Teachers’ and other Professionals’ Learning Practices

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an extensive comparative analysis of professional learning. As Chapter 1 has documented, professionals depend greatly on formal education entry credentials for their legitimacy. Professionals are also widely assumed to engage in continual learning to upgrade their specialized knowledge and skills to remain current in complex and changing jobs. We posit that, since professional occupations remain highly dependent on recognition of specialized knowledge, continuing participation in further job-related formal education (usually called “professional development”) is likely to be higher than in most other occupations. As noted in the Introduction, workplace learning can be seen as occurring on an informal-formal continuum, with much of it taking place informally (see Betcherman 1998: Livingstone 2009). All workers are likely to require continuing learning in relation to changing job conditions, so we expect that the incidence of job-related informal learning will be quite extensive among all occupations. Most of the attention in this chapter will be devoted to comparing formal provision of professional development for teachers and other specific professional occupations and by class positions of professionals.