The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action Donald Schön 384 pages, Basic Books, 1983, reprinted 1995 ISBN 1857423194 £15-99 (paper)
Pp49-69: Reflection Reflection in Action We go about our daily lives demonstrating what we know through spontaneous and largely unthinking actions or, as Schön puts it, “our knowing is in our action”. This way of working is used in a professional context too – making decisions about what actions to take based on the ‘soup of knowledge’ in our heads. Schön calls this knowing-in-action, and it sometimes goes hand in had with a more conscious approach to what we do, which Schön calls reflection-in-act ion. Reflection-in-action come into play when we are dealing with “situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness and value conflict”. (p50) i
Schön asks us to put aside Technical Rationality, in order to suggest that knowing is inherent in intelligent action. He cites examples of knowing-in-action being employed by a tightrope walker and a sportsman applying their knowledge knowledge in order to execute what they do. The idea of ‘knowing more than we can say’ is explored. We may not be able to articulate why we do or think something, we just know. Schön gives examples by Chester Barnard who, when writing about the functions of the executive in 1938, differentiated between thinking processes and non-logical processes (so all thinking is logical?) and cites several examples of what we might call intuitive behaviour. “Barnard believes that our bias towards thinking blinds us to the non-logical processes ii which are omnipresent in effective practice”. (p52). Schön goes on to refer to the work of Michael Polanyi, a man whose career went from pure science as a chemist to a social science professorship. Polanyi believed that we can make informed guesses and act on hunches in an informal and unquantifiable way which he refers to as ‘tacit knowledge’, that is to say, we “know more than we can say”. iii Schön goes on to mention several more studies into examples of knowing-in-action before moving on to concentrate on reflection-in-action. He mentions such phrases as ‘thinking on your feet’ which suggest that we can think about what we are doing as we do it – on the hoof, so to speak – and cites as an example the way jazz musicians can improvise successfully. (Not a surprising example, as he was an accomplished jazz pianist and clarinettist.) He suggests that the musicians are engaging in reflection-in-action not so much in words as through a ‘feel for the music’ – an intangible act of simpatico which is the essence of jazz musicianship. When something happens as expected, the author suggests, we do not tend to dwell on it too much; it is only when something happens which surprises us, or does not happen in the anticipated way, that we will reflect on the occurrence. We are given the example of children being given a balancing task, success at which seems to be
largely maturational: that is to say the older children developed successful strategies more readily than the younger ones. The researchers involved in this experiment iv suggest that the knowing-in-action employed by the children – having a ‘feel’ for the objects they are required to balance and the task before them – results in a set of theories (theory-in-action) which Schön prefers to call knowledge-in –action rather than knowing-in-action. He says that the balancing task is ‘a beautiful example of reflection-in-action, but it is very far removed from our usual images of professional practice’ which is the main focus of the author’s intent. There follows some semantic discussion on the nature of the word ‘practice’ in attempt to differentiate between a professional Practice (such as a lawyer) and someone who is practicing (sic) the piano. There is a suggestion that a professional might become so familiar with a given field of expertise that s/he ceases to be surprised and hence “his knowing-in-practice tends to become increasingly tacit, spontaneous and automatic”. A negative effect of this is that the person’s practice, rather than becoming specialised, can become parochial and narrow of vision. The consequence of this, having ‘over-learned’ what s/he knows, is that the practitioner becomes ‘selectively inattentive to phenomena that do not fit the categories of his knowing-in-action, then he may suffer from burn-out and afflict his clients with the consequences of his narrowness and rigidity’. (p61) Reflection-in-action can happen very quickly or over an extended period of time. It might also be on various aspects of practice, but the author suggests that it “is central to the art through which practitioners sometimes cope with the troublesome divergent situations of practice”. Such reflection might indicate that there is a problem with the practice, or that something needs tackling differently. In these instances, the practitioner will act experimentally (we are given several examples of this) in order to solve the problem. “He reflects on the phenomena before him, and on the prior understandings which have been implicit in his behaviour. He carries out an experiment which serves to generate both a new understanding of the phenomena and a change in the situation.” (p68) Schön concludes this chapter buy suggesting that “when someone reflects-in-action, he becomes a researcher in the practice context”, not relying on proven methods and received wisdom but developing strategies and theories as s/he goes along. “Thus reflection-in-action can proceed … because it is not bound by the dichotomies of Technical Rationality.” (p69) Crucially, Schön points out that reflective practice, whilst widespread, suffers from a lack of acceptance in many professional circles due to the perception that professionalism is identified with technical expertise in whichever guise, and that reflection-in-action is not a form of “professional knowing.”
Notes and References i
a model which de-emphasises practical world experience and relies on quantifiable evidence, but his use of the term has been questioned by Shargel: Schön coined the term [Technical Rationality] as a shorthand expression in contrast to his central idea of reflective practice -- that is, the concept is developed and spelled out at a time when it is already under serious attack by a theoretician developing an epistemology of practice. Behind Schon's concept of technical rationality lies a historical debate starting with Plato's separation of episteme and techne, describing a hierarchy, or at least a dichotomy, with knowledge of pure theory, or the immutable, placed above building or making, that is, dealing with changeable stuff. So the elevation of theory certainly precedes the modern, however we define it, and may indicate that our philosophical quarrel over the nature of science predates modern epistemology. Emanuel I. Shargel Florida State University http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/EPS/PES-Yearbook/95_docs/shargel.html
Shargel , EI. Toulmin, Dewey and the Modern (accessed 20/11/05) ii
A discussion of Barnard’s lecture ‘Mind in Everyday Affairs’ can be found here: http://www.the-intuitiveself.org/scripts/frameit/author.cgi?/website/author/memoir/supplements/mind_everyday_affairs.html Taggart, B. Mind in Everyday Affairs (accessed 20/11/05) iii
Smith, M. K. (2003) 'Michael Polanyi and tacit k nowledge', the encyclopaedia of informal education, Updated June 2005. www.infed.org/thinkers/polanyi.htm. (accessed 20/11/05 . ) Polanyi M: Tacit Knowing: Its Bearing on Some Problems of Philosophy http://www.culturaleconomics.atfreeweb.com/Anno/Polanyi%20Tacit%20Knowlng%20RMP%201962 .htm (accessed 20/11/05) iv
Inhelder and Karmiloff-Smith 1975 Unable to trace source from photocopied handout.
