Process Journal

The Process Journal

Using the Process Journal: Your Process Journal must be kept during the entire period of your Personal Project. It is a written account of your journey and a practical workbook for your rough notes. It does not need to be neat, but should be honest and filled in regularly to show you how your project is developing. Your Process Journal will help you create your Report and is an important method of demonstrating the approaches to learning skills that are assessed by each of the four criteria. You should record your progress and reflect on your ATL skills in your Process Journal during the entire process.

Format of the Process Journal:

The format of your Process Journal is up to you. It can be written, visual, audio or a combination of these. You can use a notebook, a folder (paper or digital), or a combination of any of these. You can also create other methods, for example students have successfully used blogs as their Process Journal in the past. You need to decide what format works best for you. In arts and technology you are already documenting your process so you can use what you have learned in those subjects to produce a thorough process journal.

Your Process Journal should be kept on ManageBac. You can type directly into the Process Journal section, attach a link to a Google Doc or a blog, or you can upload written, visual, or audio files. However you decide to keep you Process Journal, this section of ManageBac should be updated on a regular basis, not just at the end of the project.

The process journal should include: Your Process Journal should be, in part, a diary of your process including descriptions of what you’ve done, meetings with your supervisor, and reflections on the process itself (challenges and solutions). It should also help you keep track of and organize all your rough ideas, drawings, mind maps, interviews you may have conducted, notes and bibliographic information from sources you may have consulted. For example:

• All ideas you have, even if you don’t end up using them
• All plans that you made (even if they didn’t work)
• Lists of what you’ve done and things you need to do
• Meeting summaries with supervisor signatures
• Challenges and difficulties you have, including potential solutions
• An evaluation of your progress (are you achieving your goals?)
• Areas that you need to improve on
• Reflections on the different stages of the project
• Mistakes you made and how you put them right
• Problems you encountered and solutions you found
• All useful information
• Resources you’ve consulted (with complete bibliographical details)
• Notes from your research (including interviews)
• Diagrams, charts, samples, sketches, photos, etc.
• Information & research about your one focus Global Context and how you believe it is central to your topic