Topic: Organisation Change

I want a journal to be a reflective process, that is, it is a record of your thoughts, feelings, reactions and

interpretations of the learning taking place. It is not meant to be a recapitulation or retelling of the class material.

However, I am going to ask you to add a section to your journal for this purpose. The folks at Harvard found a few years ago,

that if students would take about 5-10 minutes at the end of each lecture and write a recap of the class lessons for the day,

that retention and absorption were greatly improved. So, each day, at the end of class, I expect each one of you to pull out

your journal, and in the appropriate section, write a page on the day’s class. This of course necessitates bringing your

journal to class each week.
The rest of the journal will be composed of your thoughts and reflections on the topic of learning organizations. There

should be a section for your personal thoughts about your progress in acquiring the five disciplines, a section for your

reporting and reflections on the individual exercises from the Fieldbook, and a section of the same from the group exercises.
This is a regular opportunity to reflect on the question, What does ______mean to me? and to explore how your own life

experiences, assumptions and sensibilities inform and connect to your readings. Try to be comfortable with your own

confusions. Use the journal to probe your thinking, not to prove anything.
Some helpful starters for your journal entries might be:
I really don’t understand________ because€¦ or
I think the relationship between ______ and ______ is interesting because€¦ or
These ideas remind me of the ideas in (another reading) because€¦
Exercises
As you work your way through the Fieldbook you’ll need to do the exercises that I have listed in the schedule. If you wish to

do any that I have not listed, that is up to you. You’ll notice that some of the exercises require a partner, while a few

others are group exercises. Thus, you need to find yourself both a partner and a group to work the exercises with.
A report on each of the required exercises should appear in your Learning Journal.
As you’re reading along on section three of the text and the accompanying fieldbook, you’ll find that all of the exercises

are individual, so you’ll need to carry out a number of these (and, of course, record them in your journals):
pg 201: Drawing Forth Personal Vision
pg 208: Vision for the Organization
pg 209: Checklist for Personal Values
pg 211: Cycling Back: Current Reality and Re-vision