Reply To: Do you keep a reflective journal?

[Karen Huxtable – UTD]

One of the best tools for DIY educational development is to keep a teaching journal. It can be structured and action-oriented, as you describe here. This is especially useful for instructors who are unsure of how to begin or simply prefer that kind of focus. But I suggest that it is perfectly fine to be less structured as well. We can think of keeping the teaching journal like exercise (and I probably should credit someone else for saying this first, but I don’t know who)–a little bit is good, more is better, and everything counts. Chances are, most faculty already engage in reflection after each class as we think about how things went, what didn’t go as planned, or what was successful. Writing down these thoughts or dictating them using a speech-to-text tool has all of the benefits Kelly described. If I could give advice to my past self, it would be to keep a log or journal to track my personal development as an educator.