Supporting students in Personal Development Planning

While all students have access to NTU’s online Personal Development Planner (via the VLP), many programme teams offer additional support. This is often simply an extension of what they offer already in terms of reflective learning, academic practices development, career management or work experience.

It is important to emphasise that the ultimate responsibility for deriving benefit from PDP rests with the student. However, as it is incumbent on HEIs to make PDP available to students, teams may wish to articulate or map where PDP opportunities occur on their programme.

Ideas for using PDP
These are based on the experience of colleagues at NTU and on the outcomes of national projects. All the models below could apply to all years of a programme.

• Model A - Tutorial
  A formalised personal tutorial system, with at least three meetings between tutor and student annually. These may be 1-1, or in small groups. Activities span the whole of the programme, perhaps with different themes in each year. The online PDP framework is used to record the process and to encourage reflection, portfolio building and goal setting.

• Model B - Distributed
  In this distributed model, PDP activities are mapped across many modules. Students collect evidence from these modules as they progress through the programme. Additionally, reflection and goal planning may be linked to elements of assessment.

• Model C - Synoptic
  PDP is supported through standalone module(s) which are either wholly dedicated to PDP, or include significant elements of reflection and goal planning. There may be a PDP module at each programme level.

The success of all models will, of course, depend on a shared perception of the value of PDP. Some programme teams include material about PDP in student handbooks; others also discuss PDP during induction and level 2-3 option choice/progression meetings.