Reflective practice has long been accepted as part of how professionals develop and improve their service. There is a great deal of advice out there about what it is, and what you have to do in reflective practice, but very little of this advice looks at reflective practice from a philosophical point of view.
In his 1983 book The Reflective Practitioner Donald Schön said that reflecting on practice could be done from a distance. Sometimes, ‘in the relative tranquillity of a postmortem, they think back on a project they have undertaken, a situation they have lived through, and they explore the understandings they have brought to their handling of the case’(61).
But Schön’s main point in the book is not that reflection should always be done at a distance. He talks about reflection in practice, or reflection in action. His hope is that practitioners become reflectors in practice, where wise decisions become habitual, almost second nature.
Perhaps the reflection on practice is the hard work that has to be done so that reflection in action becomes habitual.
How then might philosophical work help with reflection on practice? In the quotation above, Schön spoke of exploring one’s understanding. Perhaps it is here, with understanding and its relation to philosophical work, that we should be looking for the difference that reflection can make on the path to becoming a reflective practitioner?
Thinking about the term ‘reflection’ alone for a moment, a reflection in a mirror doesn’t change anything, it just reproduces it. It is, rather, our experience of the reflection in the mirror that creates change. The experience here consists of trying to understand what we see, and importantly, how we judge what we see. Don’t we, on the one hand, seek mirrors because we want to see ourselves, and yet, on the other hand, also fear them and even avoid them, precisely because they provoke unsettling and often unhappy experiences and questions for us.
So, perhaps the path to becoming a reflective practitioner in action, by means of reflecting on action, is a path travelled by the hard work of facing up to these experiences of reflection and trying to understand them. And this is where being a bit more philosophical can help.
The technical approach to understanding is the input-output model. At a training day you pour new knowledge and information into the heads of the participants and assume that having new knowledge is the same as understanding it.
The philosophical approach is different. It believes that increasing our understanding means deepening it. And that means not receiving knowledge as information, but working with knowledge as ideas, making sense of them, testing them out, asking questions, offering critiques… all of this is the work of understanding. It is this work that changes what we think, and changes who we are, sometime dramatically, sometimes in small ways. But it is this work, the work of internalising reflection so that we change how we understand ourselves, that is then the way that reflection can become habitual in action. We become an ‘experienced’ practitioner able to think on our feet because we habitually reflect on events with a deeper understanding. We have more to call on in the decisions we make. The decisions made by experienced practitioners may look spontaneous but they rest on years of learning to understand. And the understanding gained is not kept separate from the work of the professional. The work of understanding becomes the worker. It becomes who we. What reflective professionals bring to situations is not a textbook but themselves. We are the whole package, a fusion of knowing, understanding, and doing.
One last thought on how this work of philosophical reflection on action (in professional development and training) can become the habitual deeper understanding of reflection in action.
Working with small groups in a conversational atmosphere, the philosophical session brings a third partner into reflection on practice. This can be a text or an idea. It enables the reflecting practitioners to rehearse their thinking in indirect ways, thinking about the implications for themselves, but without having to put themselves at risk as the subject and object of what is being talked about. One person on one of our courses put it like this: ‘The course was also a safe way to think and talk about things. By using the readings to initiate conversation, without asking me for personal or professional stories, the session was “depersonalised,” “neutral,” which helped to open up the conversation more carefully.’
In other words, the question ‘what would Plato say about things we are reflecting on’ is not an irrelevance. It is a way of rehearsing our own critical thinking by way of an invited partner in the conversation. Working with ideas helps us to understand and to learn, and the experience of doing so is what develops us as individuals and practitioners, and as managers and leaders.