Thoughts on Reflective Practice

In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground where practitioners can make effective use of research-based theory and technique, and there is a swampy lowland where situations are confusing “messes” incapable of technical solution.  The difficulty is that the problems of the high ground, however great their technical interest, are often relatively unimportant to clients or to the larger society, while in the swamp are the problems of the greatest human concern. ~Donald Schon

In the preceding sections of this book, I was aiming to answer the question, “what does an aspiring or practicing Learning Strategist need to know and be able to do to be effective in their work”- the prerequisite knowledge sets, skills, competencies, artistries, crafts of the work. But assuming that mere adequacy is not your professional goal, there must be some consideration of improvement, an acknowledgement that this state of prerequisite skillfulness is not a place to arrive but a thing to develop.  It’s a thing that can be said of all professions – becoming an improved Learning Strategist involves much more than simply knowing a set of rote techniques and bits of foundational knowledge.  It requires doing the work, again and again.  So, we turn our attention now to a different question: “How do you become a better Learning Strategist?”

Here I will offer the notion of professional development through reflective practice. I place a particular emphasis on the thinking of Donald Schon, who argues that a practice like ours is messy and indeterminate and that we figure it out, not by mere technical rationality or the codes of “best practice” but by wrestling with the “materials of the situation”, encountering the work in action and then reflecting upon that. So, there are dispositions, sets of attitudes and knowledge and skills that form a kind of foundational assemblage of qualifications for the role, but more important than that is the ongoing practice of stopping and thinking about the work and how you do it. Following are some thoughts on that.

Consider again the question: how does one become a better Learning Strategist?

It’s an obvious answer. Do more. Learn more. Practice more. And you will improve at what you do. But it is here where we collide with what Donald Schon called the predicament and paradox of learning. He said: “…a student cannot at first understand what he needs to learn, can learn it only by educating himself, and can educate himself only by beginning to do what he does not yet understand” (2026, p. 93). In other words, to learn a new thing paradoxically requires first doing something you don’t know how to do. To become a better practitioner is to learn new things, new techniques, new approaches. But how do we learn those things without doing them? And how do we do them without learning them?  It requires a kind of faith, a suspension of disbelief. We cannot wait for perfect clarity before acting; rather, we act in order to achieve clarity. Picasso expressed something similar when he said “to know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing.” And so, this idea guides our approach to professional development. The arena in which we strive to become better practitioners, to honing our craft, is in this cryptic but mutually reinforcing space between learning and doing.  And how we make sense of things in that space is through reflective practice. 

Reflective Practice 

Reflective practice is an overused but under-explained phrase but essentially refers to the idea of incorporating acts of reflection – looking back – as a way of becoming more proficient at one’s work, reflection, as opposed to, or in addition to training (one does not preclude the other). Thoughtful reflection upon one’s practice is an essential part of becoming a better practitioner. This is especially true in a context where a prescribed “code of practice” is largely absent. Our profession is not yet built upon a solid theoretical and methodological foundation so, reflection becomes even more important to initiate the process of articulating, refining, challenging, disrupting, questioning, and perturbing our own and others’ assumptions about good learning strategy support provision that will hopefully become the everyday way of doing things.

While we collectively work on better establishing some grounding principles and models for the work, it remains complex, emergent, and dynamic rather than static and prescribed. Considering Schon’s quote that opens this section, we exist mainly in the “swamp” dealing with the messy problems of greatest concern. The provision of learning strategy support means entering into a conversation with another person who is wrestling with the human processes involved in learning. This is messy business. Reference to a “Learning Strategy Manual” characterised by “Rules of the Work”  (Schon’s “high ground”) only takes us so far. There are too many variables at play, like a chess game, that will make each encounter in learning strategy support unique. And each Learning Strategist will experience this idiosyncratically.

Personally, I’m glad for the fact that there isn’t a “manual” or a credential for learning strategy work because it makes it less likely that we get cornered into “ways of doing” things.  And an un-critical commitment to these ways-of-doing-things inhibits practitioners from spontaneous participation in-the-moment, from embracing the chaos of human interaction, from being open to disruption, from a tolerance for messiness. I much prefer an approach to work that is mindful and reflective. This is not meant as some new-age mantra but rather a way of approaching work that is more daring and thoughtful and underpinned by a belief in the benefits of un-planned learning. It requires risk and accident, and a tolerance for mistakes and, above all, reflection and conversation and participation.

That open stance, however, does not imply limitlessness, or an attitude of “anything goes” in Learning Strategy work. As I hope this book illuminates, there is knowledge that is prerequisite of good LS work. There are relevant “competencies”, “skills, “arts”, “crafts”, talents” to be developed. My point is that these things are developed best, not through training where competency checklists can be marked, but through practice, and then thoughtful reflection in and upon that practice, mediating in that space between learning and doing. The word “reflection” can land as intuitive but also meaningless or un-defined. It is a favorite word in the field of education, simply inserted into many of its beloved “models” (Kolb, for eg), but what do we mean by it? Well, according to Schon, “reflective practice is a dialogue of thinking and doing through which I become more skillful”.

Let that sit with you for a minute.

Schon spent his formidable career thinking and writing about the so-called “professions” and problematizing the pervasive idea that the practical professions are to be informed by “technical rationality” or, more simply, by basic science and positivist epistemologies. He says that professional schools exist in universities as a problematic idea, and, also problematic is the basic approach to training professionals; that is, to first teach them basic science, then the science applied to their particular profession, and then offer a practicum in which they practice applying the science to their particular situation. He argues that this “normative curriculum” does not account for the “uniqueness, uncertainty, and conflict” inherent in the everyday practice of a profession. In short, there is a gross over-reliance on technical rationality in the development of skillful practitioners of professions. He asks the salient question: “when people do things well, what kind of knowledge do they reveal”? His answer is that we reveal a knowledge that is tacit, and it is through a process of reflecting on what we DO that we reveal what we KNOW. He calls this knowing-in action.

But, further, he also recognizes that sometimes a professional is presented with a situation that surprises, a situation in which we are caught off-guard and cannot apply that knowing-in-action. In this case, the professional will engage in what he calls reflection-in-action – the capacity to think about what we’re doing while we are doing it, to adjust, adapt, improvise. It’s a conversation with the situation, with the “materials of their art”.

And, finally, the skillful practitioner, will also engage in what he calls reflection-on-action – an engagement with the situation sometime after it has happened, to assess the outcomes, what could have gone differently, what can be learned.

This is the art of reflective practice – a practice that much better accounts for and deals with uniqueness, uncertainty, and conflict in people’s work – what Schon calls the “indeterminate zones of practice”.

What we want to be doing, as learning strategy practitioners, is engaging in our work continuously open to the possibility of learning something new about ourselves, about our approach, about the learning process, about others’, about how our colleagues do their work, and about how we might do things differently. Gillian Bolton suggests that the route towards this is “…through spirited enquiry leading to constructive developmental change and personal and professional integrity based on deep understandings”. 

If we do this in a “spirited” way, then we are more likely to achieve our goal of “developmental change” – that is, getting better at what we do. And by “better” I simply mean having a larger repertoire. Here’s a metaphor:

Imagine two hockey players – Player A and Player B. Both play centre, both are very good, both are very well trained. Imagine them both facing the same situation, let’s say, penetrating the offensive zone, going towards the net without the puck. Imagine the right-winger has the puck, racing down the right side. The other winger is trailing the play on the left. It’s a straightforward, run-of-the-mill scenario. The puck carrier will either shoot the puck or try to thread a pass to the centreman, who will then shoot the puck, and the trailing left winger can pick up a possible rebound if the shot doesn’t go in.  Both our hockey players have been in this situation many times and there is a kind of orthodoxy to that scenario that makes response instinctual.

Ok. That’s the scene.

In the first scenario, Player A races to the net, notices the puck-carrier has made a pass, so he gets his stick down and tries a shot on net. The goalie reads it all the way and makes an easy save. In scenario two, Player B does the same thing – races towards the net, notices the pass coming but, in an instant of intuition, remembers that the left winger is just trailing the play. So, Player B, makes a motion to suggest he is taking the pass but then intentionally misses it allowing the pass to go through his legs to the left-winger. The goalie is momentarily frozen by this quick turn of events and the left-winger makes a quick shot into an open net for an easy goal.

What Player B was able to do that Player A did not was draw upon, not only experience but on a fuller reading of the whole picture. He “saw” more possibilities than Player A who simply went with the orthodox response.

Your goal is to become Player B.

This, by the way, is what Player B (Mario Lemieux) looks like – 2002 Olympic gold medal game – Pronger to Kariya with magic by Lemieux, who is gifted with an enhanced repertoire.