Critical perspective is an essential aspect of a professional progression, growth, and development. At Aleph, the practice of sending reflective journals is adopted to stimulate the team member to think critically, evaluate their workload and well–being, their team’s dynamics, as well as their ability to identify and overcome obstacles. Unfortunately, many people still perceive reflective journals as a mandatory policy that they are forced into, rather than a powerful tool, allowing them to critically assess their work and learning.
As Jeffry Babb, Rashina Hoda, and Jacob Nørbjerg put in “Embedding Reflection and Learning into Agile Software Development”, agile teams are quite prone to abandoning the core practices related to learning due to constant iteration pressure (Baab, Hoda, Nørbjerg 2014). Placed within a tight schedule, or being mandated to follow a certain practice, people tend to feel less engaged: hence, it is important to clearly demonstrate the practical positive impact of the practice, as well as maintain relative flexibility in enforcing the practice.
Lifelong learning is the key to a meaningful and fruitful professional and academical journey. Adopting the learning model suggested by David Kolb will help expedite the growth by learning from the past experiences and applying the new ideas to the future endeavours. (Dybå, Maiden, Glass 2014). Looking back at the experiences — like that of designing an avatar through objects — help better process the learnings.
Publicity, however, remains one of the most challenging aspects of maintaining a comprehensive journal: putting out reflective thoughts require a certain level of courage, like Steve Royce puts it, “people try to show their best side and ideal moments”. In my particular case, language barrier poses a certain challenge, although I have been practising in writing for the wide audience for quite some time.
I set up this journal using Gatsby and Obsidian as part of my attempt to creatively approach the task, improve my coding skills, and provide myself with enough flexibility in terms of maintenance and set up. I do, however, struggle with some aspects of having to maintain a journal, especially with the fact that I have never practised an academic reflective journaling.
Furthermore, I am not entirely sure that my style of writing is fitting. Perhaps I should consider using services like Language Tool to make sure my grammar and syntax are in order.
References
DYBÅ, Tore, Neil MAIDEN and Robert GLASS. 2014. ‘The Reflective Software Engineer: Reflective Practice’. IEEE Software 31(4), 32–6.
BABB, Jeffry, Rashina HODA and Jacob NØRBJERG. 2014. ‘Embedding Reflection and Learning into Agile Software Development’. IEEE Software 31(4), 51–7.
‘Adopting a Critical Perspective | StudyHub’. 2021. [online]. Available at: https://studyhub.fxplus.ac.uk/media/179 [accessed 19 Sep 2021].