Reflective professional development

Abstract

The exorbitant growth of internet and social media has not only contributed to an immense expansion of virtual markets but also to the growth of availability of different knowledge resources for the users (Rice- Lively/ Racine, 2002). From the beginning of mankind until the initiation of the Web 2.0 specialized knowledge was restricted to an inner circle of privileged individuals. Accordingly, growth of knowledge was limited. Today though, knowledge has become an infinite resource available in abundance to virtually anybody disposing of an internet connection (Gruber, 2007). Information pools, as a result, are growing exponentially. The challenge of raising the treasure of knowledge has shifted from getting access to information to selecting adequate, topical and relevant information (Webber, 2000). According to multichannel communication output, relevant input given by adequate insights becomes more necessary.

Context

The paper examines what triggers professional development and by what routes learning makes it possible. It combines a systematic literature review with a reflection on the author’s own doctorate. It was published in English in the Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre ökonomische Forschung (ZIFP) / Journal of Interdisciplinary Economic Research, issue 1, pages 56 to 65. It goes back to a module paper of the doctoral programme on reflective professional development. The abstract above reproduces the author’s wording as it appears in the RePEc entry, including the literature references.

Specialist knowledge was long reserved for a small circle. With the internet and social media it is open to almost everyone, and the amount of available information is growing very fast. The bottleneck has thus shifted. Access to information is hardly an obstacle any more; the difficulty lies in selecting what is current and relevant. Anyone who does research therefore needs clear intentions and methods to evaluate and take in information. How intention and method work together is the subject of the paper.

Research questions

The paper poses three questions.

1. What triggers professional development?
2. Through which mechanisms does learning make this development possible?
3. How do impetus and mechanism condition each other?

The first two questions structure the evaluation of the literature, the third brings them together. The paper treats them as a question of the what and the how of learning.

Approach

Concepts and learning theories

First, the paper clarifies the concepts. A semantic field analysis of “development” brings out three characteristics. Something previously unknown is uncovered, this happens step by step, and development is a process, not a state. Human resource development in the business sense aligns the individual with the objectives of the organization. The paper prefers the broader concept of professional development. In doing so, it draws on Swanson, who bases the discipline on economics, social sciences and psychology and places ethics beneath them as a foundation.

Three learning theories form the framework. Behaviourism explains learning as a change of behaviour through reward and punishment. Cognitivism sees the core in the inner processing of observation and prior knowledge. Constructivism describes learning as the active construction of one’s own knowledge in a community that the learner helps to shape. In this sequence the learner becomes ever more independent, and teachers turn from instructors into participants. According to the paper, academic research corresponds most closely to the constructivist picture.

Literature review

The literature review follows Eisend’s five-step scheme. It begins with the key question and the selection criteria, continues with the database search and ends with coding and evaluation. Scirus, Emerald Insight and Google Scholar were searched, with search terms on human resource and professional development and on learning processes. Six sub-questions guide the evaluation, for example about the context of a study, its understanding of development and the kind of evidence it provides.

To organize the findings, the paper designs a model of its own. It describes the passing on of knowledge as communication between a teaching and a learning party. Studies from the learners’ perspective ask what triggers learning in the learner and in the learner’s environment. Studies from the teachers’ perspective ask how knowledge is shared.

Findings

The learning party

Two models are at the centre. The Theory of Reasoned Action by Ajzen and Fishbein explains learning intention and learning behaviour from one’s own attitude and the subjective norm, that is, from the expectations of the social environment. Critics object that it neglects feelings and conceives opinion formation too linearly. The Technology Acceptance Model by Davis is derived from it. It explains whether someone adopts and learns a technology on the basis of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. In a test with 704 students, these two variables described attitudes more reliably than the general beliefs with which the Theory of Reasoned Action works.

For the further argument, the paper establishes that learning intention precedes learning behaviour. It arises from an inner resolution and from social influence, explicitly through incentives, for example, or implicitly through the expectations of colleagues and superiors. What is learned is what appears useful and can be applied easily.

The teaching party

Three mechanisms stand out on the teaching party’s side. The first is trust. A study on the introduction of a new system for assessing credit risks at a bank shows that usefulness and ease of use do not sufficiently explain the employees’ learning intention. Only trust in the system closes the gap. Ulrich and colleagues count credibility among the most important characteristics of HR professionals, because trust is what makes learning possible in the first place.

The second mechanism is the sharing of knowledge. A study of 150 firms finds that knowledge is used when the organization supports it and the individual considers it useful. Encouragement by leadership and incentive systems strengthen learning motivation. A meta-analysis on the professional development of teachers adds that such programmes mainly reach volunteers and thus miss precisely the group that would need them most.

The third mechanism is teaching as a creative process. Good professional development programmes look at a topic from several perspectives (Borko). The web gathers collective knowledge but demands concentration on a clear goal (Gruber). Teams that seek feedback, discuss errors openly and reflect on their results achieve more (Savelsbergh and colleagues). The paper therefore regards self-reflection and openness as core competences.

Key message

According to the paper, academic learning proceeds like a soaring spiral. Research objectives change the results, and the results change the objectives. Development takes place in spurts. Long phases of laborious work are followed by sudden insights. As an example, the paper cites the author’s own doctorate. The causal model of the thesis emerged all at once after the EFQM approaches had been worked through thoroughly.

Relation to the thesis

The paper describes the emergence of the thesis, not its subject. The paper’s building blocks recur in the concluding chapter of the thesis, where the thesis examines its significance for the author’s personal development. There it sorts the factors into internal and external ones.

Two connections reach beyond the concluding chapter. The paper describes learning as communication between a teaching and a learning party. The thesis transfers the same basic framework of sender and receiver to the network of agency, contractor, the contractor’s customers and the public; there the sender is the agency and the receivers are the contractor’s customers. In addition, trust is a central factor in both works. In the paper it is a condition for the acquisition of knowledge; in the final model of the thesis, customer trust is the strongest success parameter, with a standardized weight of 0.80. The page QMC model presents the model itself, and the findings are given under Results.