# 1.2 Reflecting on your learning

Each of the activities in this course has an element of reflection and, hopefully, when you read our comments, you will reflect a bit further too. Keeping a note of your reflections in your learning journal helps you to both record and consolidate your learning. Using a journal in this way ensures that you capture your thoughts; otherwise there is always a strong possibility that they are lost.

It is a good idea to review your learning journal entries on a regular basis – once a month would be good. This can help you to recognise:

- your progress – as you see that there are things that you used to find difficult, but can now do relatively easily
- recurring themes in your thoughts and actions that may indicate potential areas to develop in the future.

## Activity 2 Your learning journal

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity.

Have a look back through your learning journal. Is it a jumble of random notes, or have you organised it into weeks and activities? Are you jotting down your thoughts as well as the key points and the activity answers?

You are now nearly half way through the course, so this is a good time to review and reflect on how you are keeping your notes. See if you want to change things, now that you are probably getting a better feel for the kind of notes you wish to make and how much space they take up.

### Discussion

There are many ways of keeping your notes and reflections. You should try and work out what suits you best. How do you think you might want to use them in the future?

This is a good question to ask whenever you make notes. Are they for personal use? Are they to help answer quizzes or write essays? Deciding on the purpose can help you decide what to make notes on and how to order them.

We can gain a lot from thinking back over things by ourselves. It is also valuable, at least occasionally, to think about other points of view or perspectives. One way of doing this is by getting feedback from others.

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