Sounds simple... yet recent research proposes that reflection is the key to "teacher preparation."  The architect behind reflection in education is Dr. Donald Schon.

Learn more in the following article about the father of modern reflection in education, Donal Schön.

Schön, a philosopher, held sacrosanct the notion of effective practice and consequently tried to help educators teach professionals how to be competent in practice. He brought these ideas to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT.

"He basically created this concept of the reflective practitioner, where we try to create a school where the whole program is based on practice, and learning from practice,"said Bishwapriya Sanyal, head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

The concept of a reflective practitioner is developed in Schön's published works, which include Beyond the Stable State, The Reflective Practitioner, and Educating the Reflective Practitioner. The thought behind the reflective practitioner is to understand "the difference between espoused theory and how things really happen in life," Sanyal said.

Read this short piece, The Integration of the Disciplines: The Reflective Practitioner. 

Professional Development School Co-Liaison Reflection Todd B. Finley, Ph.D. - Assistant Professor of English (Education) - East Carolina University

Thursday, August 27, 2001

I was asked to focus on the Kenan-sponsored CCL training and its effect on my professional development experiences as a PDS liaison. Here's my story.

Volunteering

When I heard about the PDS liaison and advisory team position, I volunteered two minutes later. Here was a chance for me to collaboratively build a bridge from the public school system to the university, improve my credibility and relevance as an ECU education professor, and serve the community. Special training by CCL in Denver -complete with free Sobe yogurt drinks, expert facilitators, M & Ms, and a bedside fireplace clickers- sealed the deal. I couldn't wait to get started.

Early Assumptions

Going in, I knew that my job was going to be complicated. Professors of education suffer credibility gaps with public school teachers due to their insulation from public school classrooms. Ivory tower towers make their demands, but none of them involve meeting the demands of 120 students. Every second in the classroom, teachers manage an overwhelming set of systems: helping a student's 100 billion neurons effectively and uniquely master content knowledge and strategies; accommodating shifting physical, social, racial, and cognitive needs; synthesizing contradictory political, philosophical, cultural, and curricular mandates into a coherent pedagogical model; referencing taxonomies from psychology, multiculturalism, curriculum studies, philosophy, assessment, multiple intelligences, motivation, classroom management, various academic content areas; law, ethics, phenomenology, power relations, public relations, speech, child development, first aid, and crisis intervention; drawing from instructional models and techniques such as cooperative learning, explicit instruction, the Socratic method, portfolios, scaffolding, technology circles, writing response, whole-to-part and part-to-whole approaches, rubrics, performance tasks, graphic organizers, schema activation, the scientific process, QARs, K-W-Ls, DRTAs, outcome-based and interdisciplinary thematic instruction, hands-on activities, and guided discovery just to name a few.

Then, every five years, bulldoze all of the above with a new district-mandated educational initiative… or bring in the PDS liaisons and establish a team!

Center for Creative Leadership PDS Training

During the Colorado CCL training, we truly "bonded" during the engaging decontextualized exercises: collaborative straw tower building, collaborative paper airplane construction, collaborative blind-folded puzzle solving, collaborative alligator walk, collaborative scenic mountain treasure hunts…but whenever we discussed the structure or focus of the PDS, 90% of the participants collaborated in silence or with a monosyllabic word of agreement. One of the elementary instructors, during a Sobe break whispered, "Notice that none of the teachers are talking?"

After returning to the discussion table, I observed more closely and saw the truth of the comment. As we all sat around the big conference table rocking in our comfortable chairs, old hierarchical patterns of communication and decision-making increased the more we discussed implementation.Nobody intentionally perpetuated restrictions to honest inquiry. But there it was, as ineffable and constant as apprehension. If there is one requirement for school transformation, it is risk.

A year after our last CCL training session, I wonder what truths have teachers or decision-makers failed to tell me? Do I have a complete picture? Do I take another step? Or have I stepped too far already? In the space of a few days, the CCL training experience could not have inoculated us against restrictions to academic freedom. But given more time, CCL might have encouraged professional truths to find necessary expression by securing for each participant safe passage through real or imagined political tripwires.

Conclusions

Being a PDS liaison has been more challenging, meaningful and fun than other professional experience I've encountered. I am awed at the dedication of my co-liaison, our superintendent, my principal, the PDS coordinator, and Dean. I find myself more awake to the terrible compromises that teachers are forced to make in order to carry out curriculum and pedagogy that satisfies conflicting professional standards and pleases nobody. From these subjective constructions have emerged my desire to do more than collect data and write up interpretations in articles that have diluted impact, if any at all. I want to advocate for teachers and students through the deliberate, systematic, and collaborative application of logic to environments in order to advance them.Yet, unmitigated by vigilant attention to the political fabric that reweaves at the junctures where multiple systems interact, dangerous miscalculations are a luxury that only naïve academics can afford. After foolishly barnstorming instead of respecting the efficacy of inaction, perplexing the powerful, risking tenure and family, ignoring what is not said and who doesn't say it, I am wiser now, and more apt to listen than encroach.

Could the CCL training have helped me avoid my mistakes? Perhaps. Perhaps through experiences designed to help us all critically examine and respond to our own specific contexts, settings, and social phenomenon. Perhaps via fast iterations, collaborative goal-fostered benchmarking, and rigorous accountability. These efforts -no stranger to time, money, and investment- would produce stable foundations of communication upon which to build open-mindedness and whole-hearted action long after the evaporating memories of sweet yogurt beverages and easy dreams.

Note that this is a more revised "reflection" than the ones you write in your own journals. That's because it will be shared widely with people who could have me fired. I also retreat behind big words to fire off some fairly challenging remarks. Had I been more direct and informal, I might have just said, "Boy, let's listen to teachers and do what they say" rather than just putting them on committees and telling them what to do."

But I want to keep my job.

Reflect on your own interests as a researcher