Professional Practice And Learning

Professional Practice in Learning and Development guides learning and development professionals and students in designing and delivering effective people development in the modern organization. It is a core text for those studying for learning and development qualifications such as the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development Intermediate level, and a useful handbook for those in learning and development roles looking to develop their understanding of the latest developments facing the profession. With a particular focus on digital, blended and social learning it will help you deliver more for less. Starting with an introduction to learning and development, it shows how to make the business case for activities, use metrics to demonstrate the value add, and engage the right stakeholders. Drawing on the latest research, Professional Practice in Learning and Development highlights the new opportunities made available to the learning and development practitioner by technology, new media and the networked world in which we live. It looks at approaches to helping people learn and how to develop tailored solutions. Case studies and reflective questions develop skills in facilitating collaborative learning, working in teams, and communicating effectively with all stakeholders. This book also equips you to measure and communicate the value of the programmes and, drawing on insights from neuroscience, demonstrates some practical new tools for engaging learners to improve the effectiveness of their work. Online supporting resources include multiple-choice questions and answers for each chapter.

The body matters, in practice. How then might we think about the body in our work in and on professional practice, learning and education? What value is there in realising and articulating the notion of the professional practitioner as crucially embodied? Beyond that, what of conceiving of the professional practice field itself as a living corporate body? How is the body implicated in understanding and researching professional practice, learning and education? Body/Practice is an extensive volume dedicated to exploring these and related questions, philosophically and empirically. It constitutes a rare but much needed reframing of scholarship relating to professional practice and its relation with professional learning and professional education more generally. It takes bodies seriously, developing theoretical frameworks, offering detailed analyses from empirical studies, and opening up questions of representation. The book is organized into four parts: I. ‘Introducing the Body in Professional Practice, Learning and Education’; II. ‘Thinking with the Body in Professional Practice’; III. ‘The Body in Question in Health Professional Education and Practice’; IV. ‘Concluding Reflections’. It brings together researchers from a range of disciplinary and professional practice fields, including particular reference to Health and Education. Across fifteen chapters, the authors explore a broad range of issues and challenges with regard to corporeality, practice theory and philosophy, and professional education, providing an innovative, coherent and richly informed account of what it means to bring the body back in, with regard to professional education and beyond.

This book explores important questions about the relationship between professional practice and learning, and implications of this for how we understand professional expertise. Focusing on work accomplished through partnerships between practitioners and parents with young children, the book explores how connectedness in action is a fluid, evolving accomplishment, with four essential dimensions: times, spaces, bodies, and things. Within a broader sociomaterial perspective, the analysis draws on practice theory and philosophy, bringing different schools of thought into productive contact, including the work of Schatzki, Gherardi, and recent developments in cultural historical activity theory. The book takes a bold view, suggesting practices and learning are entwined but distinctive phenomena. A clear and novel framework is developed, based on this idea. The argument goes further by demonstrating how new, coproductive relationships between professionals and clients can intensify the pedagogic nature of professional work, and showing how professionals can support others’ learning when the knowledge they are working with, and sense of what is to be learned, are uncertain, incomplete, and fragile.

This volume provides an overview of key contemporary themes in educational leadership. It focuses on developing professional capacity, organisation improvement and the implementation of change, looking at theoretical frameworks and concepts, recent research studies and case examples of effective practice. The book covers: - leading learning and learner leadership - change processes and distributed leadership - leading professional development for educational contexts. Designed to encourage critical analysis and debate, this volume will be a useful resource for postgraduate and professional development courses in educational leadership and for practitioners. It is a companion to Educational Leadership: Context, Strategy and Collaboration, also published by Sage.

What does it mean to be a professional in education and in other sectors where education is a focus? How can professional development techniques be implemented in a variety of settings to the best effect? Over the last decade, many shifts in individual professional identity and sector requirements in education have been evident. This book engages with current debates and presents a new model - critical professional development - involving several new concepts which are mapped clearly to practice and covering the necessary techniques and approaches. Key organizational challenges and possibilities in implementation are highlighted. In outlining the new model, the book discusses the theories and perspectives of critical professional development, from educational policy to practice. Case studies from a range of education sectors convey unique and richly textured examples of successful professional practice, providing strong links between teaching and learning and professional development, with approaches that can be widely adopted and applied in different settings. *** The text as a whole is starkly realistic, scholarly, and pragmatic rather than idealistic. As the authors concede, the definition of critical professionalism does not contain any original components; however, it is original in its holistic and practical conceptualization of professionalism in higher education...The theory proposed in this volume has wide applicability, and is worthwhile in the fields of theology and religion." - Reflective Teaching, Wabash Center, June 2015 [Subject: Educational Studies, Professional Development]

The three concepts central to this volume—practice, learning and change—have received very different treatments in the educational literature, an oversight directly confronted here. While learning and change have been extensively theorised, their various contexts articulated and analysed, practice is notably underrepresented. Where much of the literature on learning and change takes the notion of ‘practice’ as an unexamined given, its co-location as a term with various classifiers, as in ‘legal practice’ and ‘teaching practice’, render it curiously devoid of semantic force. In this book, ‘practice’ is the super-ordinate organising idea. Drawing on what has been termed the ‘practice turn in contemporary theory’, the work develops a conceptual framework for researching learning in, and on, practice. It challenges received notions of practice, questioning the assumptions, elisions, conflations and silences on the subject. In so doing, it offers fresh insights into learning and change, and how they relate to practice. In tandem with this conceptual work, the book details site-ontological studies of practice and learning in diverse professional and workplace contexts, examining the work of occupations as various as doctors, chefs and orchestral musicians. It demonstrates the value of theorising practice, learning and change, as well as exploring the connections between them amid our evolving social and institutional structures.

Understanding and researching professional practice is crucial both to enhancing the quality of professional learning and to improving professional education more generally. Yet professional practice remains something that is little known, theoretically and philosophically, despite a longstanding interest in what might be called the meta-field of professional practice, learning and education. The contributors to this book, drawn from fields such as education, allied health, psychology and business, explore different aspects of practice in the professions, professionalism, and research. This includes engaging with the burgeoning literature on practice theory and philosophy, including the increasingly influential neo-Aristotelian tradition, and taking account of growing interest in practice thinking across contemporary scholarship. It considers issues such as the primacy of practice, the nature of professional judgement, the role of ‘experience’, ethics, context, and the practitioner standpoint. As such, it raises important and timely questions about practice ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies, and also praxis and politics. This is especially needed in a context otherwise increasingly organised by neoliberalism, economic rationality, anxious managerialism, and what some see as a general drive towards de-professionalisation and new nuances and intensities of regulation.

The International Handbook of Research in Professional and Practice-based Learning discusses what constitutes professionalism, examines the concepts and practices of professional and practice-based learning, including associated research traditions and educational provisions. It also explores professional learning in institutions of higher and vocational education as well the practice settings where professionals work and learn, focusing on both initial and ongoing development and how that learning is assessed. The Handbook features research from expert contributors in education, studies of the professions, and accounts of research methodologies from a range of informing disciplines. It is organized in two parts. The first part sets out conceptions of professionalism at work, how professions, work and learning can be understood, and examines the kinds of institutional practices organized for developing occupational capacities. The second part focuses on procedural issues associated with learning for and through professional practice, and how assessment of professional capacities might progress. The key premise of this Handbook is that during both initial and ongoing professional development, individual learning processes are influenced and shaped through their professional environment and practices. Moreover, in turn, the practice and processes of learning through practice are shaped by their development, all of which are required to be understood through a range of research orientations, methods and findings. This Handbook will appeal to academics working in fields of professional practice, including those who are concerned about developing these capacities in their students. In addition, students and research students will also find this Handbook a key reference resource to the field.