Personal and Professional Development Workbook

In a Personal and Professional Development (PPD) Workbook you assemble and organize installments of your project, comments you receive on them, and all the other items that arise during your research. Having a PPD workbook allows you to readily pick up after a break what you were thinking and to see emerging patterns that warrant your attention. In the same way that keeping a portfolio of your work helps an advisor make generative comments, your own PPD Workbook helps you to bring to the surface, form, and articulate your ideas as a researcher.

One way to think about what to include and how to organize it is to imagine returning to the material a year or more later. What items, annotations, and organization would make it possible to re-engage with your own thinking and processes of development?

The items in the workbooks can include notes on readings and other preparation for each Phase or part of the Cycles and Epicycles Action Research process; notes and printouts from activities; installments, comments from readers, and revisions; weekly journal-like reflections that explore the relationship between, on one hand, your interests and projects, and, on the other hand, the readings, activities, and tools; annotated clippings from print and internet sources (to keep up with current developments and develop good habits for life-long learning); a mid-project (mid-semester) self-assessment (including a report on the gap between where you are and where you would like to be in relation to research organization—both on paper and on your computer—and research and study competencies; and an end-of-semester Process Review.

A PPD workshop might be fully on your computer or even online on a wiki. Typically, you will have some paper as well as computer files and you will need cross-references from one medium to the other.