Skills 2 – Personal Development Planning

Skills 2 is a unit presented in Week 11 of W101.

Learning outcomes

After studying this unit you should be able to:

• understand your progress so far and understand Personal Development Planning
• understand the need for, and nature of, effective writing skills for law
• understand the use of legal language and vocabulary
• understand the use of grammar, punctuation and spelling
• understand the use of a legal database to find statute and case law.

© The Open University

Keep in mind that these skills are built upon each other, so that they should be treated as a continuous learning process, rather than individual ‘lessons’. In other words, you should be using these throughout your study. Don’t worry too much though, you will eventually become unaware that you are actually using them as they become more familiar and part of your study habits. The skills of reading, note-taking and summarising are integral and essential to any field of study, including law.

Personal Development Planning

At this stage in the OU W101, you should have submitted a TMA (tutor marked assignment) and received feedback from your tutor. I had mentioned before that the initial feedback from tutors might be a bit uncomfortable because you are forced to face some negative aspects of your performance. Keep in mind that tutors are not making personal statements about you, but rather they are trying to critique (not criticise!) your work. You may find comments on content (and the relevance of what you wrote to what the question was asking), identifying the correct material, writing style including grammar and spelling, referencing, presenting information concisely and accurately, making appropriate use of legal terminology and examples (remember when using examples to clearly state what the relevance is to the topic), et cetera. If all this seems a bit much at the moment, don't worry because the types of comments that are included in your feedback are designed to help you, and will be referenced to the appropriate part of your work.

More importantly, each TMA is designed so that the student can give some personal feedback on their own performance. In other words, you may have to answer questions such as: "Outline two things that you think you could improve when preparing for TMA 02 and give reasons why."

This forces you to think about your own self study, and a good student will think of all aspects of study, not just areas that help to complete answering the question(s). Therefore you are forced to examine things such as time management, understanding of the material, appropriateness and relevance to the questions, choosing examples, writing skills, referencing et cetera. And as mentioned before, some of your discoveries about yourself might not be too comfortable to admit such as (and this is just an example) browsing the Internet or being on Facebook instead of studying.

PDP aims to improve your capacity to learn and to ensure that you review, plan and take responsibility for your own learning. It is an active and continuous process of self-appraisal, review and planning. It should enable you to:

• become a more effective, independent and confident learner
• improve your generic and legal study skills
• identify your goals and evaluate your progress towards them.

The PDP Cycle © The Open University

The important lesson here is that your tutor is not making personal attacks on you, and you have to take responsibility for your own learning.