Advancing Donald Schön’s Reflective Practitioner: Where to Next?

What I read

In this article, the authors overlay Donald Schön’s work on reflective practice with other models that describe how team-based creative work is done. They conclude that there is a relationship that extends and leverages Schön’s work into the context of team-based creativity, and that relationship, which exists in creative cultures, is worthy of future investigation.

First, the authors introduce their main premise: that Schön’s work focused on an individual, while team-based projects have emerged in modern creative environments. This work will present the differences between the two, and identify potential negative consequences of this way of working and thinking.

The authors then introduce, in detail, Schön’s historic focus on reflective practice for an individual practitioner, and some of his less known work that focused on reflective organizations. He presented three different ways of framing practice. The first is reflection-in-action, which is the nature of working with and through tacit knowledge, which occurs in the real-time context of problem solving. Reflection-on-action is a more meta-thoughtfulness that happens after a work task is done. Reflecting-in-practice is the nature of thinking about a larger body of work, in order to make patterns and situations more overt for future explorations. The authors point out that this focus on individual practice was just a portion of Schön’s larger body of work, which included a fourth way of thinking about creative thinking, called knowing-in-action. This is the during work process of turning reflection-in-action info knowing-in-action.

The authors then indicate Schön’s relationship to John Dewey’s work, and introduce the work of David Kolb. Dewey and Kolb viewed reflection as different than learning. This is evident in Dewey’s five phases of reflective thought, and Kolb’s experiential learning theory. The authors briefly describe these in more detail. For Dewey, activity is not the same as experience; “change is meaningless transition unless it is consciously connected with the return wave of consequences which flow from it.” Kolb’s work described learning as “grasping and transforming experiences into knowledge.” The authors describe that “When individuals experiment with an idea to accomplish their tasks (active experimentation), they extend their knowledge to transform the situation. This engagement (concrete experience) enables them to also apprehend the experiences of the situation. When people step away and look back on the situation (reflective observation), the experience transforms their knowledge. When they come up with new ideas for their work (abstract conceptualization), they are comprehending the situation with their new knowledge.”

The authors then propose a learning cycle that presents an iterative set of moves of reflection in action, where designers then periodically “step back” to a more overt reflection on the discrete working process, as well as on their larger practice. They use an example of an architect designing to show the differences in these ways of thinking and doing.

At this point, the authors expand their analysis to consider the context in which this cycle exists, which, for practicing designers, is in an organization with other people in it. They consider a work team as a group who “share responsibility for specific outcomes for their organizations.” They reference an organizational behavior model from Nonaka and Takeuchi that described a cycle of socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization. The authors describe that “reflective practices are exercised to gain a knowledge advantage for an individual practice to compete with other firms.” The four parts of the SECI model are described, where socialization is when people design together, but externalization, combination, and internalization are when people learn from each other to develop a team-based level of knowledge. They indicate that “When professionals design together, they reflect-in-action and socialize to learn together.” But the reflection portion of the process is individual, which can lead to conflicts—destructive conversations and potential failure. They return to the architecture example, to describe when the architect interacts with their colleagues.

This is where the author’s major contribution shows up: that the reflecting phase can be collaborative. They describe the work of Lewin, who studied group dynamics, and indicated that “reflective conversations were necessary for framing the experiential approach to learning.” They relate this to the work of Anna Kayes, Christopher Kayes, and Kolb, who state that “A team that cannot see itself accurately is ultimately flying blind… a team needs to create a hospitable conversation space.” Team learning is part of the reflective practitioner process, because it improves the reflexivity of the practice, and share both the content of any single design effort, as well as reflection on designing as a whole.

The last model introduced and discussed is Peter Senge’s view of learning organizations. These are organizations that include five disciplines: personal mastery, mental models (deeply ingrained assumptions), shared vision, team learning (the ability to suspend assumptions), and systems thinking). The authors position their model inside of Senge’s model, showing how personal mastery is linked to team learning.

The authors conclude by returning to Schön’s work. They describe its popularity amongst designers, but indicate the limits of the use of the work—that only a small portion of researchers build on the work, rather than just cite it. They have built on the work, and propose future, additional explorations to extend these ideas. This might include protocol studies of design processes in teams, or statistical studies and surveys to understand the relationship between team learning behaviors and team performance.

What I learned and what I think

My first set of reflections have little to do with the paper, and more to do with the way I respond to these papers. I’ve noticed that while I’m doing a good job summarizing what I’ve read, I’m doing a pretty poor job analyzing the work, and my tendency is, instead, to judge it. I don’t mind the lack of analysis, because that wasn’t my goal of this little pre-Phd ritual; my goal was to immerse myself back in the culture of academic research, and to try to focus my very broad Phd focus into something more manageable. But I wonder about my almost constant tendency to judge these things. Is that valuable?

Maybe one can’t but help it, particularly if they’ve had more experiences that might provide inductive evidence that conclusions aren’t necessarily pinpoint accurate; in this way, maybe being older is actually a negative, because the “slate” of learning is filled with experiences and assumptions. I can see that it isn’t valuable, though, because it’s getting in the way of potential. I’ll take as an assumption that if you are working in academia, and doing thoughtful research, you are intelligent and you have something to contribute. I’m not giving that much room, at least for most of these texts.

So, maybe I’ll try a different approach here.

As I understand it, Schön’s work is about the intimacy of a person doing a creative thing; it’s a moment in time, and it’s happening so quickly that it’s invisible and probably entirely innate. The Quist example is how the innate is trying to be made overt, and the claim is that a good design educator is able to perform the reflection in action out loud, so that someone can see it happening and then work to emulate it. The point in time of the reflection/action is the making part, and the artifact that’s made is playing the intermediary. This is why the patterning and effortlessness matters so much; it actually suspends the overt reflection that Dewey is talking about when he separates activity from experience, so that he can then separate activity from learning, which means that Dewey’s model may be presented as long-term learning, but design is in-the-moment learning.

Working with that, the author’s model overlays this moment-in-time on Senge’s model, and gets there by building on the other researchers, which is inserting something happening in-situ and extremely quickly into the machinations of an organization. I’m trying to picture this playing out in a modern design organization. A product designer answers emails for a few hours in the morning, which is a clear representation of portions of Senge’s model in action. In my mind, it’s not at all Schön’s perspective on reflection-on or reflection-in or reflection of and on practice; it’s entirely separate, because it’s an intellectual activity, not a creative one. Then, they open Figma and do whatever one does in Figma, and they go through the process of moving and looking and trying and accessing and tool transparency and tool opaqueness and something pops out the other side. While the output feeds the organizational cycle through later meetings and shareouts and working sessions, it’s entirely personal. (Is it? What about accessing a component library of Lego pieces?) Then they have a crit, and other designers come in and throw some stones and move things around in Figma while other people are watching and talking, and that’s some sort of hybrid thing happening, but I don’t think that’s what the authors are talking about here.

So in the spirit of understanding but not judging, I see the Schön model happening over and over (but in the small bursts and false-starts of a company) at the “speed of light,” and then slowing wayyyyyy down to be introduced in the model that the authors are presenting. Their positioning of the model in the Senge context makes sense to me, then, because the Senge context seems absent of time.So in this reading, the Senge model is one of minutia, not long-term. I don’t think that’s what he meant, because visioning is almost by definition a long-term process, but I’ll live with it for now.

It'sinteresting to read this in context of the Mewburn article, because this whole argument is based on the work she round-about-denigrated based on its sample of one. I would assume that’s going to play out with the other thousands of Schön-grounded articles I’ve read and will keep reading.

Also, I think I’m still allowing myself to judge mercilessly, and I don’t understand the title at all; Advancing Donald Schön’s Reflective Practitioner: Where to Next? has pretty much nothing to do with the article (except for the closing paragraphs.)