‘Reflection in action’ and ‘reflection on action’
May 2007
Introduction
Teachers have welcomed our earlier Research of the Month (RoM) summaries that explored and illustrated the current practical relevance of ideas put forward by renowned thinkers, such as Vygotsky and Bruner. In this month’s RoM we look at key elements of the work of two more thinkers – John Dewey (1859-1952) and Donald Schön (1930-1997) both of whom explored the idea of ‘reflective practice’.
To read a one page summary of this RoM, go to the overview.
As professor of philosophy at Columbia University in the United States, Dewey wrote on a wide range of topics in the fields of philosophy, society and education. One of his best-known works is Experience and Education (1938), which provides a clear analysis of ‘traditional’ and ‘progressive’ education in the US. Dewey characterised the first as a passive approach to education in which teachers simply present pupils with information and the second as a reaction to the first.
Dewey’s thinking stimulated ‘enquiry learning’ – an approach based on devising good questions and strategies in order to tackle problems. This learner-centred process shares common features with the constructivist learning approaches of Vygotsky that were later developed by Bruner. Crucially, teaching leads development by providing challenges that link what the child knows and can do already to new understandings. Enquiry learning is closely associated with current approaches, spearheaded by QCA, to a learner-centred rather than a content-driven curriculum: the 21st century Curriculum.
Reflection, as a creative process that organises our thinking, was a core feature of Dewey’s approach – an idea he developed in How We Think (1910). For Dewey reflection was more than just running through what was done. It involves the learner in drawing pointers for future action from past experience and requires a healthy scepticism and an open mind.
Donald Schön studied Dewey’s theory of enquiry for his doctorate and developed his own ideas of reflective practice whilst a professor of urban studies and education at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His book The Reflective Practitioner (1983) focused on how practitioners build and modify their repertoire of professional skills. In it, Schön explored how all professionals, including teachers, reflect on their practice whilst engaged in action in order to creatively adapt their practice to new situations
In this RoM, we highlight features of Dewey’s work that embody helpful ideas about teaching and learning such as providing a stimulating environment and helping pupils create their own approaches to finding what they need to tackle problems. We also draw from Dewey and especially from Schön key messages about teachers’ learning through critical reflection on what they do in their everyday practice. We have used a number of teacher case studies to illustrate the applicability of Dewey and Schön’s ideas in today’s schools. They show, for example, practitioners’ use of enquiry and reflection for teaching and learning, including approaches to data collection, and for their own professional development. We believe that the exploration of reflection and learning from experience presented in the RoM resonate with the professional learning approaches that is popular with teachers and school leaders, and is currently being embedded in the GTC Teacher Learning Academy.
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