Formal and Informal Learning: Incorporating Communities of Practice into Professional Development

Abstract

The field of professional training has a long tradition of supporting learning and performance through formal training. This paper raises questions about the focus on formal learning and proposes a new way of incorporating communities of practice into professional development. Communities of practice are informal networks that support a group of practitioners in developing a shared meaning and engaging in knowledge building among the members. The purposes of this paper are to describe informal and formal learning found in organizations and to discuss the implications of informal and formal learning in communities of practice for general professional development.