Spring 2014

Learning Journal Instructions
Prof. Piderit

The purpose of the learning journal assignment is to promote your ability to personalize your learning, and to apply course concepts to your real life. In my experience, students retain what they write down in a learning journal for far longer than what they write in other class papers, or if they are studying for exams. (There are no exams in my section of this course, for this reason.)
However, it is important to understand that your learning journal is NOT an edited version of your class notes. It should not simply regurgitate what you have read or what you have heard in class sessions. Although we have 20 class sessions, there are only 8 entries assigned
Designing the syllabus for the course is a key task in laying the groundwork for high performance in this organization. I selected the textbook and readings for the course in collaboration with the instructors of other sections of MGMT 3502, to ensure that some level of consistency is maintained across all the sections taught at Santa Clara University. I have designed this course to draw on my past experiences as a teacher and leader over the past 15 years, at the University of Michigan in the 1990s, at Case Western Reserve University between 1998 and 2007, and at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey from 2008 to 2011. I also draw on my leadership experiences in volunteer organizations. All of these experiences have reinforced my core belief about learning: that it occurs best in community, when all members respect one another and are curious about the differences in their experiences and perspectives. When it is not possible for individuals to get to know one another face­to­face, it is much harder to create a transformative learning environment. That is why I will continually encourage you to get to know one another and to learn from one another in different ways over the course of the quarter. One experience I have had that illustrates the challenges of learning in a depersonalized environment was when I taught two EMBA distance learning classes while at the Naval
Postgraduate School in Monterey.