‘Reflection in action’ and ‘reflection on action’

Why is the issue important?

Encouraging learners to be creative and actively involved in their learning is at the heart of the ideas of John Dewey and Donald Schön, which are explored in this month’s RoM.

This approach to education provides pupils with challenges that link what they know and can already do to new understandings. It motivates learners and also enhances their learning.

The RoM also explores reflection and learning from experience; in particular the concepts of ‘reflection in action’ and ‘reflection on action’. We believe this resonates with an approach to professional learning that is popular with teachers and school leaders, and is currently being embedded in the GTC Teacher Learning Academy. 

Adopting a more learner-centred approach involves more than a straightforward change to practice. It also demands changes in understanding, values and attitudes as well as behaviour for both pupils and teachers. The models of Schön and Dewey help to provide a framework for this.

What were the key messages?

The core features of Dewey’s approach to learning from experience – what he termed ’experiential learning’ – are that:

• experience connects learning and challenges learners through continuity and interaction
• teachers need to ensure that knowledge is experienced by pupils instead of just ‘acquired’
• reflection helps learners to make sense of experience and identify routes for future action – experience without reflection does not produce real learning.

Schön was concerned with how practitioners use reflection whilst engaged in practice and afterwards in order to modify and extend their repertoire. Key messages from his work include:

• the idea of reflection-in-action during which practitioners reflect on their practice while actively engaged in it and modify what they are doing to meet the immediate needs of the situation, and
• practitioners’ analysis of their practice after the event, through reflection-on-action, in order to identify what did, and did not work well, explore where they could have done things differently and use their experiences for future planning.

Both Dewey and Schön believed that practitioners engaged in their own development needed to:

• see themselves as learners
• engage in an exploration process that requires them to raise questions, propose explanations, and use observations
• reflect on their learning with their peers
• analyse their practice to help future planning.

What are the implications?

The material explored in this RoM showed the importance of:

• teachers collecting data about their own practice and their pupils’ learning in relation to, and problems that concern them, reflecting on how they deal with them and using their analysis for future planning
• starting from what children know already and providing them with guidance that enables them to construct questions aimed at exploring new learning situations
• providing opportunities for pupils to work together in groups to hypothesise before trying to solve problems
• encouraging pupils to collect data of their own to enable them to reflect on what they have done and use it to set new learning aims, perhaps through the use of learning logs.

What do the case studies illustrate?

The case studies show:

• how a teacher helped a group of pupils construct stimulating questions in a geography activity
• how a network of schools used an enquiry approach to raise attainment
• some methods pupils and teachers used to collect data, a key first step before reflection, and
• how two teachers used peer mentoring as a powerful vehicle for reflection-in-action.

Read the RoM