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Home | Resource Center | Book Reviews | The Reflective Practitioner
| Title |
| The Reflective Practitioner ~ How Professionals Think in Action |
| Author |
| Schön, Donald A. |
| Publisher |
| Basic Books Inc, 1983 |
| ISBN |
| 0-465-0678-2 |
| Number of Pages |
| 374 |
| Reviewed by |
| Lynne Eighinger, MBA, CI/CT, SC:L, Master Mentor |
| Author's Perspective/Expertise |
| The author is a professional in a technical field who became an educator and, at the time the book was published, was a Ford Professor of Urban Studies and Education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. |
| Audience |
| The book is intended for educators of professionals. Although the book is intended for educators of professionals, it has compelling implications and benefits for non-educators. The book is intended to be applicable across industries and disciplines, both “hard” and “soft” professions. For interpreters, mentors, and educators it could be of great deal of value to the more educated generalist. |
| Focus |
| The focus of this publication is on the validity of education applicable to practice. There has been a gap between what is being taught to students of a profession and what professionals actually do. This gap is a result of professionals being unable or unwilling to articulate decision-making processes manifested in observable actions. Access to decision-making processes would enable those novices and students to replicate these critical steps. |
| Content |
| Reflection-in-Action is defined as engaging in a process whose underlying structure is a reflective conversation with a unique and uncertain situation. (p. 130) The book’s goal is to explain the value of practicing reflection-in-action for practitioners, educators, and mentors. It tries to demystify the cognitive and more abstract decisions and processes made by professionals. It uniquely describes how absence of reflection-in-action affects our thinking about profession. With reflection-in-action, much of the information about professions is reduced to technical, linear, or quantitative types of information. However, the “soft” professions such as counseling/therapy require glimpses into mental processes. The author compares and provides scenarios from both the hard (such as engineering) and soft professions to demonstrate the value of this reflection-in-action across industries.
The process of reflection-in-action resembles much of the mentoring dialogues (and educator/student) being discussed, taught, and utilized with the focus on mentee/student focused and directed learning. There are a number of helpful “guides” to establishing and engaging in a reflection-in-action discussion that can be utilized by an educator or mentor to enhance and enrich their dialogues:
• Conditions or structure conducive to Reflection-in-Action dialogues (page 129)
• Set of parameters and processes for the dialogue (page 241) which includes on-the-spot surfacing of a dilemma, criticizing the framing of the dilemma [by the student or mentee], restructuring and reframing the dilemma utilizing past experiences with similar but not the same dilemma, testing of intuitive understandings of experienced phenomena through a reflective conversation WITH the situation.
• Insight into the guide’s goal for the discussion (as well as things to avoid) by describing Models of Behavior (page 226)
• Model of “Sources of Satisfaction” congruent to experiences educators and mentors express as reasons they move beyond being a practitioner (page 300); and
• Reflective Contract demonstrating the characteristics of a student/mentee who may benefit most from Reflection-in-Action discussions (page 302)
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| Value |
| The value of this book to interpreters, interpreter educators, and mentors is the emphasis on the need to analyze our work and reflect upon it “in action”. This reflection teaches and will enable us to articulate the choices and decisions we make when faced with typical and atypical dilemmas while interpreting. Such reflection will not only benefit the practitioner, who is constantly making decisions on the job, to carefully evaluating decisions on a conscious level but will also be of value to educators and mentors in transmitting these processes to students and mentees. Through a reflective conversation, educators and mentors can move theoretical discussions away from “it depends” to more conscious decision-making processes. Educators and mentors are now equipped with a tool when questions from protégés and students with respect to abstract processes that the standard “it depends” is intended to evoke. Such reflection-in-action will assist educators and mentors in moving from mystery to mastery (p. 126). It allows students of interpretation and mentees to interact with the intuitive decisions made by veteran practitioners in artificial (safe) ways. This can provide insight into the repertoire of choices these veterans have accumulated; it can minimize the “on the job” and riskier forms of learning; and it can help to build a set of choices to be applied across a variety of dilemmas.
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