Reflective Practice

Conceptual Overview

The concepts of reflection and of reflective practice have become pivotal within contemporary approaches to professional and management development. Action learning, experiential learning methods, project-based learning, sensitivity training, outdoor management development, and coaching are all based on the idea that learning and the development of understanding can be generated through reflecting on experience. The appeal of learning through reflective practice, whether in the workplace or in formal development programs, is undoubtedly the sense of immediacy that this approach to learning offers. The application of ideas to action and to practice is not, as is the case in more traditional educational methods, delayed or deferred until some future experience presents itself. Engaging reflectively and thoughtfully with experience in the context of work, career, or profession is more likely to involve relevance than learning that is based predominantly on the abstract content of formal education curricula.

The origins of reflective practice are to be found in the writing of the philosopher and educator John Dewey. Dewey's description of the process of reflecting on experience echoes contemporary theory and practice in emphasizing that thinking involves the sense of a problem, the observation of conditions, the elaboration of a possible conclusion, and testing this conclusion through active experimentation. David Kolb's development of these ideas together with those of Piaget and Lewin has been seminal in the experience-based approaches to learning adopted in management development practice. Kolb writes of learning as a process in which ideas are not fixed and immutable but formed and reformed through experience.

A parallel development can be traced within adult education, notably the work of Malcolm Knowles and his propositions for self-directed learning. Knowles's ideas, based on those of Eduard Lindeman—who in turn was much influenced by Dewey—are also characterized by the importance attached to learning through reflection on experience.

A third writer whose ideas have influenced thinking and practice in adult and particularly professional development is Donald Schön. If the application of Kolb's and Knowles's ideas can be most clearly seen in formal approaches to the education and development of professional people, Schön's idea of the reflective practitioner foregrounds the more tacit element of learning in ways that underline the importance of reflection. For Schön, reflection is not just a retrospective process but part of the ongoing way in which understanding and experience interrelate, both consciously and often out of reach of our awareness. Schön described his concept of reflection-in-action as involving in real time—surfacing, criticizing, and testing our intuitive understanding of a particular experience in the manner of a “reflective conversation” with the situation.

Common to all these theories is the central idea that however else we acquire knowledge—from reading, from conversation, or from formal education—the learning derived from reflecting on experience has a special place because by its nature it is situated in the context within which we hope to develop, change, and otherwise enhance our ability to act, make choices and decisions, and relate to others. This process involves not only the application of knowledge but the testing and development of ideas that we carry with us into future situations. Small wonder, then, that reflecting on experience has had such a profound influence on the practice of learning within a professional and organizational context.

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