Professional growth plans: Possibilities and limitations of an organizationwide employee development strategy
✍ Scribed by Tara J. Fenwick
- Book ID
- 102254885
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2003
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 125 KB
- Volume
- 14
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1044-8004
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Abstract
Professional growth plans, while not a new approach to employee development, are rarely mandated as standard
supervisory practice. This article offers a study of widescale mandatory implementation of professional growth
plans (PGPs) in Canadian school systems, as an approach to fostering continuous professional learning.
Reported benefits include greater employee commitment to learning; increased employee focus on purposes for
their own development; increased collegiality; and employees' sense of self‐affirmation.
Tensions over control and direction, between organizational desires to guide employee development and
professionals' desires for autonomy, need to be worked through. But with sufficient employee‐supervisor
trust, dialogue, flexibility, and patience, the findings suggest that PGPs motivate dialogue and questioning that
energizes collective learning and professional practice.