Time to Regrade the Terrain of Continuing Professional Education: Views From Practitioners

Abstract

Chicago, Illinois is the home base for dozens of professional associations and other types of continuing professional education (CPE) provider organizations. This happy circumstance brings many of their program directors, administrators, educators, and senior executives to the graduate programs in Adult and Higher Education at Northern Illinois University In keeping with the mission o f the AAACE Futures Project (Knox, 2001), this column examines the diverse experiences, views, needs, and desires of practitioners engaged in CPE with whom I have had the pleasure of working in recent years. These folks are on the cutting-edge of practice, as they advise both volunteer and organizational leaders, respond to requests for expert testimony, and plan programs for their state and national constituencies. Their frustrations and triumphs bring rich discussions to our CPE courses, as they wrestle with environmental turbulence including: government regulation, changing demographics of their members (and those member's clients), increasing demands for distributed learning technologies, and economic uncertainties. Each fall as we work to become a learning community, we confront numerous occupational-silo mindsets. The prevailing view is that CPE practices and dilemmas within my field are so unique and contextually nuanced that sharing is of limited value. This view diminishes as we discover that diversity in its many forms, both confounds and informs. Learners are often surprised to find remarkably similar concerns across professional domains with regard to collaboration among providers, program planning, evaluating, financing and marketing CPE, editorial and research agendas, and increasing pressure for accountability and quality control. Nearly 5 years ago, Cervero (2000) framed three critical issues for the study and practice of CPE. These have been enormously useful in setting the stage for our scholar-practitioners, as they consider more permeable boundaries among practitioners of CPE in numerous professions. The remainder of this column focuses on consideration of these three issues plus one more: How has the CPE landscape changed since 2000, how are practitioners responding, and what counsel do they offer the readership of Adult Learning? Issue 1. Continuing education for what? The struggle between updating professionals' versus improving practice (Cervero, 2000, p. 8). Typically, this issue meets with consternation early in our discussions and it is viewed rather narrowly as a problem related to transfer-of-learning that is attributed to the lack of alignment between the formal instructional arena and the work site. As reading and reflection progresses, with much assistance from the research done by Daley (1999, 2001) and Cheetham and Chivers (2000, 2001) that examine learning in the context of practice across different professions, the issue gets fleshed out as: How can we create CPE programs that bring together specialized and reflective practice tools to enable professionals to build solid technical AND improvisational expertise? (Brick, Learning Log, October, 2004). Some innovative practices have emerged from these exchanges. With variations on the theme, a knowledge objects approach to instructional design is very much in the forefront of CPE offered through several medical specialties. Instead of selecting from the standard array of concurrent update sessions, participants enter a virtual learning environment at their annual meeting and peruse the conference program via 10-minute computer-based overview sessions. Once the participants select their interest areas, they have three options: (1) attend an update session at the conference, (2) procure self-directed study materials, or (3) enter a preceptor type arrangement for extended study in the particular area of expertise. These options are empowering to participants! However, there is a downside; only resource-rich professional associations are presenting these alternatives. …