Observe, experience and integrate: Enhancing professional development using international study tours

This chapter provides evidence of the positive benefits associated with adopting an international study tour as a unique and effective professional development tool. Specifically, we show how involvement in an international study tour has the potential to make a significant contribution to students' ability to lead, their understanding of how important it is to show initiative particularly in uncertain situations and to be an effective contributor to a team. We couch our conversation within Kolb's (1984) experiential learning frame and use Bloom's Taxonomy (Bloom et al., 1956) to illustrate how the study tour's learning objectives are assessed. Finally, we discuss our insights into the points of differentiation that we believe international study tours are uniquely designed to deliver.