The emotional experience of continuing professional development

ABSTRACT

This study seeks to understand why some social workers seem to connect and engage openly with opportunities for continuing professional development (CPD) while others seem to have a more conflicted relationship with their learning. Using psychoanalytically informed free association narrative interviews with eight social workers, the study explores the participant’s emotional experience of CPD. The data is analysed using an ‘Evolved approach’ (Cooper, 2014) in which it is examined for new ideas and organised into themes. The findings suggest a clear relational dimension to learning for social workers and the researcher offers The Learning Response model as a product of the study. This is a biographical narrative model of the pedagogy of CPD which offers a way of understanding how social worker’s approach to CPD is influenced by the experience of learning facilitation in early life. The model suggests that for some social workers, the script for future engagement with learning is set at this stage and they will repeat their early responses in their adult learning. But the study also identifies apparent compensatory factors and experiences and these seem to enable social workers to rescript their approach to CPD. For all however, the inner emotional voice created from initial experiences remains the same and it is this which replays and shapes social worker’s emotional experience of CPD.

KEYWORDS:

• Continuing professional development
• social work
• learner, pedagogy
• education
• relational

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere thanks to the study participants who generously gave me their time and their stories and to my supervisor, Dr David Forbes who consistently gave insight and encouragement.

This article is dedicated to the memory of Professor Andrew Cooper, my supervisor, mentor and friend.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tanya Moore

Tanya Moore is Principal Social Worker for Essex Adult Social Care and Social Work Doctoral Supervisor at The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust