YOUR STUDY NOTEBOOK

You are asked to keep a Study Notebook (learning journal) for this Course. You may have
kept one before or the idea may be new to you. Essentially, this is a notebook in which you
note such things as:

• your response to the activities in the Course

• ideas that may come to you when you are either studying by yourself or in the LAC, or
when you are working, or at any other time
• drafts of contributions to Course discussions
• notes about articles that you read that are related to (but not embedded in) the
Course – these could be from professional journals, government policy documents or
media stories, for example
• reflections on your own learning trajectory through the Course.

(Note that these are examples and do not constitute an inclusive list.)

The last item here – reflection on your own learning – is one of the most important. It
is helpful to identify how your own personal theories, ideas and beliefs change, or are
reinforced, by your study. Sometimes this learning will be very clear to you; at other times,
your learning will only become apparent over a much longer timespan – for example, when
you introduce some ideas in your place of work or draw on some of your practice in your
learning.

Your Study Notebook is personal to you and it should be useful to you, even if you might be
able to share parts of it with a friend or colleague. There is no particular formula for keeping
a Study Notebook: some days you may write a great deal, whereas at other times only a little.
However, you are advised to write notes in such a way that they are intelligible when you
return to them months later. Throughout the Course there are regular prompts for you to note
down a response in your Study Notebook.

You can keep the notebook in a format that appeals to you and is easy for you to maintain –
it could be an ordinary paper notebook or on a desktop or mobile device.

Adapted from a document produced as part of the TESS-India project

(www.TESS-India.edu.in). Made available under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike license.