Continuing Professional Development - reflections from nursing and education

The tradition of engaging in reflective practice for learning is firmly entrenched in the discourse of nursing. This is also the situation for the field of education. This commonality provided the stimulus for this paper. The purpose is to provide an account of the value of reflection as a tool for critical thought in relation to learning through a case study of two Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programmes in different professional contexts (nursing and teaching) and geographical locations (the United Kingdom and Singapore). The authors, who are educators of teaching and nursing practitioners respectively, exchanged narratives of professional experience in order to frame reflections on practice of CPD programmes. They problematised what it means for nurses and teachers to learn, and how this learning might be judged by both the participants and the facilitators of CPD programmes. Adopting a critical and reflexive approach to practice supported the authors' professional learning. One common issue evident from the reflections of practice raised questions in relation to how participants might provide evaluative feedback of CPD programmes in socially desirable ways. This was foregrounded as an important issue to be considered by the authors when designing and facilitating CPD programmes and suggests implications for other educators of nursing and teaching practitioners.