The Reflective Practitioner How Professionals Think in Action

A searching, not wholly successful attempt to analyze the kind of intuitive thinking creative professionals bring to their enterprise - be it psychotherapy, architecture, management, or urban planning; The operational word here is practice: Schon, presently professor of Urban Studies and Education at MIT, has been a consultant and planner; and he first explores the dichotomy between what academics profess and practitioners practice. He also notes shifts in American attitudes - from great expectations of experts in a post-industrial society to rejection of technocrats as begetters of physical and moral blight. The word "academic" has become even more pejorative. Successful practitioners, meanwhile, are hard put to explain how they operate. Schon has studied particular examples of problem-solving via transcriptions; he describes the verbal and nonverbal thinking entailed as "reflection in action," and tries to demonstrate how it operates. Professional practitioners do not pigeonhole problems in standard categories and apply fixed rules; instead, they see each problem as unique - a "universe of one," in Erik Erikson's phrase. They may "frame" the problem, generating questions that enable them to see likenesses and differences, and exercising selection and choice to narrow the focus. The process involves a continual back-and-forthness aimed at changing the situation and arriving at a satisfactory solution - which, in turn, can be evaluated using appropriate criteria. The approach is a lot different from classic Newtonian hypothesis-testing - but it is not very different from the kind of problem-solving that has been described by cognitive psychologists Or analysts of creativity. Still, some of Schon's examples are interesting - a senior psychoanalyst discussing a case with a third-year resident, for example, or an architect suggesting ways to construct a school on a "screwy site." He has also usefully articulated the schism between what professional schools teach and what practitioners in the real world require. (Kirkus Reviews)

A leading M.I.T. social scientist and consultant examines five professions - engineering, architecture, management, psychotherapy, and town planning - to show how professionals really go about solving problems. The best professionals, Donald Schön maintains, know more than they can put into words. To meet the challenges of their work, they rely less on formulas learned in graduate school than on the kind of improvisation learned in practice. This unarticulated, largely unexamined process is the subject of Schön's provocatively original book, an effort to show precisely how 'reflection-in-action' works and how this vital creativity might be fostered in future professionals.

Contents: Professional Knowledge and Reflection-in-Action: The crisis of confidence in professional knowledge; From technical rationality to reflection-in-action. Professional Contexts for Reflection-in-Action: Design as a reflective conversation with the situation; Psychotherapy: The patient as a universe of one; The structure of reflection-in-action; Reflective practice in the science-based professions; Town planning: Limits to reflection-in-action; The art of managing: Reflection-in-action within an organizational learning system; Patterns and limits of reflection-in-action across the professions. Conclusion: Implications for the professions and their place in society.

Donald A. Schön, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA