Alongside all my registered social work colleagues I report to the Social Workers Registration Board an annual account of my professional development activities. Every time I do this I ask myself what it means, how I might log my learning into small boxes provided on the website. A practitioner and I reflected at the end of a supervision session recently about how every day engagement with people brings learning, every supervision session, each kōrero in any context contributes to our professional development – there is no shortage of opportunity to expand our understanding of the world. And it’s not possible or even necessary to record or formalize all of this learning. It is simply who we are as human beings, members of communities; we relate, absorb, share, act in a reciprocal and collective way. As professionals however, we are required to observe a selection of these interactions, be deliberate about finding or creating some, and then explain how they have changed our practice, or made a difference. This intentional and accountable learning is no doubt a good thing, it aligns with the identity and overall competence of the profession, but there is a compliance factor in it that always leaves me feeling slightly numb, and a little bit lonely.

I have been witness to some training in the past few weeks, offered to social workers by their employer, and this offered opportunity to develop new insight into what professional development means. I reflect on the word “training” and the implicit expectation or direction from an employer that the information being presented will be applied to practice. Practitioners may not perceive a choice in this regard hence their reflection will no doubt be focused on what is learned and how practice might change as a result – as directed. There is learning in this and it fits nicely into the ‘log box,’ but it falls short of what we really need as a profession. Sometimes we need to be compliant, but always we need to be critical. True learning and development as a professional requires this.

So professional development should be about what I gain from my critical reflection on the usefulness of the ideas and knowledge presented to me, their relevance, how they align or not with my existing practice framework, how they fit or not into my social work kete, the extent to which I am willing and/or ethically able to incorporate them into my practice. And in true wānanga style, I would be deliberating ideas with my colleagues, discussing their merits or shortcomings, developing a strategy to collect our reflections and share them with others. There is a collective voice in this way of learning that feels less lonely, more lively, and less compliant.

To take these thoughts just a little bit further, the Australian and New Zealand Social Work and Welfare Education and Research (ANZSWWER), published a special edition of their journal earlier this year (Advances in Social Work and Welfare Education) focused on the intrinsic relationship between social work practice and research, the knowledge we use to support our practice and how we can contribute to this knowledge base. To those not involved in research this might all sound a bit much, however the sentiment is the same: how we learn and develop as individual practitioners, and as a profession relies on asking good critical questions about what is happening on the ground, at the root of our work, and finding creative ways to answer these questions. I argue that the reflections we record in our professional development “logs” should be coming from this same critical place, and that as much as possible, they should be thoughts developed in a collective way, and shared.