Schön, Donald A (1987), Josey-Bass, 355 pages

Overall rating: Has promise, but frustrates the core message

Strengths: Foundational piece of literature for any educator of reflective professionals

Weakness: This work is very dense, delving too much into specific examples rather than exploring the theoretical framework that can be applied to different professionals

Audience: All professional educators who wish to teach their learners to reflect-in-action by implementing reflective practicums in their respective curriculum

In Educating the Reflective Practitioner, Schön instructs how his theory of reflection-in-action can be taught to professional learners through coaching and implementing reflective practicums. Schön initially reiterates his original work to quickly reaffirm his thesis from The Reflective Practitioner (1983) – that successful practitioners must constantly reflect to deal with the messy challenges of real world problems. He then discusses the methodologies used by coaches to move learners from the mystery on exposure to a novel subject to ultimate mastery. This includes:

• Joint experimentation – working to achieve desired goals through collaborative inquiry of a new situation
• Follow me – breaking the whole into local units of reflection-in-action to demonstrate interplay between a whole problem and its constituents
• Hall of Mirrors – where the interaction of the learner and coach becomes a reflection of the interaction of the learner and problem

Schön then moves on to demonstrate the promises and challenges of moving these dialogues from the individual to systemic level through the implementation of reflective practicums within professional curriculum. Given the multiple stakeholders and institutionalized resistance to change at many schools, he correctly identifies multiple barriers to the implementation of his ideas.

While this work shows great promise as an educational teaching tool, it is ultimately flawed due to its overwhelming detail within specific examples. Schön’s theoretical discussions are understandable with a moderate amount of concerted thought. However, for the majority of the book he delves deeply into case examples ranging from architecture, music and psychotherapy where knowledge of these fields is necessary to comprehend the vignettes. This ultimately confounds the message and causes the forest to be lost from the trees.  While I would recommend this book for any educator of professionals, I do so with hesitation.

Schön, Donald A (1983)

Basic Books, 374 pages

Overall rating: Superb

Strengths: Foundational piece of literature for any professional who wishes to practise reflectively within their area of expertise, adapting their thought process to problems contained within their practise

Weakness: The work is slightly dense reading at times, providing more examples than required

Audience: All professionals who wish to practise reflectively and educators who wish to teach reflective practise

In The Reflective Practitioner, Schön provides his view point on the unconscious methodology successful professionals use to understand and adapt to the problems encountered within their practises. Initially, he provides an analysis of the limitations of Technical Rationality, the classical epistemology of professional practise, whereby he shows how the hierarchical and expert-based system driving much of the professional practise ill equips practitioners with the skills to handle complex multivariable problems occurring in life. Schön then states how successful practitioners reflect-in-action to approach these problems by:

• Reframing problems to yield new discoveries
• Experimenting with the problem and testing hypotheses
• Bringing past experience to bear on unique situations
• Creating virtual worlds to test new theorems
• Shifting their stance towards inquiry

Finally, Schön provides of myriad of evidence from varying professions ranging from psychology, town planning, architecture and others to show how these techniques have been effectively applied by reflective practitioners to find unique solutions to problems lacking straight forward answers. Given the era this piece was written in, the author is prescient in his predictions of how contemporary physicians now apply reflection-in-action by applying the biopsychosocial model of medicine to treat each patient uniquely. In summary, this novel is excellent. At multiple points I felt there were lessons that could be applied to my own practises in medicine and education. I would recommend this to any professional striving towards self-improvement or teaching the future generation.