Whose line learning is it anyway (or mock the weak)?

by Lee Davies

CPD, professional learning, remaining in good standing ... call it what we will, we all know it works best when professionals reflect on their own practice, plan their own learning and recognise the impact that the learning makes on what they do. We also know that the richest professional learning can come from those unexpected moments of improvisation when we leap off the step into a new scenario and are only constrained by our creativeness.

What are professional bodies really about? Deep down, isn’t it simply providing like-minded individuals who share a sense of identity the opportunity to network, create communities and to share practice? Why, then, do we plough effort and money into creating walled gardens of technology where professionals can record their CPD for the purpose of proving they have done it, rather than harnessing the technologies our members use and own and creating environments where learning is organic, member-led and improvised?

Lee will draw on the experience of the Institute for Learning, the professional body for teachers, trainers and tutors working in further education and skills, in taking a fresh, at times improvised, approach to providing an environment for individual and collective professional learning. This in a profession where CPD and the recording of it is mandatory but where the model for professional learning requires no boxes to be ticked. As well as focussing on how PebblePad has been used to meet the professional learning needs of individual members, the organisational needs of IfL and the policy wants of government, Lee will gaze into his murky and, at times, wrong crystal ball and predict some of the future challenges for personal learning spaces.