Review by: Kwakman, Kitty (2005-09-26)

The book captured my interest right from the start because its point of departure is the necessity of paying attention to how professionals learn, as professionals have to maintain and develop their expertise throughout their career. A professional is broadly defined as a practitioner who has to continue to develop in line with the changing requirements of the profession or society. Ongoing learning and development plays a role in many jobs, which means the insights presented in this book may be useful to a broad section of the community and many practitioners.

Career stages of the professional
The introductory chapter by Boshuizen, Bromme & Gruber is promising. They discuss various frequently used terms such as professional, professional knowledge, experts and expertise, and learning. Their conclusion is that developing oneself to become an expert involves complex learning processes. The development passes through various stages, which form the framework for the organisation of the book’s different chapters. Knowledge development in the study programmes that professionals follow is the first subject to be discussed, followed by learning in the transition from school to work and finally learning in the workplace or in labour organisations. The chapters on these three aspects focus on different domains and each chapter includes a substantial amount of theory. Many chapters also report on research and describe research results.

Knowledge development in study programmes
Three chapters present research into the way in which students are able to acquire complex knowledge. All the chapters close with practical suggestions for the design of study programmes and training courses. The research projects focus on different domains (counselling, biology and accounting), and on various methods of instruction. Consequently, many suggestions for designs are provided. This makes it difficult to extract the main points quickly. Many of the suggestions are rather abstract because they are presented at a fairly general level. Consequently, many suggestions also have not so much new to say. This applies for example to: learning requires complex cases; supervision is important; or, students primarily have to learn independently.

Transition from school to work
This part comprises four extremely diverse chapters that are not so much concerned with the transition from school to work but with an examination of the problem of applying knowledge. Knowledge and skills acquired at school are not automatically applied in practice. This is a problem in many study programmes but the chapters are mainly concerned with the domains in which the practical component is of primary importance for learning the profession: medicine, management and teaching.

I mainly focus on the solutions that the authors offer for this problem. Boshuizen suggests paying more attention to study and teaching skills that concentrate on acquiring practical experience. To this end, students should be given the opportunity to acquire practical experience earlier in the curriculum. She also recommends making maximum use of authentic learning tasks. Arts, Gijselaers & Segers subscribe to this argument in favour of authentic learning tasks. They recommend creating room in the curriculum for assignments that have a lot in common with practical situations. An interesting distinction is made here between the intrinsic, social and procedural dimension. Tillema also ascribes an important role to the social dimension of learning and the introduction to practice as an activity in the study programme.Prince & Boshuizen present an extensive analysis of factors that make the transition from theory to practice difficult. They also acknowledge that, although these difficulties are largely caused by the way in which the study programme is given shape, it is difficult to suggest any structural improvements. An important insight of their analysis is that there is hardly any scope for paying more attention to application in the present curriculum for medicine, and that changes are only possible on the basis of specific choices.

Learning in the workplace
Acting professionally in a real working environment is seen as the stage at which professionals transform into true experts. Six chapters are devoted to this. Each of them makes very interesting reading in its own right and they all make reading the book more than worthwhile. However, they are also extremely different chapters, which makes it impossible to summarise what the import of each chapter is. Nevertheless, a few striking aspects stand out. All the authors take a broad understanding of expertise as their starting point and stress that expertise is influenced by contextual and social factors. This has two consequences.

The first is that more attention should be paid to the role of experience in developing expertise. This argument is strengthened by the reference to research results, from which it emerges that the nature rather than the length of experience as a professional is much more important for the development of expertise (amongst others, Ropo). The idea of ‘deliberate practice’, as studied by Van de Wiel, Szegedi and Weggeman, is also promising. They assume that professionals have to consciously perform certain activities to enable them to learn from their experiences. Other research focuses on the role of the working environment (Hartels & Gruber) and the role of informal networks (Palonen, Hakkarainen, Talvitie & Lehtinen).

Another conclusion is that new theories and interdisciplinary models are necessary for research into the development of expertise. Some chapters provide an insight into the profiles of such a model: Simons & Ruijters sketch out a general model for professional learning, whereas Eteläpelto & Collin describe a new model for research into professional design expertise.

Close: all the authors say that research and the formulation of theories on the development of professional expertise in the workplace are still in their infancy and deserve more attention. It therefore comes as no surprise to find that they all call for more research in this field.

Conclusion
Is this book worthy of recommendation? I would certainly say so. It contains many valuable insights, interesting research results and practical implications, far more than I could enumerate in this review. The approach of taking the perspective of the career stage means this book will appeal to anyone interested in education, learning and the development of professionals. However, the book demands a great deal of the reader’s attention because each chapter stands in its own right and focuses on another subject or domain and each angle of approach is different. This all makes the book extremely thorough. However, at the same time, it raises questions about the relationship between all the individual approaches, theoretical ideas and practical results. In this sense, it fails to live up to the promise on the back flap that the book sets out the basis for an integrated view of professional learning and development. It certainly contains the elements of such a view but the reader has to do the integration.

This review is originally published on the SURF E-learning Themesite http://e-learning.surf.nl