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PDP: personal development planning

This page contains brief notes on how to start thinking about PDP (Personal Development Planning). I suppose I felt the need for this because most of the talks I've heard related to PDP seem very narrow: lacking all critical thought, awareness of others' views, and above all a complete lack of contact with actual student actions and concerns.

This page is my main one on PDP. It supercedes an earlier one under "best/". PDP is also briefly dealt with on my qee page, where its relationship to other enhancement themes and to employability is discussed. It could be thought of as a practical instantiation of taking seriously that students self-actualise: develop a notion of themselves as students, which is mentioned on this page.

See also this page and diagram about how PDP relates to other issues.

The 3 types of PDP

1. Personal life goals. That is, working out what, for the individual, are their main aims in life, and how that relates to what they do. Thus for an HE student, this would deal with why they are at university and what they want out of it whether that is a certificate, a career, making friends, pursuing an interest etc.
2. Study skills.
   1. Study skills. How to be an effective student. How the particular subject you are doing intersects with the study methods you have, or need to have.
   2. More grandly though: being a student. Not the tactical details like study skills, but the self-development or self-actualisation of Maslow, or Kelly's construct development.
3. Career. (You could relate that to the 5 levels that employability qualities could be divided into.)
   1. What you might do after university, how what you are studying relates to that; whether there are other topics, subjects, skills you should acquire.
   2. Secondary aspect of that: acquiring skills at applying for a job successfully (CV writing, interview skills). Also, acquiring documentation for this (portfolios, lists of things you have actually done that employers would count as evidence e.g. number of essays written, talks given, ...)

Five levels of "graduate attributes"

1. Low level employability features that employers (such as I) definitely find handy, such as a driving licence, ability to operate a spreadsheet; although teaching them is scarcely the core purpose of a university.
2. The skill of assembling an argument, preferably based on evidence, to an employer about the graduate's worth. This relates to "PDP" (personal development portfolios) which may collect material for use in this way. A good example course aimed at this is Ian Bushnell's Professional skills module (described in part of this handbook.)
3. Critical thinking etc. Lists of general intellectual properties, expressed as skills. These are the things referred to as "graduate attributes". (Of course, they tend to make all disciplines sound the same, yet the chief defining attribute of a graduate is that they have been educated in one particular discipline, and NOT in all; and their habits of thought are markedly different because of this.) A good example course aimed at this is Helen Fraser's "Project training" course for level 3 physics undergraduates.
4. A critical appreciation of the virtues and limitations of the discipline studied (i.e. of its approach and methods in general, as opposed to particular ideas or findings within it). Many departments do not do this well. (For example, I have heard an employer say she preferred to employ as programmers people with a Physics rather than a Computing degree, because they used programming methods pragmatically not dogmatically.)
5. The ultimate unmeasured value of HE. I have the impression (I have not yet done this systematically) that if you ask people what were the most valuable things they got from their university education, most do not mention anything on the curriculum. There is a wide perception of value, but it is not any of these listed things. This is argued in: Brown, John Seely & Duguid, Paul (2000) The social life of information (Harvard Business School Press, Boston Mass.) especially ch.8 "Re-education"; and was also the essential view of Cardinal Newman in his The idea of a university. Listing "graduate attributes" has a specious air of reason, yet probably still misses the main value of a higher education.

Public vs. private

Technology / e-portfolios

E-portfolios are really, technologically, just repositories (i.e. databases capable of storing objects in many media) plus services.
Which services are desirable depends on the purposes. These are multi-dimensional.

Educational purposes: (progress files, PDPlans, records of achievement, showcasing, shared workspaces.)

• To accumulate, develop, then showcase attributes and evidence of them. Ideally then this should include private areas, and public subsets. Certificates (in digital form) as well as self-created stuff.
• Self regulation of learning objectives and activities. Planning future learning a) for course requirements, but perhaps scheduled and managed personally; b) for own needs, not part of degree progamme e.g. web authoring, ...
• Reflection.
• Summative assessment. I.e. holder for required products to be marked.

There is a triangle of:

• Overall educational purpose (see above for alternatives)
• Functions the software can or does provide: things a user wants to do like searching.
• e-tools.

• Control/Privacy: does the teacher or the learner control / own this stuff?
• Does the HEI or an external provider host the software and data? Personal learning environments, ...

xx

• Simply a repository for course work that will then be marked by staff.
• Collecting evidence (e.g. in a digital repository) e.g. examples of a student's work, with a view to having them re-use them in job applications.
• Having students reflect on what they are learning in relation to what they think they need for future careers; then go and learn what is missing. This could be
  • Choosing courses
  • Getting skill training e.g. spreadsheets, database retrieval
  • Getting work, voluntary work, or placements that will satisfy requirements for sleection in later (postgraduate) courses; or simply give the student experience to help them make an informed choice of whether they would want to work in that profession.

Standing critique 1

Thus this area is a bad case of deciding to do something to students because teachers have decided it's good for them, without the slightest attempt to study what students already do in this area, and to connect to that. In fact students I've interviewed already do considerable reflection on their study skills (although they don't call it that). Most PDP won't help or relate to the way students consider each year how they personally might modify their study approaches. Hence in practice, the portfolios are designed to allow teachers to reflect on their students' practices, not to augment the already impressive private practices of students.

A quite different approach would be to study how these functions are successfully addressed at present without overt support called "PDP" from the institution, and how that success could be built on. For instance, interviews with graduating students indicate massive changes over the four years in how they study, with a variety of "significant incidents" but most commonly the experience of earlier diets of exams leads to private decisions on how to reorganise revision practices. Again, many staff believe that schools used to prepare students for university e.g. by teaching them note-taking methods, weekly essays based on library readings, etc. If it is true that this no longer is provided, then how best to provide that in first year. Again, some students seek part time and/or vacation work (whether voluntary or paid) in the professions they are considering, and use that to decide whether they really want to work in them (quite often, not) and if so, have established both a record of experience and personal contacts. This is self-organised work experience focussed on their personal plans.

Standing critique 2

In favour is to avoid dumping out students at the end of a degree with no preparation for job seeking and getting.

Against the more naive pro-PDP attitudes is that:

• We do many things in life without planning, by responding to our context. This is true not only of when we breathe, what we eat, etc., but also in our culture of marriage. (Or perhaps PDP proponents think we should have only arranged marriages.)
• The world changes, so detailed planning is invalidated before long. The issue, as they say now, is lifelong learning: the training we get in HE cannot be the knowledge that will be the basis of our work in 20 years time.
• Information on jobs is largely concealed even from an intelligent searcher. An employer will not tell you that there is a glass ceiling for women, that staff leave in droves from the bullying in dept. X, etc. So most planning for jobs is well founded only after your personal contacts have given you the inside information: it is not something a careers talk or PDP session can give.

Also, the feedback on current schemes at this university seems to be that the few students who voluntarily attend them say they are very valuable. So it may be that, like most drug and alcohol rehab, it benefits only those who have already made an internal commitment. So making it compulsory would not work; and any further roll-out would need to be about changing hearts and minds i.e. selling its benefits to students.

Critique 3

Best practical things

• Imitate Simon Bates' survey of recent graduates to discover what they found useful and lacking in their degree programme when starting their first jobs. I think this is something every department could and should do. A question they did ask in the interviews (but missed on the questionnaire) was "What was lacking in their degree programme that they now wish they'd been taught?". They "recruited" their respondents by composing an email which their Alumni office was willing to forward to their list of graduates from the department. (A longer report on this may be done over the summer.)
• Bushnell, Ian W. R. (2007) Life after university : a personal development programme (Pearson Custom Publishing)
  Ian Bushnell's new textbook may make it significantly easier for other departments to create a course on PDP that suits their students. His book was based on the professional skills course he runs for psychology level 3 students, but is written for graduates in any discipline. Far from assuming a knowledge of psychology, it offers a quick briefing for any student on what they can expect from employers' selection methods (interviews, personality tests, ...) where appropriate. However it is mainly a mix of how to prepare for jobs and job applications with how a student can select job types that will suit them personally. That is, it is basically a course for students on PDP: how to construct a conscious understanding of what you want from the world of work, what you have (as skills, as abilities), and how to communicate the latter (with evidence) to employers you think might be good for you.
• There is simple software called "the interviewer" from Sheffield Hallam University, published by Gower, which we use to give students an experience of being interviewed. No academic staff time required, just a technician to make it happen. They do it in groups (giving each other comments on their performance). Almost all students give positive feedback on this, even though it is elementary practice for those who have never yet really had a job interview.
• Each department could create and maintain a document of the kinds of (graduate) skills its graduates could boast about and support with evidence. An example applying to our graduates in the year 2008 is here.

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