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Reflective Work Journal Overview
A common form of documentation used to record student site observations and encounters in service-learning settings is a reflective work journal. Keeping a work journal helps students achieve positive results (both personally and academically) by helping them to focus their thoughts and feelings in relation to learning objectives.
Basically, what this means is that you should try to connect your experiences at the work site with the things you learn in discussion/class, thus, making your academics more personally applicable.
Staying focused on course theories is extremely important in journal writing because one of the most common tendencies for students is to resort to an objective, 'log-of-events' style of recording; e.g., "This happened first, then later, this happened," and so forth....
This was termed "lecture regurgitation" by Pierrette Hondagnueu-Sotelo and Sally Raskoff in a paper about community service-learning. "Lecture regurgitation" is basically the writing of concepts verbatim from lectures without understanding them or applying them at your site. In order to avoid this kind of objective chronicling of daily events, you will want to maintain a "sense of curiosity" during your everyday observations (Hamner 31). This will help you to subjectively examine the details of every situation. Try to connect the theory you are discussing with an example in order to help explain an individual's situation, with emphasis on the 'explain' part.
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