Reflective Practice

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What is Reflective Practice?

Reflective Practice is the habit of examining your own action while you can still change it, and again after the action, so a surprise can alter the next move.

Active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends, constitutes reflective thought.

John Dewey wrote that in How We Think (1910), in the chapter “What Is Thought?” It names reflective thought, which is a precursor, and Reflective Practice is narrower. It starts when a skilled move meets a surprise, and a later action can still change. That skilled move is called knowing-in-action: action you can already perform before you can fully state the rule. The 1983 book’s back cover says Schön holds that the best professionals know more than they can put into words. Reflective Practice begins when that usual move fails, and the situation will not take it. Reflection-in-action happens during the work, while a change can still matter. Reflection-on-action happens afterward, when you can see what you did and choose a different next move. An Iriss teaching page describes the first as reshaping the work while it unfolds, often after a surprise. It describes the second as asking what happened, and whether another action was open. The everyday picture is soup still on the burner. You taste it, the salt is wrong, and you can still change this pot. A note after dinner cannot fix this pot, but it can change the next one. Metacognition watches how you think, often while you learn, while Reflective Practice watches your own move in a messy situation. Ladder of Inference climbs from selected data to a belief, and this page does not retell that climb. Pre-mortem Thinking imagines that a plan has already failed. This habit starts from a surprise that has actually arrived.

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Reflective Practice in 3 Depths

• Beginner: The cue is a surprise. The move that usually works has just failed. Name what you expected, and what the situation did instead, before you repeat the move.
• Practitioner: While the work is still open, try one small change and watch what comes back. Afterward, write the move, the surprise, and the one change you will test next time.
• Advanced: The risk is that the first frame stays in charge. The 1983 book moves from technical rationality, practice as the application of ready knowledge, toward reflection-in-action. If the surprise says the frame is wrong, changing the frame is the work. Double-loop learning, a neighboring idea from Chris Argyris, asks whether the goal itself should change. That loop is not this habit.

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Origin

Reflective Practice enters the public record as Donald Schön’s account of how professionals think when a ready rule does not fit the case. Schön died on 13 September 1997, at age 66, after an illness, according to the MIT obituary. He studied philosophy at Yale, graduated in 1951, and earned master’s and doctoral degrees in philosophy at Harvard in 1955. He began at MIT as a visiting professor in 1968, and in 1972 he was appointed Ford Professor of Urban Studies and Education. From 1990 to 1992 he chaired the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. MIT’s notice names The Reflective Practitioner and Educating the Reflective Practitioner among his most important books. In 1983, Basic Books in New York published The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. The catalog record describes a book of x, 374 pages. The back-cover note says he looks at five professions: engineering, architecture, management, psychotherapy, and town planning. It says the best professionals know more than they can put into words. They rely less on formulas learned in graduate school than on improvisation learned in practice. The contents move from a crisis of confidence in professional knowledge to the shift from technical rationality toward reflection-in-action. A later chapter treats design as a reflective conversation with the situation, and another treats town planning as a place where reflection-in-action meets limits. Those chapters are his analysis, not a score from a trial. Dewey’s How We Think (1910) is an earlier precursor. It defines reflective thought as a careful look at the grounds of a belief, and at where that belief leads. A revised edition appeared in 1933, and Karen Mann, Jill Gordon, and Anna MacLeod cite that edition, from D. C. Heath in Boston, in the reference list of their review. The sentence quoted above is the 1910 wording. In 1987, Jossey-Bass in San Francisco published Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions. An ERIC record for that book says professional education should center on reflection-in-action, described there as learning by doing. The abstract says the examples come from an architectural design studio and the arts. Coaching, on that account, includes practice on real problems, testing solutions, making mistakes, seeking help, and refining the approach. Those studio scenes are teaching material in the book, not a measured outcome. A Japanese library record for the later translation names the 1987 original as a John Wiley & Sons book, while Jossey-Bass is the publisher named on the ERIC record. The Japanese full translation of the 1983 book was published by 鳳書房 in November 2007. The CiNii record titles it 『省察的実践とは何か』 and gives the English title as The reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. The 1987 book appeared in Japanese from the same publisher in February 2017, as 『省察的実践者の教育』. An Iriss teaching page, drawing on Schön’s 1983 book, separates the two times. Reflection-in-action reshapes the activity while it is still unfolding, and it is tied to surprise. The practitioner reflects on the unexpected event and tries a move that can change both the understanding and the situation. Reflection-on-action looks back after the event and asks what happened, why one acted that way, and whether another action was open.

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Key Points

Reflective Practice pays when a usual move has just failed and a later move can still change. It stalls when the review has no next action, or when every smooth task is treated as a puzzle.

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Applications

Use Reflective Practice when a usual move has failed and you can still act, or when a finished episode will recur. Write the surprise, one change, and the time when you will test it.

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Case Study

A documented test of a reflective instruction is the 2008 experiment by Sílvia Mamede, Henk Schmidt, and J. C. Penaforte, published in Medical Education (volume 42, issue 5, pages 468–475). The participants were 42 internal medicine residents in hospitals in two states in the northeast of Brazil, and each resident diagnosed 16 written clinical cases. The design was repeated measures, so every resident worked at both levels of both factors. One factor was case complexity, simple or complex. The other was the reasoning they were told to use, pattern recognition or reflective reasoning. The score was the accuracy of the diagnosis on each case. The abstract reports a main effect of case complexity. It reports no statistically significant main effect of reflective practice. It does report an interaction between complexity and mode of processing, F[1,41] = 4.48, P < 0.05. On the authors’ reading, the reflective instruction did not change accuracy on simple cases. It had a positive effect when the cases were complex. The abstract does not give the mean scores, so this page does not state a size for that gain. Non-analytical reasoning was as effective as the reflective instruction for routine cases. The authors say the findings support a narrower idea. Reflective practice may particularly help diagnosis in situations of uncertainty and uniqueness. That reading has a hard edge, because the cases were written and the mode was assigned. The study does not show what a doctor does on a ward when a surprise arrives in the middle of a visit, and it does not measure whether a patient fared better. It is not a test of the studio coaching in Schön’s 1987 book. The interaction is a result inside this task, not a general proof that reflection beats a first impression.

The evidence to support and inform these curricular interventions and innovations remains largely theoretical.

Karen Mann, Jill Gordon, and Anna MacLeod wrote that in the abstract of their review in Advances in Health Sciences Education (volume 14, pages 595–621, 2009; published online 23 November 2007). The same abstract says it is unclear which approaches may have efficacy or impact. A CPREE page by Brook Sattler and Lauren Thomas, dated 21 September 2015, says the review’s search found more than 600 papers that used the word reflection or a related term. It says the authors then kept 29 papers that explicitly addressed reflective practice in health professional education and practice. Those figures are a literature count in that summary. They are not an effect size for this habit.

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Boundaries and Failure Modes

Reflective Practice fails when the situation can no longer answer, when the task is routine and already working, and when the name is pasted onto a different exercise. The first boundary is time. Reflection-in-action needs a stretch in which action can still make a difference, and the Iriss account places that work while the activity is unfolding. If the pot is empty, tasting it will not change dinner. Reflection-on-action can still teach, but only if a later move exists. A note about a closed case, with no similar case coming, describes the past and does not repair it. The town-planning chapter in the 1983 book is there to mark limits. This page does not invent what those limits were. It only keeps the warning that the habit is not available in every setting. The second boundary is the routine case. In the 2008 experiment, the reflective instruction did not change diagnostic accuracy on simple cases. Non-analytical reasoning was as effective for routine cases. A forced pause on every smooth task is not what that result supports. The abstract’s positive effect sits on the complex, unusual cases, and it comes without a published mean in the abstract. Mann, Gordon, and MacLeod say the wider curricular evidence was still largely theoretical. A workshop, a journal, or a slogan does not inherit the interaction from the written cases. The common misuse is to treat a mood, a therapy hour, or a performance score as Reflective Practice. Those can be useful, and they are not this habit. A review asks how you ranked, therapy has its own aim, and a diary can store the note while still changing nothing. Pre-mortem Thinking imagines that a plan has already failed, before the event. Reflective Practice starts from a surprise that is already in the work, and it asks what the next move should be.

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Common Misconceptions

Three confusions travel with the name. The habit gets mistaken for thinking about thinking, for any written review, and for a proof that reflection always raises accuracy.

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Related Concepts

These neighboring pages cover thinking about thinking, the climb from data to belief, the testing of claims, an imagined failure, and a place to write.

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One-Line Takeaway