Student support through personal development planning: retrospection and time

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of higher education students’ retrospective meaning making of their experiences of personal development planning (PDP). An earlier study of first year students had indicated that students rarely reflected on their own meta‐cognitive processes and were preoccupied with practical study skill matters, particularly time management. The authors were interested, therefore, in looking at whether students in their final year had developed the ability to reflect on their learning, and which aspects of their learning experiences they felt supported them in these developments. They undertook 20 in‐depth interviews which explored how students approached learning and the supports they had found useful as well as probing specifically about the PDP elements of the course. Their analysis reveals the complexity of students’ understandings of their own first‐year experiences: their lack of engagement, and ‘faking’ reflection and planning by completing ‘plans’ only after the event. Retrospective realisation of relevance and an increased focus on results and the future shaped their understandings in the final year. The authors draw on theorists of time to explore how understanding the multiple temporalities involved in education might offer insight into the difficulties students experience and their lack of future orientation in the first year. Rather than being simply mundane concerns, time, time management, and perceptions of the present in terms of the past, present or the future illuminate some of the difficulties of reflection and of the projection of future selves implicit in the term ‘personal development planning’. Tempo and timing appear to be essential in terms of students’ shifting personal epistemologies, their experiences of self as both relatively unchanging and developing, and their capacities to judge relevance and access support.