The reflective practitioner pdf

Using the essential elements identified in this work as a guide, this textbook will assist readers in the development of the teaching philosophies, behaviors, and skills relevant to effective instruction in the unique middle school situation. This emphasis reflects the authors' basic philosophy that it is the teacher who ultimately determines the quality of schooling and that the learning environment should be student-centered while maintaining a strong academic foundation. Books Becoming A Reflective Practitioner.

Author : Kenneth S. Author : Sheri R. Author : Donald A. The limitations of the reflective practitioner Charlotte Meierdirk University of Portsmouth Charlotte. GET pdf. Educating the Reflective Practitioner. Becoming A Reflective Practitioner According to the educator Reflective practice is a state of mind, an ongoing attitude to life and work, the pearl grit in the oyster of practice and education; danger lies in it being a separate curriculum element with a set of exercises.

Schon alone, were The Reflective Practitioner, published in ,9 and Educating the Reflective Practitioner, published in Skip to content Home » Schon the reflective practitioner pdf.

Showing pages 1 to 3 of 9 pages. Becoming a Professional and Reflective Practitioner. He be- lieves that we can often recognize and correct the "bad fit" of a form to its context, but that we usually cannot describe the rules by which we find a fit bad or recognize the cor- rected form to be good. Thus for generations the Slova- kian peasants made beautiful shawls woven of yams which had been dipped in homemade dyes.

When aniline dyes were made available to them, "the glory of the shawls was spoil- ed. Over the generations Ruminating on Alexander's example, Geoffrey Vickers points out that it is not only artistic judgments which are based on a sense of form which cannot be fully articulated: artists, so far from being alone in this, exhibit most clearly an odd- ity which is present in all such judgments. We can recognize and describe deviations from a norm very much more clearly than we can describe the norm itself.

Psycholinguists have noted that we speak in conformity with rules of phonology and syntax which most of us cannot de- scribe. In some cases, we were once aware of the understandings which were subsequently internalized in our feeling for the stuff of action. In other cases, we may never have been aware of them. In both cases, however, we are usually unable to de- scribe the knowing which our action reveals.

It is in this sense that I speak of knowing-in-action, the char- acteristic mode of ordinary practical knowledge. If common sense recognizes knowing- in-action, it also recognizes that we sometimes think about what we are doing. Some of the most interesting examples of this process occur in the midst of a performance. Big-league baseball pitchers speak, for example, of the expe- rience of "finding the groove": Only a few pitchers can control the whole game with pure physical ability.

The rest have to learn to adjust once they're out there. If they can't, they're dead ducks. What is "learning to adjust once you're out there"? Presumably it involves noticing how you have been pitching to the batters and how well it has been working, and on the basis of these thoughts and observations, changing the way you have been doing it. When you get a "feel for the ball" that lets you "repeat the exact same thing you did before that proved successful," you are noticing, at the very least, that you have been doing something right, and your "feeling" allows you to do that something again.

When you "study those win- ning habits," you are thinking about the know-how that has enabled you to win. The pitchers seem to be talking about a kind of reftection on their patterns of action, on the situations in which they are performing, and on the know-how implicit in their performance. They are reftecting on action and, in some cases, reftecting in action.

When good jazz musicians improvise together, they also manifest a "feel for" their material and they make on-the-spot adjustments to the sounds they hear.

Listening to one another and to themselves, they feel where the music is going and ad- just their playing accordingly. They can do this, first of all, be- cause their collective effort at musical invention makes use of a schema-a metric, melodic, and harmonic schema familiar to all the participants-which gives a predictable order to the piece.

In addition, each of the musicians has at the ready a repertoire of musical figures which he can deliver at appropri- ate moments. Improvisation consists in varying, combining, and recombining a set of figures within the schema which bounds and gives coherence to the performance.

Of course, we need not suppose that they reflect-in- action in the medium of words. More likely, they reflect through a "feel for the music" which is not unlike the pitcher's "feel for the ball. When iptuitive, spontaneous performance yields noth- ing more than the results expected for it, then we tend not to think about it.

But when intuitive performance leads to sur- prises, pleasing and promising or unwanted, we may respond by reflecting-in-action.

Like the baseball pitcher, we may re- flect on our "winning habits"; or like the jazz musician, on our sense of the music we have been making; or like the designer, on the misfit we have unintentionally created. In such process- es, reRection tends to focus interactively on the outcomes of action, the action itself, and the intuitive knowing implicit in the action.

Let us consider an example which reveals these processes in some detail In an article entitled "If you want to get ahead, get a theo- ry," Inhelder and Karmiloff-Smith66 describe a rather unusual experiment concerning "children's processes of discovery in ac- tion. Some of the blocks were plain wooden blocks, but others were conspicuously or inconspicuously weighted at one end.

The authors attended to the spontaneous processes by which the children tried to learn about the properties of the blocks, balance them on the bar, and regulate their actions after success or failure. How did they respond to failure? Some children made what the au- thors called an "action-response. They showed considerable surprise at not being able to balance the blocks a second time "Heh, what's gone wrong with this one, it worked before" Action sequences then be- came reduced to: Place carefully at geometric center, correct very slightly around this center, abandon all attempts, declaring the ob- ject "impossible" to balance.

When the counterweighted blocks failed to balance at their geometric centers, these chil- dren began to de-center them. They did this first with conspic- uously counterweighted blocks. This second pattern of response to error, the authors call "theory-response. When they are first confronted with a num- ber of events which refute their geometric center theories-in- action, they stop and think.

Then, starting with the conspicu- ous-weight blocks, they begin to make corrections away from the geometric center. Finally, when they have really aban- doned their earlier theories-in-action, they weigh all the blocks in their hands so as to infer the probable point of balance.

As they shift their theories of balancing from geometric center to center of gravity, they also shift from a "success orientation" to a "theory orientation. It is interesting to note that as the authors observe and de- scribe this process, they are compelled to invent a language.

They describe theories-in-action which the children them- selves cannot describe. Indeed, although the younger child's action sequences bear elo- quent witness to a theory-in-action implicit in his behavior, this should not be taken as a capacity to conceptualize explicitly on what he is doing and why. A conversion of this kind seems to be inevitable in any at- tempt to talk about reflection-in-action. One must use words to describe a kind of knowing, and a change of knowing, which are probably not originally represented in words at all.

Thus, from their observations of the children's behavior, the authors make verbal descriptions of the children's intuitive understandings. These are the authors' theories about the children's knowing-in- action. Like all such theories, they are deliberate, idiosyncratic constructions, and they can be put to experimental test: just as the child was constructing a theory-in-action in his endeavor to balance the blocks, so we, too, were making on-the-spot hypoth- eses about the child's theories and providing opportunities for neg- ative and positive responses in order to verify our own theories!

The word "practice" is ambiguous. When we speak of a law- yer's practice, we mean the kinds of things he does, the kinds of clients he has, the range of cases he is called upon to handle. When we speak of someone practicing the piano, however, we mean the repetitive or experimental activity by which he tries to increase his proficiency on the instrument. In the first sense, "practice" refers to performance in a range of professional situ- ations.

In the second, it refers to preparation for performance. But professional practice also includes an element of repeti- tion. A professional practitioner is a specialist who encounters certain types of situations again and again. This is suggested by the way in which professionals use the word "case"--or project, account, commission, or deal, depending on the pro- fession.

All such terms denote the units which make up a prac- tice, and they denote types of family-resembling examples. Thus a physician may encounter many different "cases of mea- sles"; a lawyer, many different "cases of libel. He develops a reper- toire of expectations, images, and techniques.

He learns what to look for and how to respond to what he finds. As long as his practice is stable, in the sense that it brings him the same types of cases, he becomes less and less subject to surprise. His knowing-in-practice tends to become increasingly tacit, sponta- neous, and automatic, thereby conferring upon him and his clients the benefits of specialization. On the other hand, professional specialization can have neg- ative effects. In the individual, a high degree of specialization can lead to a parochial narrowness of vision.

Thus people sometimes yearn for the general practitioner of earlier days, who is thought to have concerned himself with the "whole patient," and they sometimes accuse contemporary specialists of treating particular illnesses in isolation from the rest of the patient's life experience. Further, as a practice becomes more repetitive and routine, and as knowing-in-practice becomes increasingly tacit and spontaneous, the practitioner may miss important op- portunities to think about what he is doing.

He may find that, like the younger children in the block-balancing experiment, he is drawn into patterns of error which he cannot correct. And if he learns, as often happens, to be selectively inattentive to phenomena that do not fit the categories of his knowing-in- action, then he may suffer from boredom or "burn-out" and affiict his clients with the consequences of his narrowness and rigidity. When this happens, the practitioner has "over- learned" what he knows.

A practitioner's reflection can serve as a corrective to over- learning. Through reflection, he can surface and criticize the tacit understandings that have grown up around the repetitive experiences of a specialized practice, and can make new sense of the situations of uncertainty or uniqueness which he may allow himself to experience.

Practitioners do reflect on their knowing-in-practice. Some- times, in the relative tranquility of a postmortem, they think back on a project they have undertaken, a situation they have lived through, and they explore the understandings they have brought to their handling of the case. They may do this in a mood of idle speculation, or in a deliberate effort to prepare themselves for future cases. A practitioner's reflection-in-action may not be very rapid. It is bounded by the "action-present," the zone of time in which action can still make a difference to the situation.

The action-present may stretch over minutes, hours, days, or even weeks or months, depending on the pace of activity and the situational boundaries that are characteristic of the practice.

Within the give-and-take of courtroom behavior, for example, a lawyer's reflection-in-action may take place in seconds; but when the context is that of an antitrust case that drags on over years, reflection-in-action may proceed in leisurely fashion over the course of several months.

An orchestra conductor may think of a single performance as a unit of practice, but in an- other sense a whole season is his unit. The pace and duration of episodes of reflection-in-action vary with the pace and dura- tion of the situations of practice.

When a practitioner reflects in and on his practice, the possi- ble objects of his reflection are as varied as the kinds of phe- nomena before him and the systems of knowing-in-practice which he brings to them.

He may reflect on the tacit norms and appreciations which underlie a judgment, or on the strate- gies and theories implicit in a pattern of behavior. He may re- flect on the feeling for a situation which has led him to adopt a particular course of action, on the way in which he has framed the problem he is trying to solve, or on the role he has con- structed for himself within a larger institutional context.

Reflection-in-action, in these several modes, is central to the art through which practitioners sometimes cope with the trou- blesome "divergent" situations of practice. Sometimes he arrives at a new theory of the phenome- non by articulating a feeling he has about it. When he finds himself stuck in a problematic situation which he cannot readily convert to a manageable problem, he may construct a new way of setting the problem-a new frame which, in what I shall call a "frame experiment," he tries to impose on the situation.

When he is confronted with demands that seem incompati- ble or inconsistent, he may respond by reflecting on the appre- ciations which he and others have brought to the situation. Conscious of a dilemma, he may attribute it to the way in which he has set his problem, or even to the way in which he has framed his role. He may then find a way of integrating, or choosing among, the values at stake in the situation.

The following are brief examples of the kinds of reflection- in-action which I shall illustrate and discuss at greater length later on. An investment banker, speaking of the process by which he makes his judgments of investment risk, observes that he really cannot describe everything that goes into his judgments.

The ordinary rules of thumb allow him to calculate "only 20 to 30 percent of the risk in investment. Still, if the management's explanation of the situation does not fit the numbers, or if there is something odd in the behavior of the people, that is a subject for worry which must be considered afresh in each new situation. He recalls a situation in which he spent a day with one of the largest banks in Latin America. Several new business proposals were made to him, and the bank's operating numbers seemed satisfactory.

When he thought about it, it seemed that he was responding to the fact that he had been treated with a degree of deference out of all propor- tion to his actual position in the international world of banking. What could have led these bankers to treat him so inappropri- ately? When he left the bank at the end of the day, he said to his colleague, "No new business with that outfit! Let the existing obligations come in, but nothing new!

An ophthalmologist says that a great many of his patients bring problems that are not in the book. In So or 85 percent of the cases, the patient's complaints and symptoms do not fall into familiar categories of diagnosis and treatment.

A good physician searches for new ways of making sense of such cases, and invents experiments by which to test his new hypotheses.

In a particularly important family of situations, the patient suf- fers simultaneously from two or more diseases. While each of these, individually, lends itself to familiar patterns of thought and action, their combination may constitute a unique case that resists ordinary approaches to treatment.

The ophthalmologist recalls one patient who had inflamma- tion of the eye uveitis combined with glaucoma. The treat- ment for glaucoma aggravated the inflammation, and the treat- ment for uveitis aggravated the glaucoma. When the patient came in, he was already under treatment at a level insufficient for cure but sufficient to irritate the complementary disease.

The ophthalmologist decided to remove all treatment and wait to see what would emerge. The result was that the pa- tient's uveitis, a parasitic infection, remained in much reduced form. On the other hand, the glaucoma disappeared altogeth- er, thus proving to have been an artifact of the treatment.

Working with very small quantities of drugs, he aimed not at total cure but at a reduction of symptoms which would allow the patient to go back to work. Seven lives depended on his ocular cells! The prognosis was not good, for uveitis moves in cycles and leaves scars behind which impede vision.

But for the time being, the patient was able to work. In his mid-thirties, sometime between the composition of his early work The Cossacks and his later War and Peace, Lev Nikolayevitch Tolstoy became interested in education. He started a school for peasant children on his estate at Yasnaya Polanya, he visited Europe to learn the latest educatic:mal meth- ods, and he published an educational journal, also called Yas- naya Polanya.

Before he was done his new novel eventually replaced his interest in education , he had built some seventy schools, had created an informal teacher-training program, and had written an exemplary piece of educational evaluation.

For the most part, the methods of the European schools filled him with disgust, yet he was entranced by Rousseau's writings on education. His own school anticipated John Dewey's later approach to learning by doing, and bore the stamp of his conviction that good teaching required "not a method but an art. That which forms an insuperable difficulty to one does not in the least keep back another, and vice versa. The best teacher will be he who has at his tongue's end the expla- nation of what it is that is bothering the pupil.

These explanations give the teacher the knowledge of the greatest possible number of methods, the ability of inventing new methods and, above all, not a blind adherence to one method but the conviction that all methods are one-sided, and that the best method would be the one which would answer best to all the possible difficulties incurred by a pupil, that is, not a method but an art and talent.

Every teacher must. He must do a piece of experimental research, then and there, in the classroom. And because the child's difficulties may be unique, the teacher cannot assume that his repertoire of explanations will suffice, even though they are "at the tongue's end. In this Teacher Project,77 the researchers have encouraged a small group of teachers to explore their own intuitive thinking about apparently simple tasks in such do- mains as mathematics, physics, music, and the perceived be- havior of the moon.

They have allowed themselves to become confused about subjects they are supposed to "know"; and as they have tried to work their way out of their confusions, they have also begun to think differently about learning and teaching.

Early in the project, a critical event occured. The teachers were asked to observe and react to a videotape of two boys en- gaged in playing a simple game. The boys sat at a table, sepa- rated from one another by an opaque screen. In front of one boy, blocks of various colors, shapes, and sizes were arranged in a pattern.

In front of the other, similar blocks were lying on the table in no particular order. The first boy was to tell the second one how to reproduce the pattern.

After the first few instructions, however, it became clear that the second boy had gone astray. In fact, the two boys had lost touch with one another, though neither of them knew it. In their initial reactions to the videotape, the teachers spoke of a "communications problem.

That small mistake had set off a chain of false moves. The second boy had put a green thing, a triangle, where the first boy's pattern had an orange square, and from then on all the instructions became problematic. Under the circumstances, the second boy seemed to have dis- played considerable ingenuity in his attempts to reconcile the instructions with the pattern before him.

At this point, the teachers reversed their picture of the situa- tion. They could see why the second boy behaved as he did. Later on in the project, as the teachers increasingly chal- lenged themselves to discover the meanings of a child's puz- zling behavior, they often spoke of "giving him reason.

The banker has a feeling that some- thing is wrong, though he cannot at first say what it is. The physician sees an odd combination of diseases never before de- scribed in a medical text. Tolstoy thinks of each of his pupils as an individual with ways of learning and impedections pecu- liar to himself.

The teachers are astonished by the sense behind a student's mistake. In each instance, the practitioner allows himself to experience surprise, puzzlement, or confusion in a situation which he finds uncertain or unique.

He reftects on the phenomena before him, and on the prior understandings which have been implicit in his behavior.

He carries out an experiment which serves to generate both a new understanding of the phenomena and a change in the situation. When someone reftects-in-action, he becomes a researcher in the practice context.

He is not dependent on the categories of established theory and technique, but constructs a new the- ory of the unique case. His inquiry is not limited to a delibera- tion about means which depends on a prior agreement about ends. He does not keep means and ends separate, but defines them interactively as he frames a problematic situation. He does not separate thinking from doing, ratiocinating his way to a decision which he must later convert to action. Because his experimenting is a kind of action, implementation is built into his inquiry.

Although reflection-in-action is an extraordinary process, it is not a rare event. Indeed, for some reflective practitioners it is the core of practice. Nevertheless, because professionalism is still mainly identified with technical expertise, reflection-in- action is not generally accepted--even by those who do it-as a legitimate form of professional knowing. They have become too skillful at techniques of selec- tive inattention, junk categories, and situational control, tech- niques which they use to preserve the constancy of their knowl- edge-in-practice.

For them, uncertainty is a threat; its admission is a sign of weakness. Others, more inclined toward and adept at reflection-in-action, nevertheless feel profoundly uneasy because they cannot say what they know how to do, cannot justify its quality or rigor. For these reasons, the study of reflection-in-action is criti- cally important. The dilemma of rigor or relevance may be dis- solved if we can develop an epistemology of practice which places technical problem solving within a broader context of reflective inquiry, shows how reflection-in-action may be rigor- ous in its own right, and links the art of practice in uncertainty and uniqueness to the scientist's art of research.

We may thereby increase the legitimacy of reflection-in-action and en- courage its broader, deeper, and more rigorous use.