Per-Erik Ellström

Promoting Professional Learning in the Workplace:
Towards an Integrated Model

Today it is widely recognized that formal training courses are not sufficient for promoting sustainable professional learning and competence development. In order to turn training into an effective strategy for competence development and school improvement, it is necessary to focus not only on the design and delivery of training, but also on the school as a workplace. Specifically, it is necessary to focus on the learning potential of the workplace, that is, the extent to which it provides a learning environment that supports and facilitates teachers’ professional learning in and through the day-to-day work of teaching. In this seminar, there will be a focus on schools as learning organizations and on the importance of management attention, encouragement, and support in order to promote effective professional learning. Theory and empirical research on workplace learning emphasize the need to integrate formal training with non-formal and informal learning at work. In line with this, different logics for leading and organizing professional learning will be distinguished, and a number of conditions will be identified that enable and constrain learning at work. During the seminar a number of practical principles will be formulated for how to organize for effective professional leaning.

Biographical note:

Per-Erik Ellström is Professor in Education at Linköping University, Sweden. He is also Director of the HELIX Centre of Excellence at the same university - a ten-year programme for research on mobility, learning, and innovation (www.liu.se/helix). His research interests include studies of change and innovation processes in organizations, workplace learning, interactive research, leadership and organization development. His recent publications include articles in the Journal of Workplace Learning, the Journal of European Industrial Training, and the SAGE Handbook of Workplace Learning.