Trainer: Donald Alan Schön (September 19, 1930 – September 13, 1997) was a philosopher and professor in urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who developed the concept of reflective practice and contributed to the theory of organizational learning.
He said: “Old questions are not answered -they only go out of fashion.”
The Run
In 1980, Lawrence Stenhouse gave a plenary talk with the title: “Artistry and Teaching: the teacher is the focus of research and development” at the Summer Institute on Teacher Education, University of Vancouver. In this talk he declared teaching an art pointing out that: “Teaching is the art which expresses in a form accessible to learners an understanding of the nature of that which is to be learned”.
Inspiring talk as it was several theorists got into the task to investigate the artistic origins of teaching but also the other points Stenhouse made namely that teachers are autonomous in professional judgement or that good learning is about making, not mere doing.
Schön, as a philosopher, thought a lot about Stenhouse’s talk. He published, in 1983, three years after Stenhouse’s talk, a seminal book titled: “The Reflective Practitioner: how professionals think in action”. Schön’s ideas are very influential. We can find them in most of the current but also older theories of mind, learning and teaching. Notions such as knowing-in-action, reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action have become part and parcel of many different tools and practices of many different fields, from psychotherapy to medicine, even astrophysics.
Knowing-in-action refers to how much we know and have experienced as teachers/professionals. This is knowledge that cannot be seen or touched, it is tacit, implicit, it is not tangible, but it gives us the confidence to know what we know and what we do. It is knowledge we gain while teaching, using our mental capacities to interpret the world around us. As Schön puts it, it is the “thinking on your feet”. We use this knowledge to get into the classroom and “perform” our art.
Reflection-in-action refers to the decisions we make while teaching, while performing. It is our ability to self-observe ourselves while teaching and control our actions according to the contextual cues. This kind of reflection offers us the opportunity to unfold our artistry and frame and reframe problems. Schön again: “It is our capacity to see-as and do-as that allows us to have a feel for problems that do not fit existing rules”
Finally, reflection-on-action is an after-lesson process that re-frames the problems and generates solutions and new actions. In that sense, it may sound a lot like meta-cognition but the central difference here is that reflection-on-action is a problem-solving process or if you like a critical thinking process that leads to betterment, it is what Stenhouse points out by saying that: “only the teacher himself can change the teacher himself”.
The following graph can help you visualise these processes:
Post-Run Recovery Routine
Schön’s concepts are very useful for us as teachers. Firstly, they help us realise the nature of our profession and how knowledge is accommodated and deployed; this kind of knowledge is called “teacher cognition” and we will run this another time. Secondly, it helps us define and determine the source of our actions and act; this makes us better teachers with better inside and outside control. Finally, it teaches us the virtue of self-reflection, it gives us the reason to look back and evaluate ourselves focusing on more effective and better techniques to perform our art.
