Community of practice in the context of "Professional school"

Professional development, also known as professional education, is learning that leads to or emphasizes education in a specific professional career field or builds practical job applicable skills emphasizing praxis in addition to the transferable skills and theoretical academic knowledge found in traditional liberal arts and pure sciences education. It is used to earn or maintain professional credentials such as professional certifications or academic degrees through formal coursework at institutions known as professional schools, or attending conferences and informal learning opportunities to strengthen or gain new skills.

Professional education has been described as intensive and collaborative, ideally incorporating an evaluative stage. There is a variety of approaches to professional development or professional education, including consultation, coaching, communities of practice, lesson study, case study, capstone project, mentoring, reflective supervision and technical assistance.

Étienne Charles Wenger (born 1952) is an educational theorist and practitioner, best known for his formulation (with Jean Lave) of the theory of situated cognition and his more recent work in the field of communities of practice.

An online community of practice (OCoP), also known as a virtual community of practice (VCoP), is a community of practice (CoP) that is developed and maintained on the Internet. OCoPs include active members who are practitioners, or "experts," in the specific domain of interest. Members participate in a process of collective learning within their domain. Community social structures are created to assist in knowledge creation and sharing, which is negotiated within an appropriate context. Community members learn through both instruction-based learning and group discourse. Finally, multiple dimensions facilitate the long-term management of support and the ability for synchronous interactions.

To some, a VCoP is a misnomer because the original concept of a CoP was based around situated learning in a co-located setting. With increasing globalization and the growth of the Internet, many now claim that virtual CoPs exist. For example, some claim that a wiki (such as Wikipedia) is a virtual CoP, whereas others argue that the essence of a community is place-based – a community of place.

Situated learning is a theory that explains an individual's acquisition of professional skills and includes research on apprenticeship into how legitimate peripheral participation leads to membership in a community of practice. Situated learning "takes as its focus the relationship between learning and the social situation in which it occurs".

The theory is distinguished from alternative views of learning which define learning as the acquisition of propositional knowledge. Lave and Wenger situated learning in certain forms of social co-participation and instead of asking what kinds of cognitive processes and conceptual structures are involved, they focused on the kinds of social engagements that provide the proper context and facilitate learning.