Abstract
This chapter provides a theoretical insight into the nature of continuing professional development within the health and medical professions. Ensuring the critical relevance and meaningful nature of CPD for clinical practitioners and the assessment mechanisms used to assess its effectiveness remains challenging in terms of how to engage professionals with timely, relevant, and tailored CPD content. The philosophical basis of constructivism is used to provide a theoretical lens through which knowledge construction and application can be integrated into the lifelong learning of post-qualifying members of the workforce.
TopIntroduction
“Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.” ~(Albert Einstein, 1879-1955)
The 21st century has seen the emergent need for continuing professional development (CPD) within the health and medical professions to address not only the individual needs of clinicians to ensure their knowledge is current but that it serves a greater collective purpose in relation to the healthcare workforce (Lewis, 2023). From a theoretical perspective, seminal epistemological theories of learning remain unchanged but the challenge of how best to facilitate disciplinary experts in remaining motivated and passionate about learning opportunities amidst the pressures of their daily workloads remains an issue for address. Time and fiscal resources are the two attributable factors to engagement in practice, but this does not detract from the passion that most healthcare practitioners demonstrate in the context of patient centred care, where applied knowledge is fundamental to optimal healthcare outcomes.
The foundation of Social Learning Theory rests on the theoretical basis of experiential learning and where the work of constructivist theorists such as Vygotsky still has resonance today (Rapanta, 2023). Whilst individuals may have preferred learning styles, curriculum justification, design and development remain towards the domain specificities of the psychomotor, cognitive, and affective, with acknowledgement that it is experience which forms the basis of the tacit knowledge that becomes second nature to experienced clinicians and healthcare professionals in practice (Johannessen, 2022). Constructivism therefore lends itself to the differentiation of a job versus a vocation, where tacit, experiential knowledge becomes an embedded part of the clinician on a personal as well as a professional level.
Structured frameworks for curriculum development ought therefore to recognise the significance of the need for evidence-based approaches to teaching knowledge, skills and facilitating the consideration of the critical reflexivity that underpins attitudes and expressed behaviours at the front line of patient care (Ng et al, 2022). This also enables criteria for the assessment of quality to become an integral part of curriculum development against which the gauging of optimal practice can be made.
The foundational basis of extant knowledge is what Vygotsky used to frame constructivist approaches to learning, where the interdependency of experience and current learning are clear.
TopCritical Reflection, Reflexivity And Trajectory Planning
Critical reflexivity in practice is now an integral part of all healthcare work. There are few models of reflection that fit all healthcare practitioners but the notion of reflexivity (defined for the purposes of this article as the ability to react to a similar incident in the future with informed discernment and reflection on previous incidents) is common to the majority (Cribb, Entwistle & Mitchell, 2023). Reflection necessitates the consideration of the multi-faceted nature of knowledge construction in a real world that is littered with nuance and complexity that must be negotiated and articulated carefully (Schaepkens, Veen, & de la Croix, 2022). This is what becomes of all healthcare provision – it is rooted in the unanswerable question and most celebrated of all human attributes i.e.) what it is to ‘be’. How we understand and apply meaning to how we interact with others in the context of healthcare provision for individual people, regardless of their physical or mental capacity in being part of the world, defines and frames our societies and our contributions to them.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Social Learning Theory: Seminally posited by Albert Bandura, Social Learning Theory emphasises the significance of observing, modeling, and imitating the attitudes, expressed behaviours and affective reactions of other people, whose individual professional identities can then be alluded to.
Critical Reflexivity: Critical reflexivity is defined as the capacity to reflect on self-perspective and long held presupposition and assumptions with the aim of understanding how these aspects of identity are socially constructed via critical reflection.
Signature Pedagogy: The term signature pedagogy refers to the specific mechanisms of teaching, learning and assessment, which are common to specific academic or clinical disciplines or professional groups. These specific mechanisms of learning often facilitate the building of professional identity and self-efficacy which enables learners to think and act in terms of higher order thinking, as experts within their disciplinary fields of practice.
Professional Identity: Professional identity is defined as a healthcare professional’s level of self-concept based on their individual attributes, beliefs, values, motives, and experiences. It can also be used to define what characterises individual professional groups or disciplines.
Communities of Practice: Within the context of the healthcare workforce, a community of practice (CoP) is a collective group of people with a shared common interest, set of issues or challenges and who join to ensure the fulfilment of specified individual or collective goal(s).
Lifelong Learning: Lifelong learning is the holistic nature of education, which focuses on personal as well as professional development in terms of career trajectory planning and work-life balance.
Experiential Learning: Experiential learning is process of educational engagement where students learn by immersive activity in the ‘real world and then proactively reflecting on the experience to learn from what the experience has taught them and how they might refine their approach in the future as a means of iterative contemplation and improvement.
Social Constructivism: Social constructivism places strategic emphasis on the collaborative nature of learning as a social experience. It is based on the premise that knowledge is a byproduct of the interaction of people within their different cultures and contexts and the societies to which they belong. Metaphorically knowledge building can be represented by bricks, where students learn from others and construct their own knowledge and reality.