PROFESSIONAL KNOWLEDGE AND REFLECTION-IN-ACTION
scientific basis of professional knowledge and the demands of
real-world practice in such a way as to preserve the model of
Technical Rationality. Schein does it by segregating convergent
science from divergent practice, relegating divergence to
a residual category called "divergent skill." Glazer does it by
attributing convergence to the major professions, which he applauds,
and divergence to the minor professions, which he dismisses.
Simon does it by proposing a science of design which
depends on having well-formed instrumental problems to
begin with.
Yet the Positivist epistemology of practice, the model of professional
knowledge to which these writers cling, has fallen into
disrepute in its original home, the philosophy of science. As
Richard Bernstein has written,
There is not a single major thesis advanced by either nineteenthcentury
Positivists or the Vienna Circle that has not been devastatingly
criticized when measured by the Positivists' own standards
for philosophical argument. The original formulations of the analytic-synthetic
dichotomy and the verifiability criterion of meaning
have been abandoned. It has been effectively shown that the Positivists'
understanding of the natural sciences and the formal disciplines
is grossly oversimplified. Whatever one's final judgment
about the current disputes in the post-empiricist philosophy and
history of science ... there is rational agreement about the inadequacy
of the original Positivist understanding of science, knowledge
and meaning.ř?
Among philosophers of science no one wants any longer to be
called a Positivist, and there is a rebirth of interest in the ancient
topics of craft, artistry, and myth=-topics whose fate Positivism
once daimed to have sealed. It seems clear, however,
that the dilemma which affiicts the professions hinges not on
science per se but on the Positivist view of science. From this
perspective, we tend to see science, after the fact, as a body
48
From Technical Rationality to Reflection-in-Action
of established propositions derived from research. When we
recognize their limited utility in practice, we experience the
dilem ma of rigor or relevance. But we may also consider science
before the fact as a process in which scientists grapple
with uncertainties and display arts of inquiry akin to the uncertainties
and arts of practice.
Let us then reconsider the question of professional knowledge,
let us stand the question on its head. If the model of
Technical Rationality is incomplete, in that it fails to account
for practical competence in "divergent" situations, so much
the worse for the model. Let us search, instead, for an epistemology
of practice implicit in the artistic, intuitive processes
which some practitioners do bring to situations of uncertainty,
instability, uniqueness, and value conflict.
Reflection-in-Action
When we go about the spontaneous, intuitive performance of
the actions of everyday life, we show ourselves to be knowledgeable
in a special way. Often we cannot say what it is that we
know. When we try to describe it we find ourselves at a loss,
or we produce descriptions that are obviously inappropriate.
Our knowing is ordinarily tacit, implicit in our patterns of action
and in our feel for the stuff with which we are dealing.
It seems right to say that our knowing is in our action.
Similarly, the workaday life of the professional depends on
tacit knowing-in-action. Every competent practitioner can recognize
phenomena-families of symptoms associated with a
particular disease, peculiarities of a certain kind of building
site, irregularities of materials or structures-for which he cannot
give a reasonably accurate or complete description. In his
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PROFESSIONAL KNOWLEDGE AND REFLECTION-IN-ACTION
day-to-day practice he makes innumerable judgments of quality
for which he cannot state adequate criteria, and he displays
skills for which he cannot state the rules and procedures. Even
when he makes conscious use of research-based theories and
techniques, he is dependent on tacit recognitions, judgments,
and skillful performances.
On the other hand, both ordinary people and professional
practitioners often think about what they are doing, sometimes
even while doing it. Stimulated by surprise, they turn thought
back on action and on the knowing which is implicit in action.
They may ask themselves, for example, "What features do I
notice when I recognize this thing? What are the criteria by
which I make this judgment? What procedures am I enacting
when I perform this skill? How am I framing the problem that
I am trying to solve?" Usually reflection on knowing-in-action
goes together with reflection on the stuff at hand. There is
some puzzling, or troubling, or interesting phenomenon with
which the individual is trying to deal. As he tries to make sense
of it, he also reflects on the understandings which have been
implicit in his action, understandings which he surfaces, criticizes,
restructures, and embodies in further action.
It is this entire process of reflection-in-action which is central
to the "art" by which practitioners sometimes deal well
with situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and
value conflict.
Knowing-in-action. Once we put aside the model of Technical
Rationality, which leads us to think of intelligent practice
as an apolication of knowledge to instrumental decisions, there
is nothing strange about the idea that a kind of knowing is inherent
in intelligent action. Cornmon sense admits the category
of know-how, and it does not stretch common sense very
much to say that the know-how is in the action-that a tightrope
walker's know-how, for example, lies in, and is revealed
5°
Frorn Technical Rationality to Heflection-in-Action
by, the way he takes his trip across the wire, or that a big-league
pitcher's know-how is in his way of pitching to a batter's weakness,
changing his pace, or distributing his energies over the
course of a game. There is nothing in common sense to make
us say that know-how consists in rules or planswhich we entertain
in the mind prior to action. Although we sometimes think
before acting, it is also true that in much of the spontaneous
behavior of skillful practice we reveal a kind of knowing which
does not stem from a prior intellectual operation.
As Gilbert Ryle has put it,
What distinguishes sensible from silly operations is not their parentage
but their procedure, and this holds no less for intellectual
than for practical performances. "Intelligent" cannot be defined
in terms of "intellectual" ar "knowing how" in terms of "knowing
that"; "thinking what I am doing" does not connote "both thínking
what to do and doing it." When I do something intelligently
... I am doing one thing and not two. My performance has a
special procedure ar manner, not special antecedents.t?
And Andrew Harrison has recently put the same thought in
this pithy phrase: when someone acts intelligently, he "acts his
mind."51
Over the years, several writers on the epistemology of practice
have been struck by the fact that skillful action often reveals
a "knowing more than we can say." They have invented
various names for this sort of knowing, and have drawn their
examples from different domains of practice.
As early as 1938, in an essay called "Mind in Everyday Affairs,"
Chester Barnard distinguished "thinking processes"
from "non-logical processes" which are not capable of being
expressed in words or as reasoning, and which are only made
known by a judgment, decision, or action.V Barnarďs exarnples
include judgments of distance in golf or ball-throwing, a
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PROFESSIONAL KNOWLEDGE AND REFLECTION-IN-ACTION
hígh-school boy solving quadratic equations, and a practiced
accountant who can take "a balance sheet of considerable
complexity and within minutes or even seconds get a signíficant
set of facts from it."53 Such processes may be unconscious
or they may occur so rapidly that "they could not be
analyzed by the persons in whose brain they take place." 54
Of the high-school mathematician, Barnard says, memorably,
"He could not write the text books which are registered in
his mind."55 Barnard believes that our bias toward thinking
blínds us to the non-logical processes which are omnipresent
in effective practice.
Michael Polanyi, who invented the ph rase "tacit knowing,"
draws examples from the recognition of faces and the use of
tools. If we know a person's face, we can recognize it among
a thousand, indeed, among a million, though we usually cannot
tell how we recognize a face we know. Similarly, we can recognize
the moods of the human face without being able to tell,
"except quite vaguely,"56 by what signs we know them. When
we learn to use a tool, or a probe or stick for feelíng our way,
our initial awareness of its impact on our hand is transformed
"into a sense of its point touching the objects we are exploring."57
ln Polanyi's phrase, we attend "frorn" its impact on
our hand "to" its effect on the things to which we are applying
it. In this process, which is essential to the acquisition of a skill,
the feelings of which we are initially aware become internalized
in our tacit knowing.
Chris Alexander, in his Notes Toward a Synthesis of
Form,58 considers the knowing involved in design. He belíeves
that we can often recognize and correct the "bad lit"
of a form to its context, but that we usually cannot describe
the rules by which we find a lit bad or recognize the corrected
form to be good. Traditional artifacts evolve culturally
through successive detections and correctíons of bad lit until
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From Technical Rationality to Reflection-in-Action
the resulting forms are good. Thus for generations the Slovakian
peasants made beautiful shawls woven of yarns which
had been dipped in homemade dyes. When anilíne dyes were
made available to them, "the glory of the shawls was spoiled."59
The shawlmakers had no innate ability to make good
shawls but "were simply able, as many of us are, to recognize
bad shawls and their own mistakes. Over the generations
... whenever a bad one was made, it was recognized as such,
and therefore not repeated."60 The introduction of aniline
dyes disrupted the cultural process of design, for the shawlmakers
could not produce wholly new designs of high quality;
they could only recognize "bad lit" within a familiar pat-
tern.
Ruminating on Alexander's example, Geoffrey Vickers
points out that it is not only artistic judgments which are based
on a sense of form which cannot be fully articulated:
artists, so far from being alone in this, exhibit most clearly an oddity
which is present in all such judgments. We can recognize and
describe deviations from a norm very much more clearly than we
can describe the norm itself.61
For Vickers, it is through such tacit norms that all of us make
the judgments, the qualítative appreciations of situations, on
which our practical competence depends.
Psycholínguists have noted that we speak in conformity with
rules of phonology and syntax which most of us cannot describe.š-
Alfred Schultz and his intellectual descendants have
analyzed the tacit, everyday know-how that we bring to social
interactions such as the rituals of greeting, ending a meeting,
or standing in a crowded elevator.š! Birdwhistell has made
comparable contributions to a description of the tacit knowledge
embodied in our use and recognition of movement and
gesture.š+ ln these domains, too, we behave according to rules
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PROFESSIONAL KNOWLEDGE AND REFLECTION-IN-ACTION
and procedures that we cannot usually describe and of which
we are often unaware.
ln examples like these, knowing has the following properties:
• There are actions, recognitions, and judgments which we know
how to carry out spontaneously; we do not have to think about
them prior to or during their performance.
We are often unaware of having learned to do these things;
we simply find ourselves doing them.
ln some cases, we were once aware of the understandings
which were subsequently internalized in our feeling for the
stuff of action. In other cases, we may never have been aware
of them. In both cases, however, we are usualIy unable to describe
the knowing which our action reveals.
It is in this sense that I speak of knowing-in-action, the characteristic
mode of ordinary practical knowledge.
Reilecting-in-action. If common sense recognizes knowingin-action,
it also recognizes that we sometimes think about
what we are doing. Phrases like "thinking on your feet," "keeping
your wits about you," and "learning by doing" suggest not
only that we can think about doing but that we can think about
doing something while doing it. Some of the most interesting
examples of this process occur in the midst of a performance.
Big-league baseball pitchers speak, for example, of the experience
of "finding the groove":
On ly a few pitchers can control the whole game with pure physical
ability. The rest have to learn to adjust once they're out there. ff
they can't, they're dead ducks.
[You getJ a special feel for the balI, a kind of command that lets
you repeat the exact same thing you did before that proved suc-
cessful.
Finding your groove has to do with studying those winning habits
and trying to repeat them every time you perforrn.š!
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From Technical Rationality to Reflection-in-Action
I do not wholly understand what it means to "find the groove."
It is c1ear, however, that the pitchers are talking about a partieular
kind of re8ection. What is "learning to adjust once you're
out there"? Presumably it involves noticing how you have been
pitching to the batters and how well it has been working, and
on the basis of these thoughts and observations, changing the
way you have been doing it. When you get a "feel for the ball"
that lets you "repeat the exact same thing you did before that
proved successful,' you are noticing, at the very least, that you
have been doing something right, and your "feeling" allows
you to do that something again. When you "study those winning
habits,' you are thinking about the know-how that has
enabled you to win. The pitchers seem to be talking about a
kind of re8ection on their patterns of action, on the situations
in which they are performing, and on the know-how implicit
in their performance. They are re8ecting on action and, in
some cases, re8ecting in action.
When good jazz musicians improvise together, they also
manifest a "feel for" their material and they make on-the-spot
adjustments to the sounds they hear. Listening to one another
and to themselves, they feel where the music is going and adjust
their playing accordingly. They can do this, first of all, because
their collective effort at musical invention makes use of
a schema-a metric, melodie, and harmonie schema familiar
to all the participants-which gives a predictable order to the
piece. In addition, each of the musicians has at the ready a
repertoire of musical figures which he can deliver at appropriate
moments. Improvisation consists in varying, combining,
and recombining a set of figures within the schema which
bounds and gives coherence to the performance. As the musicians
feel the direction of the music that is developing out of
their interwoven contributions, they make new sense of it and
adjust their performance to the new sense they have made.
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They are reflecting-in-action on the music they are collectively
making and on their individual contributions to it, thinking
what they are doing and, in the process, evolving their way of
doing it. Of course, we need not suppose that they reflect-inaction
in the medium of words. More likely, they reflect
through a "feel for the rnusic" which is not unlike the pitcher's
"íeel for the ball."
Much reflection-in-action hinges on the experience of surprise.
When intuitive, spontaneous performance yie1ds nothing
more than the results expected for it, then we tend not
to think about it. But when intuitive performance leads to surprises,
pleasing and promising or unwanted, we may respond
by reflecting-in-action. Like the baseball pitcher, we may reflect
on our "winning habits"; or like the jazz musician, on our
sense of the music we have been making; or like the designer,
on the misfit we have unintentionally created. In such processes,
reflection tends to focus interactive1y on the outcomes of
action, the action itself, and the intuitive knowing implicit in
the action.
Let us consider an example which reveals these processes in
some detail.
ln an artic1e entitled "If you want to get ahead, get a theory,"
Inhe1der and Karrnilofř-Smith= describe a rather unusual
experiment concerning "children's processes of discovery in action."67
They asked their subjects to balance wooden blocks
on a metal bar. Some of the blocks were plain wooden blocks,
but others were conspicuously or inconspicuously weighted at
one end. The authors attended to the spontaneous processes
by which the children tried to learn about the properties of
the blocks, balance them on the bar, and regulate their actions
after success or failure.
They found that virtually all children aged six to seven began
the task in the same way:
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From Technical Rationality to Reílectíon-ín-Actíon
alf blocks were systematica11yfirst tried at their geometrie cen-
ter.68
And they found that slightly older children would not only
place all blocks at their geometrie center but that
when asked to add sma11blocks of varying shapes and sizes to
blocksalreadyin balance, they added up to ten blocksprecariously
one on top of the other at the geometrie center rather than distributing
them at the extrernities.š?
They explain this persistent and virtually universal behavior by
attributing to the children what they call a "theory-in-action":
a "geometrie center theory" of balancing, or, as one child put
it, a theory that "things always balance in the middle."
Of course, when the children tried to balance the counterweighted
blocks at their geometrie centers, they failed. How
did they respond to failure? Some children made what the authors
called an "action-response."
They now placed the very same blocks more and more systematically
at the geometrie center, with only very slight corrections
around this point. They showed considerable surpriseat not being
able to balance the blocksa second time (UHeh,whaťs gone wrong
with this one, it worked before") ... Action sequences then became
reduced to: Place carefu11yat geometrie center, correct very
slightlyaround this center, abandon a11attempts, declaring the object
"impossible" to balance."?
Other children, generally between the ages of seven and eight,
responded in a very different way. When the counterweighted
blocks failed to balance at their geometrie centers, these children
began to de-center them. They did this first with conspicuously
counterweighted blocks. Then
gradually,and often almost reluctantly, the 7 to 8 year olds began
to make corrections also on the inconspicuous weight blocks
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PROFESSIONAL KNOWLEDGE AND REFLECTION-IN-ACTION
. . . At this point, we observed many pauses during aetion sequenees
on the ineonspieuous weight iterns."!
Later stili,
As the ehildren were now really beginning to question the generality
of their geometrie center theory, a negative response at the geometrie
center suffieed to have the ehild rapidly make eorreetions
toward the point of balance.P
And finally,
ehildren paused beiore eaeh item, roughly assessed the weight distribution
of the bloek by lifting it ("you have to be careful, sornetimes
iťs just as heavy on eaeh side, sometimes iťs heavier on one
side"), inferred the probable point of balanee and then plaeed the
objeet immediately very close to it, without making any attempts
at first balaneing at the geometrie center."?
The children now behaved as though they had come to hold
a theory-in-action that blocks balance, not at their geometrie
centers, but at their centers of gravity.
This second pattern of response to error, the authors call
"theory-response." Children work their way toward it through
a series of stages. When they are first confronted with a number
of events which refute their geometrie center theories-inaction,
they stop and think. Then, starting with the conspicuous-weight
blocks, they begin to make corrections away from
the geometrie center. Finally, when they have really abandoned
their earlier theories-in-actíon, they weigh all the blocks
in their hands so as to infer the probable point of balance.As
they shift their theories of balancing from geometrie center
to center of gravity, they also shift from a "success orientation"
to a "theory orientation." Positive and negative results come
58
From Technical Rationality to Reílection-in-Action
to be taken not as signs of success or failure in action but as
informatíon relevant to a theory of balancing.
It is interesting to note that as the authors observe and describe
this process, they are compelled to invent a language.
They describe theories-in-action which the children thernselves
cannot describe.
Indeed, although the (younger] ehilďs action sequences bear eloquent
witness to a theory-in-action implicit in his behavior, this
should not be taken as a capacity to coneeptualize explicitly on
what he is doing and why.7-4
Knowing-in-action which the child may represent to himself
in terms of a "feel for the blocks," the observers redescribe in
terms of "theories." I shall say that they convert the chilďs
knowing- in-action to knowledge- in-action.
A conversion of this kind seems to be inevitable in any attempt
to talk about reflection-in-action. One must use words to
describe a kind of knowing, and a change of knowing, which are
probably not originally represented in words at all.Thus, from
their observations of the children's behavior, the authors make
verbal descriptions of the children's intuitive understandings.
These are the authors' theories about the children' s knowíng-inaction.
Like all such theories, they are deliberate, idiosyncratic
constructions, and they can be put to experimental test:
just as the child was constructing a theory-in-action in his endeavor
to balance the blocks, so we, too, were making on-the-spot hypotheses
about the chilďs theories and providing opportunities for negative
and positive responses in order to verify our own theonesl'"
Reflecting-in-practice The block-balancing experiment is a
beautiful example of reflection-in-action, but it is very far removed
from our usual images of professional practice. If we
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PROFESSIONAL KNOWLEDGE AND REFLECTlON-IN-ACTION
are to relate the idea of reflection-in-action to professional practice,
we must consider what a practice is and how it is like and
unlike the kinds of action we have been discussing.
The word "practice" is ambiguous. When we speak of a lawyer'
s practice, we mean the kinds of things he does, the kinds
of clients he has, the range of cases he is called upon to handle.
When we speak of someone practicing the piano, however, we
mean the repetitive or experimental activity by which he tries
to increase his proficiency on the instrument. In the first sense,
"practice" refers to performance in a range of professional situations.
In the second, it refers to preparation for performance.
But professional practice also includes an element of repetition.
A professional practitioner is a specialist who encounters
certain types of situations again and again. This is suggested
by the way in which professionals use the word "case"~r
project, account, commission, or deal, depending on the profession.
All such terms denote the units which make up a practice,
and they denote types of family-resembling examples.
Thus a physician may encounter many different "cases of measles",
a lawyer, many different "cases of libel." As a practitioner
experiences many variations of a small number of types of
cases, he is able to "practíce" his practice. He develops a repertoire
of expectations, images, and techniques. He learns what
to look for and how to respond to what he finds. As long as
his practice is stable, in the sense that it brings him the same
types of cases, he becomes less and less subject to surprise. His
knowing-in-practice tends to become increasingly tacit, spon taneous,
and automatic, thereby conferring upon him and his
clients the benefits of specialization.
On the other hand, professional specialization can have negative
effects. In the individual, a high degree of specialization
can lead to a parochial narrowness of vision. When a profession
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From Technical Rationality to Reflection-in-Action
divides into subspecialties, it can break apart an earlier wholeness
of experience and understanding. Thus people sometimes
yearn for the general practitioner of earlier days; who is
thought to have concerned himself with the "whole patient,'
and they sometimes accuse contemporary specialists of treating
particular illnesses in isolation from the rest of the patienťs
life experience. Further, as a practice becomes more repetitive
and routine, and as knowing-in-practice becomes increasingly
tacit and spontaneous, the practitioner may miss important opportunities
to think about what he is doing. He may find that,
like the younger children in the block-balancing experiment,
he is drawn into patterns of errorwhich he cannot correct. And
if he learns, as often happens, to be selectively inattentive to
phenomena that do not fit the categories of his knowíng-inaction,
then he may suffer from boredom or "burn-out" and
afHict his clients with the consequences of his narrowness and
rigidity. When this happens, the practitioner has "overlearned"
what he knows.
A practitioner's reRection can serve as a corrective to overlearning.
Through reRection, he can surface and criticize the
tacit understandings that have grown up around the repetitive
experiences of a specialized practice, and can make new sense
of the situations of uncertainty or uniqueness which he may
allow himself to experience.
Practitioners do reflect on their knowing-in-practice. Sometimes,
in the relative tranquility of a postmortem, they think
back on a project they have undertaken, a situation they have
lived through, and they explore the understandings they have
brought to their handling of the case. They may do this in a
mood of idle speculation, or in a deliberate effort to prepare
themselves for future cases.
But they may also reflect on practice while they are in the
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PROFESSIONAL KNOWLEDGE AND REFLECTION-IN-ACTION
midst of it. Here they reflect-in-action, but the meaning of this
term needs now to be considered in terms of the complexity
of knowing-in-practice.
A practitioner' s reflection-in-action may not be very rapid.
It is bounded by the "action-present,' the zone of time in
which action can still make a difference to the situation. The
action-present may stretch over minutes, hours, days, or even
weeks or months, depending on the pace of activity and the
situational boundaries that are characteristic of the practice.
Within the give-and-take of courtroom behaviar, for example,
a lawyer's reflection-in-action may take place in seconds; but
when the context is that of an antitrust case that drags on over
years, reflection-in-action may proceed in leisurely fashion over
the course of several months. An orchestra conductor may
think of a single performance as a unit of practice, but in another
sense a whole season is his unit. The pace and duration
of episod es of reflection-in-action vary with the pace and duration
of the situations of practice.
When a practitioner reflects in and on his practíce, the possible
objects of his reAection are as varied as the kinds of phenomena
before him and the systems of knowíng-in-practice
which he brings to them. He may reAect on the tacit norms
and appreciations which underlie a judgment, or on the strategies
and theories implicit in a pattern of behavior. He may reHect
on the feeling for a situation which has led him to adopt
a particular course of action, on the way in which he has framed
the problem he is trying to solve, or on the role he has constructed
for himself within a larger institutional context.
Reflection-in-action, in these several modes, is central to the
art through which practitioners sometimes cope with the troublesome
"divergent" situations of practice.
When the phenomenon at hand eludes the ordinary categories
of knowledge-in-practice, presenting itself as unique or un-
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From Technical Rationality to Reflection-in-Action
stable, the practitioner may surface and criticize his initial understanding
of the phenomenon, construct a new description
of it, and test the new description by an on-the-spot experiment.
Sometimes he arrives at a new theory of the phenornenon
by articulating a feeling he has about it.
When he finds himself stuck in a problematic situation
which he cannot readily convert to a manageable problem, he
may construct a new way of setting the problem-a new frame
which, in what I shall call a "frarne experiment," he tries to
impose on the situation.
When he is confronted with demands that seem incornpatible
or inconsistent, he may respond by reflecting on the appreciations
which he and others have brought to the situation.
Conscious of a dilem ma, he may attribute it to the way in
which he has set his problem, ar even to the way in which he
has framed his role. He may then find a way of integrating,
or choosing among, the values at stake in the situation.
The following are brief examples of the kinds of reflectionin-action
which I shall illustrate and discuss at greater length
later on.
An investment banker, speaking of the process by which he
makes his judgments of investment risk, observes that he really
cannot describe everything that goes into his judgments. The
ordinary rules of thumb allow him to calculate "only 20 to 30
percent of the risk in investment." ln terms of the rules of
thumb, a company's operating numbers may be excellent. Still,
if the managemenťs explanation of the situation does not fit
the numbers, ar if there is something odd in the behaviar of
the people, that is a subject for worry which must be considered
afresh in each new situation. He recalls a situation in which
he spent a day with one of the largest banks in Latin America.
Several new business proposals were made to him, and the
bank's operating numbers seemed satisfactory. Still, he had a
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gnawing feeling that something was wrong. When he thought
about it, it seemed that he was responding to the fact that he
had been treated with a degree of deference out of all proportion
to his actual position in the international world of banking.
What could have led these bankers to treat him so inappropriately?
When he left the bank at the end of the day, he said
to his colleague, "No new business with that outfit! Let the
existing obligations come in, but nothing new!" Some months
later, the bank went through the biggest bankruptcy ever in
Latin America-and all the time there had been nothing
wrong with the numbers.
An ophthalmologist says that a great many of his patients
bring problems that are not in the book. In 80 or 85 percent
of the cases, the patienťs complaints and symptoms do not fall
into familiar categories of diagnosis and treatment. A good
physician searches for new ways of making sense of such cases,
and invents experiments by which to test his new hypotheses.
ln a particularly important family of situations, the patient suffers
simultaneously from two or more diseases. While each of
these, individually, lends itself to familiar patterns of thought
and action, their combination may constitute a unique case
that resists ordinary approaches to treatment.
The ophthalmologist recalls one patient who had inflammation
of the eye (uveitis) combined with glaucoma. The treatment
for glaucoma aggravated the inflammation, and the treatment
for uveitis aggravated the glaucoma. When the patient
came in, he was already under treatment at a level insufficient
for cure but sufficient to irritate the complementary disease.
The ophthalmologist decided to remove all treatment and
wait to see what would emerge. The result was that the patienťs
uveitis, a parasitic infection, remained in much reduced
formo On the other hand, the glaucoma disappeared altogether,
thus proving to have been an artifact of the treatment. The
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From Technical Rationality to Reflection-in-Action
opthalmologist then began to "titrate" the patient. Working
with very small quantities of drugs, he aimed not at total cure
but at a reduction of symptoms which would allow the patient
to go back to work. (Seven lives depended on his 5000 ocular
cellsl) The prognosis was not good, for uveitis moves in cycles
and leaves scars behind which impede vision. But for the time
being, the patient was able to work.
ln his mid-thirties, sometime between the composition of
his early work The Cossacks and his later War and Peace, Lev
Nikolayevitch Tolstoy became interested in education. He
started a school for peasant children on his estate at Yasnaya
Polanya, he visited Europe to learn the latest educational methods,
and he published an educational journal, also called Yasnaya
Polanya. Before he was done (his new novel eventually
replaced his interest in education), he had built some seventy
schools, had created an informal teacher-training program, and
had written an exemplary piece of educational evaluation.
For the most part, the methods of the European schools
filled him with disgust, yet he was entranced by Rousseau's
writings on education. His own school anticipated John
Dewey's later approach to learning by doing, and bore the
stamp of his conviction that good teaching required "not a
method but an art." ln an essay, "On Teaching the Rudirnents,'
he describes his not ion of art in the teaching of
reading:
Every individual must, in order to acquire the art of reading in
the shortest possible time, be taught quite apart from any other,
and therefore there must be a separate method for each. That
which forms an insuperable difficulty to one does not in the least
keep back another, and vice versa. One pupil has a good memory,
and it is easier for him to memorize the syllables than to comprehend
the vowellessness of the consonants; another reflects calmly
and will comprehend a most rational sound method; another has
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SCHÖN, Donald A. The reflective practitioner : how professionals think in action. Repr. Aldershot : Ashgate, 2003.
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PROFESSIONAL KNOWLEDGE AND REFLECTION-IN-ACTION
a line instinct, and he grasps the law of word cornbinations by reading
whole words at a tirne.
The best teacher will be he who has at hís tongue's end the explanation
of what it is that is bothering the pupil. These explanations
give the teacher the knowledge of the greatest possible nurnber
of rnethods, the ability of inventing new rnethods and, above all,
not a blind adherence to one rnethod but the conviction that all
rnethods are one-sided, and that the best rnethod would be the
one which would answer best to all the possible difficulties incurred
by a pupil, that is, not a rnethod but an art and talent.
... Every teacher rnust ... by regarding every irnperfection in
the pupil's cornprehension, not as a defect of the pupil, but as a
defect of his own instruction, endeavor to develop in hirnself the
ability of discovering new rnethods ... 76
An artful teacher sees a chilď s difficulty in leaming to read
not as a defect in the child but as a defect "of his own instruction."
So he must find a way of explaining what is bothering
the pupil. He must do a piece of experimental research, then
and there, in the classroom. And because the child's difficulties
may be unique, the teacher cannot assume that his repertoire
of explanations wi1l suffice, even though they are "at the
tongue's end." He must be ready to invent new methods and
must "endeavor to develop in himself the ability of discovering
thern.'
Over the last two years, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology have undertaken a program of in-service
education for teachers, a program organized around the idea
of on-the-spot reflection and experiment, very much as in Tolstoy's
art of teaching. In this Teacher Proiect,"? the researchers
have encouraged a small group of teachers to explore their own
intuitive thinking about apparently simple tasks in such domains
as mathematics, physics, musíc, and the perceived behavior
of the moon. The teachers have made some important
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From Technical Rationality to Reflection-in-Action
discoveries. They have allowed themselves to become confused
about subjects they are supposed to "know"; and as they have
tried to work their way out of their confusions, they have also
begun to think differently about leaming and teaching.
Early in the project, a critical event occured. The teachers
were asked to observe and react to a videotape of two boys engaged
in playing a simple game. The boys sat at a table, separated
from one another by an opaque screen. In front of one
boy, blocks of various colors, shapes, and sizes were arranged
in a pattem. In front of the other, similar blocks were lying
on the table in no particular order. The first boy was to tell
the second one how to reproduce the pattem. After the first
few instructions, however, it became clear that the second boy
had gone astray. In fact, the two boys had lost touch with one
another, though neither of them knew it.
ln their initial reactions to the videotape, the teachers spoke
of a "communications problern.' They said that the instruction
giver had "well-developed verbal skills" and that the receiver
was "unable to follow directions.' Then one of the researchers
pointed out that, although the blocks contained no
green squares-all squares were orange and only triangles were
green-she had heard the first boy tell the second to "take a
green square.' When the teachers watched the videotape
again, they were astonished. That small mistake had set off a
chain of false moves. The second boy had put a green thing,
a triangle, where the first boy's pattern had an orange square,
and from then on all the instructions became problematic.
Under the circumstances, the second boy seemed to have displayed
considerable ingenuity in his attempts to reconcile the
instructions with the pattern before him.
At this point, the teachers reversed their picture of the situation.
They could see why the second boy behaved as he did.
He no longer seemed stupid; he had, indeed, "followed instruc-
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SCHÖN, Donald A. The reflective practitioner : how professionals think in action. Repr. Aldershot : Ashgate, 2003.
Tento text je možné využívat pouze ke studijním účelům.
PROFESSIONAL KNOWLEDGE AND REFLECTION-IN-ACTION
tions." As one teacher put it, they were now "giving him reason."
They saw reasons for his behavior; and his errors, which
they had previously seen as an inability to follow directions,
they now found reasonable.
Later on in the project, as the teachers increasingly challenged
themselves to discover the meanings of a chilď s puzzling
behavior, they often spoke of "giving him reason."
ln examples such as these, something falls outside the range
of ordinary expectations. The banker has a feeling that something
is wrong, though he cannot at first say what it is. The
physician sees an odd combination of diseases never before described
in a medical text. Tolstoy thinks of each of his pupils
as an individual with ways of learning and imperfections peculiar
to himself. The teachers are astonished by the sense behind
a studenťs mistake. In each instance, the practitioner allows
himself to experience surprise, puzzlement, or confusion in a
situation which he finds uncertain or unique. He reflects on
the phenomena before him, and on the prior understandings
which have been implicit in his behavior. He carries out an
experiment which serves to generate both a new understanding
of the phenomena and a change in the situation.
When someone reflects-in-action, he becomes a researcher
in the practice context. He is not dependent on the categories
of established theory and technique, but constructs a new theory
of the unique case. His inquiry is not limited to a deliberation
about means which depends on a prior agreement about
ends. He does not keep means and ends separate, but defines
them interactively as he frames a problematic situation. He
does not separate thinking from doing, ratiocinating his way
to a decision which he must later convert to action. Because
his experimenting is a kind of action, implementation is built
into his inquiry. Thus reHection-in-action can proceed, even
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From Technical Rationality to Reflection-in-Action
in situations of uncertainty or uniqueness, because it is not
bound by the dichotomies of Technical Rationality.
Although reflection-in-action is an extraordinary process, it
is not a rare event. Indeed, for some reflectíve practitioners it
is the core of practice. Nevertheless, because professionalism
is still mainly identified with technical expertise, reflection-inaction
is not generally accepted-even by those who do it-as
a legitimate form of professional knowing.
Many practitioners, locked into a view of themselves as technical
experts, find nothing in the world of practice to occasion
reHection. They have become too skillful at techniques of selective
inattention, junk categories, and situational control, techniques
which they use to preserve the constancy of their knowledge-in-practice.
For them, uncertainty is a threat; its
admission is a sign of weakness. Others, more inclined toward
and adept at reílection-in-action, nevertheless feel profoundly
uneasy because they cannot say what they know how to do,
cannot justify its quality or rigor.
For these reasons, the study of reflection-in-action is critically
important. The dilem ma of rigor or relevance may be dissolved
if we can develop an epistemology of practice which
places technical problem solving within a broader context of
reflective inquiry, shows how reflection-in-action may be rigorous
in its own right, and links the art of practice in uncertainty
and uniqueness to the scientisťs art of research. We may
thereby increase the legitimacy of reflection-in-action and encourage
its broader, deeper, and more rigorous use.
6g
SCHÖN, Donald A. The reflective practitioner : how professionals think in action. Repr. Aldershot : Ashgate, 2003.
Tento text je možné využívat pouze ke studijním účelům.