Schon Reflection-in-Action

Donald Schön's distinction between reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action is the foundational conceptual move of the modern reflective practice tradition. Set out in The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, published by Basic Books in 1983, the framework reframed professional expertise as a form of thinking embedded in doing rather than as the application of pre-formed theory.

Knowing-in-action

Schön begins with what he calls knowing-in-action: the tacit, intuitive, spontaneous knowing that competent practitioners exhibit while performing skilled tasks. A teacher's pacing of an explanation, their decision to elicit before explaining, their reading of a class's confusion — all are examples of knowing carried in the act, much of it not consciously articulated and not reducible to rules learned in training.

Reflection-in-action

When a situation departs from routine — when something surprises, fails, or presents a conflict of values — the practitioner can reflect while still acting. This is reflection-in-action: thinking about what one is doing in the doing of it, on the timescale of seconds and minutes, in a way that reshapes the action mid-stream. A teacher who notices a planned activity is not landing and pivots to a different staging without leaving the lesson is reflecting-in-action. The reflective move is provoked by surprise — the gap between what knowing-in-action expected and what is happening — and produces, in the moment, a revised theory of the situation that guides the next move.

Reflection-on-action

Reflection on action, by contrast, is reflection that takes place after the event: the post-lesson conversation, the journal entry, the feedback debrief. It allows the practitioner to revisit decisions at leisure, articulate what was tacit, and extract lessons for subsequent practice. Both modes are valuable, but Schön's distinctive contribution was the in-action mode — the claim that professionals do think while practising and that this thinking is the core of expertise.

Critique of technical rationality

Schön framed The Reflective Practitioner as a critique of what he called the technical rationality model of professional knowledge — the assumption that practice is the application of scientific theory to instrumental problems. He argued that this model could not account for the actual realities of practice, which are uncertain, unique, unstable, and value-laden. Practising professionals deal with the swampy lowlands of indeterminate problems, not the high ground of textbook ones, and the expertise that handles the swamp is reflection-in-action.

Position in teacher education

Schön's framework underpins much of the Reflective Practice tradition that became central to teacher education in the 1980s and 1990s. Frameworks such as the Gibbs Reflective Cycle and Korthagen's ALACT Model are mostly concerned with reflection-on-action; the harder construct, reflection-in-action, has been more often invoked than empirically operationalised, and remains contested in the literature.

References

• Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic Books.
• Schön, D. A. (1987). Educating the reflective practitioner. Jossey-Bass.