Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions

by Donald A. Schön

Building on the concepts of professional competence that he introduced in his classic The Reflective Practitioner, Schon offers an approach for educating professional in all areas that will prepare them to handle the complex and unpredictable problems of actual practice with confidence, skill, and care.

Genres: Education, Design, Nonfiction, Academic, Research, Psychology, Management

380 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[Peter Norman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was pleasantly surprised by this book, which is saying something because I picked it up knowing I would probably agree with its Polanyi/Dewey-esque account of tacit knowledge and skill building. I wanted to read up on theories of how we become expert practitioners as preparation for presenting the "practical" elements of a course I'll be teaching on comparative law. What I didn't expect was the author's often evocative description of the teacher/student relationship, especially the descriptions of how this relationship could be derailed. It made me think about my relationship with my father (which admittedly says more about me than about the book). The book is not uniformly compelling and I found my eyes glazing over during certain sections, but on the whole I found it more than worthwhile and would recommend it to anyone working in a field that requires continual learning (including, but not limited to, law).

[Carlos Caceres · Rating 1 out of 5]

Under the pretenses of introducing artistry into professional education, Schön is at pains to prove that Intuition ('Tacit Knowledge') and Self-Reflection, are more important than progressive teaching methods and objective knowledge when it comes to professional education or practice. He claims that “Technical Rationality” constraints professional creativity by imposing unnecessary rules: to be truly creative, a professional must break free from the rules of his formal education.
Appealing as it sounds, the idea hardly passes any inspection at close range.
For example, Schön claims that expertise is a holistic (i.e., a non-domain-specific) skill that professionals need to develop through self-reflection prior to acquiring deep technical understanding: “the student must begin to design before she knows what she is doing.” This assertion ignores that learning to practice a profession is not the same as practicing the profession. (see, e.g. Kirschner et al. doi:10.1207/s15326985ep4102_1)
What Schön proposes is “learning by doing" how to perform, e.g., brain surgery in first year medicine, or how to design an aircraft before understanding the laws of fluid dynamics. Not surprisingly, the book does not have a single example illustrating how Reflective Creativity ‘breaks the rules.’
The reflective mechanism is self-contradictory, as even Schön acknowledges: “If we begin to reflect-in-action, we may trigger an infinite regress of reflection-on-action,” with a paralysing effect; “so understood, reflection-in-action is a contradiction in terms.”
Loops of this sort stem from the scheme’s Constructivist underpinnings: according to Schön, we all live “in worlds of our own making that we come to accept as reality.” Would you allow your doctor to inject your child with an antibiotic developed in his "own world," or rather go for one developed/tested through standard scientific methods?
The whole book fits closely into what Martin Kozloff calls “Constructivism in Education: Sophistry for a new age.”
Stay clear from it.

[Nixie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The questions of the book were more intriguing than the answers. Perhaps because of the heavy prose.
Reflection to the point of dissection. How do people learn to do complex things? How to teach someone to solve unframed problems with ethical implications? Can you do it at all? And how to do it at scale?

[Elly's Diary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although it took me a while to get into it...it really changed my perspective on human interactions... . I would definitely recommend it to anyone diving into the world of pedagogy.

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty redundant with his first book, but I appreciated the commentary on the student/coach relationship.

[Valeriana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seminal author that made me appreciate and miss apprenticeships! Lets bring them back. The author also does an amazing job describing 'knowing' by doing and reflection.

[Dr. Kat]

"engage in practice, then reflect upon it"

[Mills College Library]

378.013 S3711 1987

[Nick Brown]

"Donald Schön’s The Reflective Practitioner: How professionals think in action is the closest thing we have to a manual of meta-rationality."
https://meaningness.com/further-readi...

"note that I think Schön's /Educating the Reflective Practitioner/ is a better start than the earlier book. Recapitulates the most important of the earlier book's content."
comment by @malik, https://twitter.com/marick/status/103...

Book review by @drossbucket here:
https://drossbucket.wordpress.com/201...