that challenges the notions you entered the project with?  What's most exciting to you about your project right now?  What scares you the most? 
  • New directions or conclusions
  • Connections with material you've learned in other courses
  • New technical or logistical considerations for the project
  • Connections to stakeholders, your Community Partner, or others
     
• Bigger Project Picture.  As you think about what you've done this week and what you need to do in the coming week and you situate that in any additional issues to consider, reflect on what this might mean bigger picture. 
  • How does this connect to or deviate from prior knowledge you have? 
  • What more do you need to understand to complete your tasks ahead? 
  • What are your ongoing experiences with your Community Partner teaching you?

As you write each journal entry, here are some tips for opening up this space and learning from the experience of your project.  These areas must be addressed in each journal entry and will obviously vary in length and scope from week to week as your project evolves. As this is a journaling exercise, please feel free to be open and at ease in these communications.  They will have a necessary conversational tone and structure and should definitely be written from the first person perspective.  The nature of the project is also such that it is likely that some weeks the journaling will focus more on things that needed to be accomplished but weren't yet (and why that's the case). 

Formatting

Please use the three headings below to structure your weekly journal entries. I've included some suggestions for topics to write about under each heading, but you'll likely include others and not include each of these every time.  Feel free to add an additional section at the end of any entry if you have something to discuss that didn't quite fit into one of those categories.

How long should a journal entry be?  The length may vary from week to week, but a typical journal entry should be approximately 1 page double-spaced.

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