The Professional Development Journal

A teacher who reflects only in their head loses most of what their reflection produces. The Professional Development Journal, or PDJ, is the simplest tool for keeping reflection. It is a written record kept across time, used to develop practice deliberately rather than by accident.

The PDJ is not a diary. It has a purpose. The purpose is to help the teacher trace patterns, plan changes, and link theory to their own practice.

What the PDJ is

The PDJ is a written record of your experiences and your feelings about planning, preparing, and delivering lessons. It contains general accounts of learning and identifies critical incidents along the way.

Three features of the PDJ are worth being clear about.

It is subjective

The PDJ is written by you and for you. It is a dialogue with yourself. This is different from a report written for a supervisor or a paper written for assessment. The honesty that this kind of writing requires is hard to achieve when the writing is for an audience that may judge.

The subjectivity is the point. A teacher who tries to write a PDJ for an external audience produces a polished but shallow document.

It links theory to practice

The PDJ is also a place where theory meets practice. A theory the teacher has read about gets brought into the journal alongside an event from a lesson. The journal is one of the main places where the theory and the experience are made to talk to each other.

Without this layer, the PDJ becomes a feelings journal. With it, the PDJ produces professional learning.

It identifies development points

One of the most valuable functions of the PDJ is to help identify points for action planning. Patterns that emerge from regular journaling become the starting points for deliberate development work.

A teacher who reads back through three months of journal entries usually finds something they had not noticed in any single entry: a recurring difficulty, a recurring strength, a missing element. The pattern points to where development effort should go next.

How to use the PDJ

Several practical guidelines help the PDJ work as a tool rather than a chore.

Write soon after the event

Memory smooths. The longer the gap between an event and the writing, the less specific the writing becomes. The teacher remembers their general feeling but loses the particular detail that would make analysis useful.

Get into the habit of writing as soon as possible after the event, while it is fresh.

Do not think too hard at the start

When you start writing, do not over-edit. Let the writing flow and try to capture the experience and the critical incidents. The polished version can come later, if needed at all.

This advice fights the instinct to make the writing look academic. The first pass is for capture. Refinement is for the second pass, if there is one.

Little and often

Short, frequent entries are more useful than long, rare ones. A page a week beats a chapter twice a year. The little-and-often approach builds a continuous record. The big-occasional approach produces gaps where patterns disappear.

Five minutes after a lesson, while events are fresh, often produces more useful writing than thirty minutes on a Sunday afternoon.

Include diagrams and drawings

The PDJ does not have to be only prose. A quick sketch of the seating arrangement during a difficult moment, a diagram of how a group activity unfolded, a flowchart of how a concept was introduced, all belong in the journal. Visual material can capture things prose cannot.

Review regularly

The PDJ produces its best value when it is read back. Once a month, look through the recent entries. Look for themes that recur. Look for ideas that came up once and were forgotten. Look for plans you made and never followed through on.

A PDJ that is written but never read produces less than half of its value.

Share reflections with colleagues

Sharing entries with trusted colleagues helps in two ways. It often reveals that a colleague is having the same uncertainty or difficulty, which reduces isolation. And it brings another perspective to bear on the entry, which deepens the reflection.

Not every entry needs to be shared. The right ones, with the right colleagues, multiply the value.

Build a structure into entries

A useful entry has more than description. It includes:

1. Description. What happened?
2. Analysis. How and why?
3. Evaluation. How effective was the action or response?
4. Conclusion. What does this suggest for future practice?

A teacher who structures entries this way, even loosely, produces journaling that supports development. A teacher who only describes ends up with a record but not learning.

The Driscoll-Teh framework

A useful framework for structuring reflection within the PDJ comes from Driscoll and Teh (2001). It is based on three simple questions: What? So what? Now what?

The framework looks plain. Its simplicity is the strength. Three questions are easy to remember and quick to apply, even on a busy day.

What?

The first question is description. What happened?

Trigger questions:

1. What happened?
2. What did I see or do?

This stage stays close to the event. It records what actually took place. The writing is short, factual, and specific.

So what?

The second question is analysis. So what?

Trigger questions:

1. How did I feel at the time?
2. What were the effects of what I did, or did not do?

This stage interprets the event. It looks at consequences and at the teacher’s own response. The writing here is where the reflection deepens.

Now what?

The third question is action. Now what?

Trigger questions:

1. What are the implications of what I have described and analysed?
2. How can I modify my practices?

This stage looks forward. It commits to a change, an experiment, or a question to explore in the next round.

The three questions, used regularly, produce structured reflection that has all three stages of a useful entry. They also fit comfortably with most other reflective frameworks: Gibbs’s cycle, Kolb’s cycle, and Johns’s model can each be mapped to What, So what, Now what.

Flashcard

What are the three questions in the Driscoll-Teh framework, and what does each question do?

Tap to reveal

Answer

What? (description), So what? (analysis), Now what? (action).

What asks for a record of the event. So what asks for the meaning of the event, including feelings and effects. Now what asks for the next move: what will be changed, tested, or explored. The three questions together produce a complete reflective entry.

Layout for the PDJ

A practical layout for the PDJ helps separate description from reflection visually. Two common approaches are used.

Headings approach

Use the categories as headings.

1. Description
2. Analysis and evaluation
3. Conclusion for future practice

Each section gets its own paragraph. The structure is visible at a glance.

Split-page or two-page approach

Divide each page into two columns. The left-hand side records description. The right-hand side records reflection on that description.

This approach has a practical advantage. The teacher can write the description quickly during or just after a lesson. The reflection can come later, perhaps in a quieter moment, in the right-hand column. The visual separation keeps the two activities distinct, even when they happen close together in time.

A teacher can also design their own template. The point is not the specific layout but having a layout that supports the work.

When the PDJ becomes a habit

A PDJ that the teacher dreads becomes a chore and is dropped. A PDJ that fits naturally into the rhythm of the week becomes a habit and continues for years.

The shift from chore to habit usually depends on three things.

1. Finding a time that works. The journey home, the first 20 minutes after students leave, a small block on Friday afternoon. Whatever the time, it has to be sustainable.
2. Keeping entries short enough. Long entries are more impressive but less sustainable. Short, useful entries done regularly are the goal.
3. Seeing value from the practice. Teachers who review their PDJ and find patterns or development points stay with the practice. Teachers who never review stop, because the value never appears.

A PDJ that has been kept for a year tends to produce one or two real insights about the teacher’s practice that they would not have seen otherwise. That return is enough to justify the time, once the practice is established.