Theories of Learning for the Workplace

Building blocks for training and professional development programs

Filip Dochy, David Gijbels, Mien Segers, Piet Van den Bossche

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136733048
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Workplace and professional learning, lifelong learning, adult learning, learning in different contexts have become of more and more interest and now dominate all aspects of 21 st century life. Learning is no longer about 'storing and recall' but 'development and flow'.

Theories of Learning in the Workplace offers fascinating overviews into some of the most important theories of learning and how they are practically applied to organisational or workplace learning. With each chapter co-authored by an academic researcher and an expert in business or industry, this unique book provides practical case studies combined with thorough analysis of theories and models of learning.

Key figures in education, psychology and cognitive science present a comprehensive range of conceptual perspectives on learning theory, offering a wealth of new insights to support innovative research directions.

Containing overviews of theories from Schön, Argyris, Senge, Engeström, Billet, Ericsson, Kolb, Boud and Mezirow, this book discusses:

• adult learning;

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• workplace learning;

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• informal learning;

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• reflective practice;

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• experiential learning;

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• deliberate practice;

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• organisational and inter-organisational expansive learning.

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Combining theory and practice, this book will be essential reading for all trainee and practicing educational psychologists, organisational psychologists, researchers and students in the field of lifelong learning, educational policy makers, students, researchers and teachers in vocational and higher education.

Chapter 1

Deliberate Practice, the High Road to Expertise: K.A. Ericsson

Margje W. J. van de Wiel, Piet Van den Bossche and Richard P. Koopmans

Case Study: The Case of Medical Specialist Training

Medical doctors start their training after finishing secondary school. In the Netherlands, medical studies are organised according to the bachelor-master scheme. The training takes six years: a three-year bachelor programme with mostly theoretical studies, followed by a three-year master phase in the hospital. After six years of successful study the student is licensed as an MD, and takes the oath. However, independent work as a medical doctor is not yet possible, because the Dutch government has put in place a law that more or less obliges all doctors to do some sort of specialist training after graduation.

Approximately 2,800 students start their medical studies every year. After graduation, approximately 1,000 of these continue for specialist training, which usually takes four to six years, and approximately 600 continue their training to become general practitioners (GPs), which takes three years. This postgraduate training phase is usually spent as a doctor working in the training area, either a hospital or a GP practice, and the students are normally closely supervised by senior practitioners. Hereafter, we will mainly consider medical specialists who work in hospitals only.

A usual day in such a training programme is spent as follows. The trainee, also called a resident, is allocated to an in-patient ward, the outpatient ward, the emergency ward or a treatment area (e.g., the operating room). Depending on what stage the student has reached in his or her training there may be a supervisor physically present. However, particularly in such medical specialisms as internal medicine, the supervisor is often not physically present but will be readily contactable by phone. Residents see approximately 10 to 20 patients on such a day. They are in close contact with other residents at all different stages of training, as well as with undergraduate students. They work closely together with all sorts of paramedics, especially nurses, whom they instruct on the approach to be taken for the individual patients. Residents assume responsibility for the actions taken, which they share with their supervisors. There is a grey area between actions which are largely the responsibility of the residents and those for which supervisors are mainly responsible. Residents are in regular contact with their supervisors during the day, usually for short discussions (e.g., one to five minutes) on how to proceed with individual patients.

How does learning take place in such a training programme? Much learning is implicit in such a training programme. That is, residents observe others taking certain actions and receiving feedback on the proposed management plan from their supervisors. From this they construct for themselves what is the most appropriate action to be taken in a given case. There is usually no explicit check that residents have deduced the correct instructions from these observations and feedback. However, over the years of training residents will have many different supervisors and will work in many different hospitals; therefore over time and with experience students will come to understand the most appropriate courses of action that would be approved by their supervisors. In recent years an emphasis has been put on more explicit learning, i.e., taking courses in certain subjects, usually not in the workplace itself, and taking exams that test both knowledge and practical skills. Moreover, in the workplace there will be everyday meetings that will contribute to residents’ learning on the job.

These meetings touched on above are usually patient-centred, with the aim of discussing patients’ conditions and the actions to be taken, proposed by a resident among a group of other residents and supervisors. There are daily morning sessions in which the night-shift doctors hand over their work, and daily ward rounds in which residents discuss with nurses and with their immediate supervisors the patients on their ward. Every week, there are so-called grand ward rounds in which an extended group of residents, medical staff, nurses and other paramedics review the patients on their ward. Usually, there are also weekly meetings to discuss particular issues, such as pathology reports and radiology results, and meetings with specialists about special problems, such as oncology cases. In most of these meetings residents are expected to present a case and to propose the actions to be taken in patient care.

During their medical training residents have to sit a number of written examinations, usually on the subject of their chosen specialism. Often this is a formative assessment and the results do not influence graduation. Most judgements on the progression of residents are subjectively made by the group of supervisors. They give their overall impression of the behaviour of a resident in the workplace and usually take into account both specialism-related skills, such as skills demonstrated in the operating room, and more general skills, such as communication with patients. In recent years some emphasis has been put on structured observation of residents. For such an observation a supervisor will typically observe residents for 15 minutes, score an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) form and give some feedback. Such forms have also been developed for practical skills. The number of such structured observations is limited; typically some 10 to 20 have to be done annually to comply with official regulations.

During recent years there has been a lot of discussion on this type of learning in practice. Several issues have been put forward in such discussions. A main theme is the way in which residents receive feedback on their work, and the quality of this feedback. In programme evaluations, residents often indicate that they want more feedback. According to some authorities both the quality and quantity of feedback should be improved. Another theme is the implicit learning, in which the learning climate is a major issue; today there are even scoring forms on which residents can score the quality of their learning climate. The issue here is whether learning during specialism training is facilitated or not; so, do the supervisors allocate time to answer questions? How is the caseload? How do the supervisors deal with stressful situations? And so on. The main question here is to what extent residents can learn from their daily work. Another theme is what residents should learn on simulators, and what they should learn from working with actual patients. Patient safety is of course important, but residents who have had a relatively small caseload during their training might be unfit to work independently after graduation. A further issue concerns in what settings residents should do their training, and whether the mix of cases they encounter can be adjusted to facilitate learning. As residents mainly see the patients that are either staying on the ward in which they work or are visiting the hospital outpatient ward, the cases they are confronted with depend on the type of patients that are hospitalised or visit the outpatient ward. In a university hospital residents might see many very special cases that they will probably never see again in their later practice, while in a non-university hospital residents might see many more routine cases. Another theme that is currently influencing learning is the working-time directive. At present, the working hours of residents have been limited to approximately 50 hours per week. For reasons such as shift-working, but to some extent also because of obligations to do courses, part-time working arrangements, pregnancy (more than 50 per cent of residents are women) and vacations, residents have very irregular working weeks. A perceived problem in this respect is that residents often cannot see the outcomes of their actions, as they will only be caring for a certain patient for a short time.

Introduction

Professional expertise is based on a large and well-organised knowledge base that is developed in great part by learning from experience. Based on his research on workplace learning Eraut (2000) has stressed the importance of this non-formal learning during work; most human learning does not occur in formal contexts such as schools, courses and training, but in everyday contexts. In describing a typology of non-formal learning, Eraut pointed to the level of intention to learn as a fundamental distinction. On the one hand, there is implicit learning, in which there is no intention to learn and no awareness of the learning process. On the other hand, learning can be deliberative: it is planned, and time is specifically set aside. A category between these two types of learning has been described as reactive. This learning takes place in response to specific situations and events that draw attention. This near spontaneous and unplanned learning can vary in level of intentionality.

Theories on the development of expertise are traditionally based on differences in performance as a result of experience emphasising the role of implicit learning to tune knowledge to its practical use (Chase & Simon, 1973; Ericsson & Lehman, 1996; Norman, Eva, Brooks, & Hamstra, 2006). However, the deliberate activities that could be undertaken by professionals to learn from their experiences must also be taken into account. The theory of deliberate practice (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, 1993) addressed this last aspect, arguing that mere practice is not enough to attain expertise but that focused efforts are needed.

This chapter presents the theory of deliberate practice. Based on the description in the case study of the professional learning environment in which physicians are trained, we will discuss how deliberate practice theory can inform the development of this environment so that expertise is fostered.

The Theory of Deliberate Practice

Extensive practice and experience in a professional domain is, according to deliberate practice theory (Ericsson et al., 1993; Ericsson, 2004, 2006, 2009), important but not sufficient to reach expert levels of performance. With this theory, the nature of the practice activities engaged in plays a decisive role in the development of expertise. It is argued that practice activities contribute most if they are specifically designed and structured to develop performance aspects that need improvement and if they allow feedback and repetition. This so-called deliberate practice requires the motivation to improve performance and to engage in sustained efforts to refine knowledge and skills. It also requires sufficient resources in terms of the time and energy that can be spent on training, as well as in terms of the access to teachers, coaches, training material and facilities that support and enable learning. On the path to excellence, trainers and coaches have an important role in guiding training and the learning process. They analyse performance, plan and design the practice activities and monitor performance to provide informative feedback and to adjust training methods and strategies. With this individualised supervision they help the performer to attend to critical aspects of performance and to focus on knowledge of results so that effective self-monitoring during independent practice is enhanced. Experts in a domain have gradually learned to control, monitor and evaluate their performance themselves and try to find the best possible methods and teachers to further improve.

Research on deliberate practice has mostly been done in competitive domains, such as music, chess and sports (Ericsson, 2006, 2009). In line with the monotonic benefits assumption it has been found that the amount of time an individual has engaged in deliberate practice activities is directly related to that individual’s level of performance (Charness, Tuffiash, Krampe, Reingold, & Vasyukova, 2005; Ericsson et al., 1993; Ward, Hodges, Williams, & Starkes, 2004). The higher the investment in deliberate practice, the better the performance is. The type of practice that has the largest impact on the acquisition of expertise, however, differs across domains. In music and chess, accumulated and current amount of practice alone has been found to be the major determinant of expert performance (Charness et al., 2005; Ericsson et al., 1993). Piano players, for example, practice music pieces over and over again guided by the feedback of their teachers, steadily building up a repertoire of more complex pieces by working on their technique and expression. Chess players study published games and reflect on the best next move for each position and compare their prediction to the move by the master. In sports, the deliberate practice activities that best predict top-level performance are sport specific (Ward et al., 2004). For individual sports like figure skating or swimming, practising the tasks that needed to be performed at competitions contributed most. For team sports, however, the amount of engagement in team practice discriminated between players’ skill levels. In soccer, for example, players need to practice technical mastery and strategic insight to optimally cooperate during a match. This domain-specificity of relevant practice activities stresses the importance of analysis for training design by selecting the most representative tasks of the domain that need to be improved.

Becoming an expert takes a long time of effortful engagement in deliberate practice. The general rule is that at least ten years of practice are required to attain expertise (Ericsson et al., 1993). This is much more than is needed to accomplish a complex skill such as driving a car, which most people can master in less than 50 hours. Skill acquisition research has shown that, according to the power law of practice, a performance asymptote can be reached within a manageable time period for most daily skills and laboratory tasks (Anderson, 1981; Fitts & Posner, 1967). Therefore, Ericsson (Ericsson et al., 1993; Ericsson, 2006, 2009) distinguished deliberate practice to reach expertise from the mere repetitive practice that has been described in this traditional skill acquisition research to result in increases of speed and accuracy and eventually in fully automatic behaviour. Ericsson also made a clear distinction between deliberate practice and experience. Having experience in a domain does not necessarily mean that one has reached full mastery of the relevant tasks. For example, an amateur chess player may have been actively involved in the game for as many years as a master player but for fewer hours and in a different way. Experience within a domain without receiving feedback and making adjustments in behaviour may even lead to learning inefficient or inaccurate routines. The central thesis of deliberate practice theory is that skilled performance and experience are not enough to acquire superiority in a domain, and that automaticity should be counteracted by achieving high-level control of performance that allows further improvements to be made (Ericsson, 1998, 2004, 2006, 2009).

The cognitive mechanisms that mediate expert performance have been described as complex integrated systems of mental representations (Ericsson, 2004, 2006, 2009). Based on a highly developed network of knowledge and skills, experts in a field have accurate and precise representations of the current situation and task, their goals and the ways in which they might achieve these goals. These representations enable them to perform the task proficiently and at the same time monitor and adjust performance whenever necessary. They also use these representations to evaluate their performance afterwards and to retrieve associated representations in their knowledge base when reflecting on the outcomes. In chess, for example, masters have stored a huge number of chess game representations in their memory that they use in weighing up the best next move and envisioning the consequences of more and less favourable moves. The conclusions of the evaluation and reflection processes, as well as the feedback received, are used to fine-tune the system of representations. These are, in turn, the starting point for the planning of subsequent learning and practice. Experts are continuous learners who never seem satisfied, but want to perfect their performance and always try to improve on their current level.

This last characterisation of experts sharply contrasts with the motivation and possibilities of most professionals working in organisations. The primary task of these professionals is to complete job-related tasks on time, while often only few resources are available to reconsider their work and assess their developmental progress. According to Ericsson (2004, 2006, 2009) most professionals reach an acceptable level of performance during the initial phase of their career and then stay at this level without serious attempts to develop beyond the proficient execution of routine tasks. Only some individuals surpass this level and succeed in their continuous efforts to develop themselves as they become recognised as outstanding professionals in their domain. Research on deliberate practice in the workplace, however, is limited. The few studies carried out related to the fields of education (Dunn & Shriner, 1999), insurance (Sonnentag & Kleine, 2000) and organisational consultancy (Van de Wiel, Szegedi, & Weggeman, 2004), and looked for activities that are performed with the aim of learning or improving professional competence. The work-related activities identified as deliberate practice in these work settings are preparation, mental simulation, asking for feedback or advice, evaluation, reflection and updating activities. These activities closely resemble key elements of self-regulated learning, in which individuals plan, monitor and reflect on their learning to optimise the outcomes (Van de Wiel et al., 2004...