Longitudinal Case Study Research to Study Self-Regulation of Professional Learning:Combining Observations and Stimulated Recall Interviews Throughout Everyday Work

Professional learning reflects critical processes of change whereby one modifies and extends prior competencies while performing one’s job. Over the past two decades, the need has emerged and grown for insights on how employees take responsibility for their own learning and engage in self-regulation of professional learning. However, the process of measuring professional learning as well as self-regulation of professional learning during everyday work has raised difficult methodological problems for various reasons. The retrospective, cross-sectional, self-report measurement techniques often used, tend to de-contextualise learning from the complex environments in which professionals operate. Under such techniques, study participants are asked to make abstractions of this complexity to self-report regarding possibly implicit, multifaceted competencies and metacognitive strategy use as features of self-regulated learning. In this chapter, we offer an alternative approach via a longitudinal multiple case study design combining long-term observations with immediate consecutive stimulated recall interviews, towards building a more dynamic and situated understanding of professional learning through which to explore participants’ self-regulation. Using both ‘on-line’ and ‘off-line’ measurement techniques, the proposed interactive approach was empirically applied to investigate self-regulation of professional learning in medical practice. Without pretentiously suggesting that this is the ultimate research solution, we aim to outline the approach, its opportunities and challenges, how to tackle these challenges, and how the approach’s research insights could function to advance theory-building on professional learning in general—and self-regulation of professional learning in particular—in everyday work.</p

Intergenerational professional relationships in elementary school teams: a social network approach

This paper examines the extent to which school team members’ professional relationships are affected by being part of a certain generational cohort. These professional relationships provide opportunities for intergenerational knowledge flows and can therefore be relevant for intergenerational learning. Nowadays these topics have gained more attention due to worldwide demographic changes such as increased retirement rates and high levels of teacher dropout. Data were gathered through a survey with socio-metric questions among 299 school team members in 15 elementary schools in the Netherlands. Using social network analysis, in particular p2 modelling, we analysed the effect of being part of a generational cohort on teachers’ likelihood of having professional relationships in networks such as discussing work, asking and providing advice, and collaboration. Findings indicate that generational cohorts based on chronological age do matter in the formation of work related ties. These findings also support the importance of focusing on different professional networks since different age dynamics can be at play. Our findings also show that school team members of the youngest cohort tend to form intra-generational relationships, whereas older generational cohort members prefer inter-generational relationships. This study is innovative due to its application of social network analysis to investigate intergenerational knowledge flows.