Streamline Training & Documentation: Donald Schön

Saturday, May 26, 2007

Donald Schön

In my periodic browsing at MIT's Open Courseware website, I came upon a January 2007 course offered by the Urban Studies and Planning department called "Reflective Practice: An Approach for Expanding Your Learning Frontiers." Taught by Professors Ceasar McDowell and Sebastiao Ferreira, this course is

"an introduction to the approach of Reflective Practice developed by Donald Schön. It is an approach that enables professionals to understand how they use their knowledge in practical situations and how they can combine practice and learning in a more effective way. Through greater awareness of how they deploy their knowledge in practical situations, professionals can increase their capacities of learning in a more timely way. Understanding how they frame situations and ideas helps professionals to achieve greater flexibility and increase their capacity of conceptual innovation."

Since Donald Schön (1930-1997) was new to me and obviously an important thinker and practitioner, I began exploring his writing and found that it touched on many of the subjects I particularly care about in my own work, notably, reflectiveness as a boost to learning, reframing to escape seemingly intractable conflicts, and improvisation.

To give a sense of Schön's thinking in each of these areas, here are some quotes from his work:

Reflection on action

... with this emphasis on problem solving, we ignore problem setting, the process by which we define the decision to be made, the ends to be achieved, the means which may be chosen ... [problems] must be constructed from the materials of problematic situations which are puzzling, troubling and uncertain.¹

Reframing

We [Schön and co-author Martin Rein] see policy positions as resting on underlying structures of belief, perception, and appreciation, which we call "frames." We see policy controversies as disputes in which the contending parties hold conflicting frames. Such disputes are resistant to resolution by appeal to facts or reasoned argumentation because the parties' conflicting frames determine what counts as a fact and what arguments are taken to be relevant and compelling. Moreover, the frames that shape policy positions and underlie controversy are usually tacit, which means that they are exempt from conscious attention and reasoning.

Improvisation (reflection-in-action)

[R]eflection-in-action ... involves a surprise, a response to surprise by thought turning back on itself, thinking what we’re doing as we do it, setting the problem of the situation anew, conducting an action experiment on the spot by which we seek to solve the new problems we’ve set, an experiment in which we test both our new way of seeing the situation, and also try to change that situation for the better. And reflection-in-action need not be an intellectual or verbalized activity. ... [M]y favourite example of reflection-in-action is jazz, because if you think about people playing jazz within a framework of beat and rhythm and melody that is understood, one person plays and another person responds, and responds on the spot to the way he hears the tune, making it different to correspond to the difference he hears, improvisation in that sense is a form of reflection-in-action. And so is good conversation which must be neither wholly predictable nor wholly unpredictable. If it’s wholly predictable, it’s boring and not good, and if it’s wholly unpredictable, it’s crazy. Good conversation, which all of us have some gift for, involves a moving between those extremes in a kind of on-line observation and action which is so natural and spontaneous to us that we don’t even think about the capacity we have to do it. And in much of this activity we need not think about what we are doing in explicit, verbal or symbolic terms, but sometimes we must. For example, when we get stuck. Or, for example, when we want to teach somebody else to do what we know how to do.³

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¹ Schön, Donald, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (Basic Books, 1983), pp.39-40.

² Schön, Donald and Martin Rein, Frame Reflection: Toward the Resolution of Intractable Policy Controversies (Basic Books, 1994), p.23.

³ Schön, Donald,"Educating the Reflective Practitioner," presentation to the 1987 meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Washington D.C. (http://educ.queensu.ca/~russellt/howteach/schon87.htm)

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Labels: Learning organization, Notables, Teaching

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