Identity Development in Professional Education* ???

What do educators in the professions and the publics they serve expect of their students and graduates? When this question is posed in a variety of professional settings, a common set of answers generally emerges: We want our students to acquire knowledge. We want them to have basic conceptual and applied knowledge, and we want them to have the clinical skills so that they will be competent practitioners. Our field is dynamic. We expect our graduates will continue to develop through years of practice. Therefore, we want them to be willing and capable of learning on their own from experience and continuous study once they leave school. We want them to have the values of the profession; we want them to be ethical, to reason about the ethical implications of practice. And we want them to be doctors, or lawyers, or engineers, or teachers, or ministers, or nurses, or officers; we want them to have a sense of themselves as professionals. What professionals know and can do is certainly critical—professional competence matters. However, these answers also suggest that who they are as professionals also counts. The public and those who prepare professionals for service have this intuitive sense that “who they are” influences how they practice. Hence, we want professionals who have developed a set of internal standards–an internal compass–that regulates their work, and we want them to be able to make the tough calls when their knowledge and skills are tested. We want professionals who have the emotional maturity and the where-with-all to act in the best interest of the client, regardless of external pressures. This is the area of professional education that my colleagues and I have been exploring for the past decade. Like educators in other professions, those of us involved in officer education in the military are concerned about more than the acquisition of knowledge and skills. For sure, we want officers who are technically and tactically competent, and we invest heavily in the development of professional expertise in officer education. But we also want officers who are persons of character, who can make principled, well-reasoned decisions about life-and-death issues in complex and often ambiguous situations. Witness the challenges confronting today's military professionals. The degree of complexity and ambiguity they face in the streets of Baghdad or the mountains of eastern Afghanistan are far more than soldiers faced during the Cold War—at the Berlin Wall or on the DMZ in Korea. And when we encounter professional error and mistake, it often has less to do with knowledge and skills than it has to do with the maturity, judgment, values, and professionalism. These outcomes matter. Theoretical Perspective on Development To understand these kinds of educational outcomes, we have turned to the literature on adult development for some insights. Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan has presented a broad and comprehensive theory of development we have used to inform our work.1,2 Kegan's constructive developmental theory posits major qualitative shifts in how people construct their understanding of themselves and their world. This understanding, Kegan argues, is central to one's personal identity and influences one's relationships with others. My colleagues and I think this framework may hold some clue to understanding professional identity, the sense of who we are as professionals. Kegan is interested in how people construct or organize their understanding of themselves and their interpersonal world. Psychological development, then, involves progressively more complex and encompassing ways of constructing this understanding, helping us to deal with the psychological and interpersonal demands of life. We speculate that this broader notion of psychological development may be relevant for professional development. Our understanding of self and the world has two features—content and structure.3 Content is the surface material—our behaviors, ideas, preferences, aspirations, style. It is the “what” that is “being organized.” Professional values and expectations are important content that we imagine will be incorporated into a developing professional's sense of self. Structure refers to the way in which content is organized—its form, complexity, and levels of abstraction. Kegan and colleagues argues that individuals at different developmental levels may share similar content (values, for example) but differ in terms of how those values are structured and understood. So we may get fooled if we don't look beyond the content to understand the structure. Kegan posits a total of six stages of development (0–5) of which three are relevant to our discussion of emerging professional identity (stages 2, 3, and 4). Stage 2 Individuals at Stage 2 organize events into concrete categories and are able to take the perspective of others. This structure enables them to play social roles, delay gratification, follow rules, develop and pursue enduring interests, construct a stable sense of self, and participate in close relationships based on social exchange. Individuals at Stage 2 derive their self-esteem from competent performance of valued role behaviors and from achieving external goals. Stage 2 competencies are essential to adequate personal and social functioning. There are, however, limitations to a Stage 2 way of understanding. Although individuals at Stage 2 can take the point of view of others and understand their perspectives, they do so in terms of their OWN needs and interests. That is, their own needs become the lens through which they understand their social world. Now it's possible that these interests will be prosocial or socially acceptable—getting a good education or a job, for example, or helping others—but that is really the content of their understanding. And while Stage 2 individuals are concerned about others, their concern is related to what others will do with respect to them; there is no sense that how others feel about them defines how they feel about themselves. Stage 3 At Stage 3, new capacities emerge that are more encompassing. The Stage 3 individual is able to organize experiences and events into abstract categories and to view multiple perspectives simultaneously. This new ability allows them to become identified with others; hence, interpersonal mutuality emerges at Stage 3. Stage 3 individuals still have needs and interests, but they are able to look at them objectively and to see them in the context of shared understandings. Self esteem is based on an internal sense of being regarded by others. Stage 3 individuals are team players, able to subordinate self interests to societal ideals and expectations, and able to regulate current activities in the light of long range interests and concerns. A Stage 3 understanding is co-constructed: others' feelings become part of how Stage 3 individuals view themselves. While Stage 3 is more encompassing than a Stage 2 perspective, it also has limitations. Stage 3 individuals may expend considerable energy concerned about what others think about them and on avoiding hurting others' feelings, and they take personal responsibility for how others experience them. Others' feeling about them become part of how they experience themselves. Put another way, at Stage 3, we become our relationships; we experience a shared identity at Stage 3 rather than a personal identity. With regard to professional identity, it's as if Stage 3 individuals “are the profession”; they are fully bought in and take on all the expectations of the profession. The limitation, however, is that they are unable to reconcile competing expectations because they have not yet “integrated” the expectations of the profession into their own sense of self. Stage 4 At Stage 4, external expectations and identifications are restructured in terms of individually constructed expectations. At Stage 4 we can take a perspective on relationships and assess them in terms of self-authored principles and standards. The transition from Stage 3 to Stage 4 is the story of moving from “being relationships” to “having relationships.” Stage 4 is about psychological autonomy. Self-generated values and principles provide a perspective on one's relationships; the shift is from shared expectations to personal expectations. The Stage 4 person is free to let others be individuals—because this is the first time that self is defined independently from what others think. While individuals have values (content) at both Stage 3 and Stage 4, only Stage 4 people can justify their values in terms of what they believe rather than some external standard alone. From a professional perspective, Stage 4 individuals have internalized and personalized the values and expectations of the profession—they are able articulate the relationship among expectations, and they “own” them as their own. Violations of such expectations bring a sense of violations of one's internal standards, not simply the violation of what others expect. Three examples illustrate what developmental perspective—structure– sounds like at each of these three stages. These excerpts are drawn from research with West Point cadets and Army officers, which is summarized in more detail later in the paper. Stage 2 The following example comes from a 20-year-old sophomore, talking about his understanding of good leadership. During an interview, he had mentioned that he feels more motivated when he has a leader who “puts out a hundred and ten percent.” When asked to explain this comment, he makes the following statement: The leaders that I've had in the past, the ones that are really good, I perform well in there. If they are putting out a hundred and ten percent, and they are doing their best, you can visually see it; their uniform looks really cool. You know, if their shoes are really shined, you know, mine should get that good too. And if I see them putting a hundred and ten percent out for us, they're doing it for us—their own troops—and they really care about them, then I'm going to work that much harder for that person. A Stage 2 understanding is suggested in the social exchange nature of the relationship between the cadet and the leader—he puts out for me, so I'll put out for him. In this excerpt, we see the Stage 2 capacity to take two perspectives, one at a time: the cadet's and the leader's. As a follow-up, the interviewer seeks to clarify why it is important that leaders care. In response, the cadet explains: I guess for me it's because of the tangible rewards of what will happen if somebody does really care about you. Maybe, like for instance, if they are putting a hundred and ten percent out, then you're going to put a hundred and ten percent out there. And then you are all going to feel better about everything else. Here, the follow-on question clearly reveals the cadet's perspective that a motivated leader will yield “tangible rewards,” and thus satisfy the cadet's personal needs. And presumably he “feels better about everything else” because he, individually, is being more successful. Stage 3 By way of comparison, consider the following description of leadership found in the interview of a cadet scored at Stage 3. I think the best cadet is the one who really understands that his real mission in life—in the Army—is being there for his troops. I mean he's got to have a commitment to the Army's goals overall. HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT'S THE RIGHT THING? I guess its one of those gut feelings that you have. And I'm of the firm belief that if you don't want that, if you're here just for yourself, you know, get the heck out of here. And, you know, the Academy kind of makes you realize that taking care of your troops is the most important thing. SO YOU HAVE THAT RESPONSIBILITY. WHERE DOES THAT RESPONSIBILITY COME FROM? I think the responsibility as a leader to take care of your troops comes from the fact that you're the lieutenant. In addition to the fact that you're a human being. You know, as a human being you have a responsibility, I think, to take care of everybody else. In this excerpt, we see that the Academy's expectations of an Army officer and the position of a lieutenant have become internalized and help define this cadet's perspective on himself. We don't see this cadet construct his understanding of leadership around his individual needs, as we did in the previous example of a Stage 2 point of view. Quite the contrary, he demonstrates the ability to take a perspective on self interest (a stage 3 structure) when he criticizes those who are “here just for yourself” and suggests they “get the heck out.” Stage 4 The third example comes from an interview with an officer in his early 40s with about 20 years of commissioned service.4 The officer is talking about a leadership experience where he felt particularly successful. … I also feel to be successful you have to undergo hardships. You know, units and organizations, whether it's a staff organization—coming together not during good times, but overcoming bad times—inspections, field exercises, and stuff—that's where they come together. That's where you become successful. 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