Unit 08

Major Proponents of Reflective Practice

 Students Learning Outcomes

After Completion this unit, students will be able to:

1- What is the concept of John Dewey
2- Explain the idea of L. Stanhouse
3- What are the thoughts of D,Schon
Content

• John Dewey
• L. Stanhouse
• D,Schon
 John Dewey

• Introduction John Dewey (1859 - 1952) has made, arguably, the most significant contribution
to the development of educational thinking in the twentieth century.
• He was an American psychologist, philosopher, educator, social critic and political activist.
Dewey's philosophical pragmatism, concern with interaction, reflection and experience, and
interest in community and democracy, were brought together to form a highly suggestive
educative form.
• John Dewey is often misrepresented - and wrongly associated with child-centered education.
• In many respects his work cannot be easily slotted into any one of the curriculum traditions
that have dominated North American and UK schooling traditions over the last century. John
Dewey's significance for informal educators lays in a number of areas.
• First, his belief that education must engage with and enlarge experience
has continued to be a significant strand in informal education practice.
• Second, and linked to this, Dewey's exploration of thinking and reflection
- and the associated role of educators has continued to be an inspiration.
• Third, his concern with interaction and environments for learning provide
a continuing framework for practice.
• And finally, his passion for democracy, for educating so that all may share in a
common life, provides a strong rationale for practice in the collaborative settings in
which educators work. Dewey’s Early Years John Dewey was born October 20, 1859,
in Burlington, Vermont.
• Dewey completed grade-school at the age of 12 in Burlington's public schools. He
entered high school in 1872 and selected the college-preparatory track (this option
became available only a few years previously).
• Dewey completed his high school courses in three years. He began his college studies
at the University of Vermont, in Burlington, in 1875, when he was 16 years old.
• Dewey graduated from the University of Vermont in 1879.
• Through a relative, he obtained a high school teaching position in Oil City, Pennsylvania, where he
was part of a three-member faculty for two years.
• Dewey returned to Vermont in 1881, where he combined high school teaching with continuing
study of philosophy, under the tutoring of Dewey's former undergraduate professor, Henry A. P.
Torrey.
• In September 1882, Dewey enrolled at Johns Hopkins University to begin graduate studies in
philosophy. Upon completion of his Ph.D., Dewey was recommended, by one of his advisers, for a
position as a junior professor at the University at Michigan, where he inevitably became the
department chair of the philosophy department. In 1894, Dewey joined the staff at the four year old
University of Chicago.
• John Dewey and the Art of Teaching: Toward Reflective Practice. “We do
not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience.” ―
John Dewey “Education is a social process; education is growth;
education is not preparation for life but is life itself.”
• John Dewey Dewey stated “I believe that the teacher's place and work in
the school is to be interpreted from this same basis.”
• “The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there
as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in
properly responding to these influences” (1897).
• This was one of many quotations that the educational community faulted, in that it was felt that the teacher
would lose control of the students in a child-centred environment.
• Dewey also states his belief in authentic education by writing “I believe that the only way to make the
child conscious of his social heritage is to enable him to perform those fundamental types of activity which
make civilization what it is.” “I believe, therefore, in the so-called expressive or constructive activities as
the centre of correlation.” “I believe that this gives the standard for the place of cooking, sewing, manual
training, etc., in the school” (1897).
• In Dewey’s extensive works throughout his life, he outlined his views on how education could improve
society.
• The founder of what became known as the progressive education movement, Dewey
argued that it was the job of education to encourage individuals to develop their full
potential as human beings.
• He was especially critical of the rote learning of facts in schools and argued that
children should learn by experience. In this way students would not just gain knowledge
but would also develop skills, habits and attitudes necessary for them to solve a wide
variety of problems.
• Experience and Reflective Thinking Dewey was careful in his writings to make clear
what kinds of experiences were most valuable and useful. Some experiences are merely
passive affairs, pleasant or painful but not educative.
• An educative experience, according to Dewey, is an experience in which we make a
connection between what we do to things and what happens to them or us in consequence;
the value of an experience lies in the perception of relationships or continuities among
events.
• Thus, if a child reaches for a candle flame and burns his hand, he experiences pain, but this
is not an educative experience unless he realizes that touching the flame resulted in a burn
and, moreover, formulates the general expectation that flames will produce burns if touched.
• In just this way, before we are formally instructed, we learn much about the world,
ourselves, and others. It is this natural form of learning from experience, by doing and then
reflecting on what happened, which Dewey made central in his approach to schooling.
• In fact, he defined the educational process as a "continual reorganization, reconstruction and
transformation of experience" for he believed that it is only through experience that man
learns about the world and only by the use of his experience that man can maintain and
better himself in the world.
• Reflective thinking and the perception of relationships arise only in
problematical situations. As long as our interaction with our environment
is a fairly smooth affair we may think of nothing or merely daydream, but
when this untroubled state of affairs is disrupted we have a problem which
must be solved before the untroubled state can be restored.
• Learning For Dewey, learning was primarily an activity which arises from
the personal experience of grappling with a problem.
• This concept of learning implied a theory of education far different from the dominant school
practice of his day, when students passively received information that had been packaged and
predigested by teachers and textbooks.
• Thus, Dewey argued, the schools did not provide genuine learning experiences but only an endless
amassing of facts, which were fed to the students, who gave them back and soon forgot them.
• Dewey distinguished between the psychological and the logical organization of subject matter by
comparing the learner to an explorer who maps an unknown territory. The explorer, like the learner,
does not know what terrain and adventures his journey holds in store for him.
• He has yet to discover mountains, deserts, and water holes and to suffer fever, starvation, and other
hardships. Finally, when the explorer returns from his journey, he will have a hard-won knowledge
of the country he has traversed.
• Then, and only then, can he produce a map of the region. The map, like a textbook, is an abstraction
which omits his thirst, his courage, his despairs and triumphs–the experiences which made his
journey personally meaningful. The map records only the relationships between landmarks and
terrain, the logic of the features without the psychological revelations of the journey itself.
• Although learning experiences may be described in isolation, education for Dewey consisted in the
cumulative and unending acquisition, combination, and reordering of such experiences.
• Just as a tree does not grow by having new branches and leaves wired to it each spring, so
educational growth does not consist in mechanically adding information, skills, or even educative
experiences to students in grade after grade.
• Rather, educational growth consists in combining past experiences with present experiences in order
to receive and understand future experiences.
• To grow, the individual must continually reorganize and reformulate past experiences in the light of new
experiences in a cohesive fashion. School and Life From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the
school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and
freeway within the school itself; while on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is
learning in school.
• That is the isolation of the school–its isolation from life. When the child gets into the school room he has
to put out of his mind a large part of the ideas, interests and activities that predominate in his home and
neighborhood.
• So the school being unable to utilize this everyday experience, sets painfully to work on another tack and
by a variety of means, to arouse in the child an interest in school studies gap existing between the
everyday experiences of the child and the isolated material supplied in such large measure in the school.
• To bridge this chasm between school and life, Dewey advocated a method
of teaching which began with the everyday experience of the child.
• Dewey maintained that unless the initial connection was made between
school activities and the life experiences of the child, genuine learning and
growth would be impossible.
• Nevertheless, he was careful to point out that while the experiential
familiar was the natural and meaningful place to begin learning
• It was more importantly the "intellectual starting point for moving out into the unknown
and not an end in itself". To further reduce the distance between school and life, Dewey
urged that the school be made into an embryonic social community which simplified but
resembled the social life of the community at large.
• A society, he reasoned, "is a number of people held together because they are working
along common lines, in a common spirit, and with reference to common aims.
• The common needs and aims demand a growing interchange of thought and growing unity
of sympathetic feeling." The tragic weakness of the schools of his time was that they were
endeavoring "to prepare future members of the social order in a medium in which the
conditions of the social spirit [were] eminently wanting".
• Thus Dewey affirmed his fundamental belief in the two-sidedness of the educational process.
Neither the psychological nor the sociological purpose of education could be neglected if evil
results were not to follow.
• To isolate the school from life was to cut students off from the psychological ties which make
learning meaningful; not to provide a school environment which prepared students for life in
society was to waste the resources of the school as a socializing institution.
• Democracy and Education Dewey thought that in a democratic society the school should
provide students with the opportunity to experience democracy in action.
• For Dewey, democracy was more than a form of government; it was a way of living which
went beyond politics, votes, and laws to pervade all aspects of society.
• Dewey recognized that every social group, even a band of thieves, is held together by certain common interests,
goals, values, and meanings, and he knew that every such group also comes into contact with other groups.
• He believed, however, that the extent to which democracy has been attained in any society can be measured by
the extent to which differing groups share similar values, goals, and interests and interact freely and fruitfully
with each other.
• Dewey's belief in democracy and in the schools' ability to provide a staging platform for social progress
pervades all his work but is perhaps most clearly stated in his early Pedagogic Creed: “I believe that education
is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.
• All reforms which rest simply upon the enactment of law, or the threatening of certain penalties, or upon
changes in mechanical or outward arrangements, are transitory and futile….By law and punishment, by social
agitation and discussion, society can regulate and form itself in a more or less haphazard and chance way.
But through education society can formulate its own purposes, can organize
its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and
economy in the direction in which it wishes to move.
Education thus conceived marks the most perfect and intimate union of
science and art conceivable in human experience”.
 Donald Schon
• John Dewey (1904, 1933) was among the first to write about Reflective
Practice with his exploration of experience, interaction and reflection. Schön,
followed theories of Dewey.
• He defines reflective practice as the practice by which professionals become
aware of their implicit knowledge base and learn from their experience.
• He sets the problem in the first part of the book in chapters 1&2 in which he
questions the limitation of technical rationality that seems to ignore the
importance of problem setting in problem solving activity, which leads to
a crisis of confidence in professional knowledge.
Basically, in this book Schön questions:
• in practice of various kind, what form does reflection in action take? What are the
differences? and what features of the process are similar?
• Reflection in action may be directed to strategies, theories, frames or role of frames.
How do these processes interact with one another, and how does technical problem
solving relate to them?
• Is there a kind of rigor peculiar to reflection-in-action and, if so, how is it like and
unlike rigorous technical problem solving?
• What sets the limits of our ability to reflect-in-action? How do individuals and
institutional constraints interact with one another? And in what directions should we
look to increase the scope and depths of reflection-in-action.
• Schön defines reflective practice as the practice by which professionals
become aware of their implicit knowledge base and learn from their
experience. He talks about reflection in action and reflection
action. Reflection in action is to reflect on behavior as it happens,
whereas, Reflection on action reflecting after the event, to review,
analyze, and evaluate the situation. Another term he introduces is
“knowing in action” to describe tacit knowledge.
 L. Stenhouse
• Born in 1926 Stenhouse was a British Educational Theorist who was
credited to reshaping the curriculum What is his theory? Lawrence
Stenhouse (1975) produced one of the best- known explorations of a
process model of curriculum theory and practice.
• After teaching for a number of years, Stenhouse worked at Durham
University in the mid-1950s before moving to Jordanhill College in
Glasgow. Then, in 1967, Stenhouse became Director of the Humanities
Curriculum Project (HCP), which Elliott and Norris consider his ‘greatest
achievement’
• He defined curriculum tentatively: "A curriculum is an attempt to communicate
the essential principles and features of an educational proposal in such a form that
it is open to critical scrutiny and capable of effective translation into practice."
• A curriculum, like the recipe for a dish, is first seen as a possibility, then the
subject of experiment. The recipe offered publicly is in a sense a report on the
experiment. Similarly, a curriculum should be grounded in practice. It is an
attempt to describe the work observed in classrooms.
• Finally, within limits, a recipe can be varied according to taste - so can a
curriculum.
• Stenhouse likens curriculum to a recipe in cookery. Stenhouse process theory promotes:
• More student choice.
• Looks at curriculum not as a physical thing but as the interaction of lecturers, students
and knowledge.
• Content and means are developed as teachers and students work together.
• There is a clear focus on learning, rather than teaching – lecturers and students as partners
in meaning-making.
• Curriculum as an active rather than technical exercise.
• It was in Stenhouse’s work with the Humanities Curriculum Project (1967-72) that he first
started to question the role of academic research in improving education. Questioning the
power relationship that put teachers in a position of authority over students let to a questioning
of the power structure that placed academic researchers, who were influencing the ways
teachers taught and students learned, in a position of authority over teachers and schools.
• Stenhouse believed that studying, developing, and experimenting with curricula was the task
of teachers, not academic researchers.
• How does this demonstrate in today's practice? * Group discussions * Evaluation of our
lessons * Promoting Independent Learners * Team meetings * Self-assessment and peer
assessment
• Lawrence Stenhouse, for those who don’t know, based his thinking on an
epistemological thesis that emphasized the provisionally of knowledge
and research.
• He believed, however, that this thesis had implications for teaching in so
far as a curriculum is itself an object of enquiry that is tested in the
classroom and seminar by both teachers and students.
• A curriculum is nothing more than a series of hypotheses that can be
refined but never perfected.
• Consequently, Stenhouse stressed that education is a matter of process rather than the achievement
of prescribed objectives: the aim of education is itself enshrined in the process of enquiry. Moreover
- and this is crucial - he never believed that enquiry could only be conducted by the most able.
• He held strongly to the view that young people of all abilities and backgrounds could be encouraged
to think of their learning in terms of enquiry. Behind Stenhouse’s educational theory was a firm and
generous democratic conviction that was thoroughly optimistic about what human beings could
achieve.
• Moreover, he viewed this achievement not as the mere fulfilling of individual potential but as
sharing in and participating in a democratic culture. What is striking about Stenhouse the person,
however, is that he found the energy and purpose to try and make these ideas actually happen in the
classroom. He was an intellectual all right, but one with strong pragmatic abilities as well.
• In England we have a rich history of practitioner enquiry, embodied in the
notion of teacher-as-researcher, accredited to Stenhouse (1975) and indicated in
more recent discussions of practitioner enquiry (Menter et al. 2011; BERA-
RSA, 2014; Leat et al. 2014).
• “As a starting point I shall define research as 'systematic inquiry made public'.
Like all such definitions this is too simple.
• However, it alerts you to my point of view and puts research in a particular
perspective, and I hope this will serve to relate my argument to your own posi ti
on”. (stenhouse,1975)
• “Inquiry is a teleological pattern of action whose purpose is satisfaction,
and it is related psychologically to curiosity, a disposition to explore the
environment in order to assess its potential for yielding satisfactions”.
• “Whon I address the problem of the application of research to education,
I conceive it in terms of research lodged within the broad tradition of
scholarship which I have just sketched. And, of course, the crucial issue in
education, as in other applied fields, is that of the relationship of
scholarship and research to action”. (stenhouse, 1975)
Conclusion
• Research can be adequately applied to education only when it develops theory which can be
tested by teachers in classrooms.
• Research guides action by generating action research (or at least the adoption of action as a
systematic mode of inquiry).
• Action research in education rests upon the designer of procedures in schools which meet both
action criteria and research criterion, that is, experiments which can he justified both on the
grounds of what they teach teachers and researchers and on the grounds of what they teach
pupils.
• A systematic structure of such procedures 1 call a hypothetical curriculum. Such a curriculum is
the appropriate experimental procedure through which research is applied by testing, refining,
and generating theory in the laboratory of the classroom.