ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we will present at a more abstracted level than we have done before what we have learned through the years from our inquiry into the nature of professional development. Abandoning the restraints of formulating our text within a phase format, as we did in the preceding six chapters, we will now use a different lens to describe themes of professional development. To do so we started by asking whether we could summarize our most important findings in one sentence? That was not possible, but we were able to formulate “summary sentences” presented initially as 20 themes of professional development (Skovholt & Rønnestad, 1992). In a reanalysis and reformulation, these were reduced to 14 (Rønnestad & Skovholt, 2003). Inspired by Goodyear’s recommendation (Rodney, Goodyear, Wertheimer, Cypers, & Rosemond, 2003) to collapse and shorten the number of themes even further to reduce overlap, we have trimmed down the number of themes to 10. Here are the 10.
