Product Details
The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action

The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action
By Donald A. Schon

List Price: $26.95
Price: $24.25 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com

51 new or used available from $7.15

Average customer review:

Product Description

A leading M.I.T. social scientist and consultant examines five professions—engineering, architecture, management, psychotherapy, and town planning—to show how professionals really go about solving problems.The best professionals, Donald Schön maintains, know more than they can put into words. To meet the challenges of their work, they rely less on formulas learned in graduate school than on the kind of improvisation learned in practice. This unarticulated, largely unexamined process is the subject of Schön’s provocatively original book, an effort to show precisely how ”reflection-in-action” works and how this vital creativity might be fostered in future professionals.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #53856 in Books
  • Published on: 1984-09-22
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 384 pages

Editorial Reviews

About the Author
Donald A. Schön is Ford Professor of Urban Studies and Education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Customer Reviews

Two-tiered knowledge4
The author links academic and practical knowledge and sets them onto equal footing. He explains how practitioners know what they know, and he emphasizes the creative processes involved in planning and problem-solving. Schon's work addresses a variety of professions -- engineering, architecture, management, psychotherapy, and town planning -- and distills what they have in common.

Reflective Practitioner: Stepwise Discovery of Solutions4
Dr. Schon addresses how professionals can better join in a process of learning and decision-making. By seeing life as a process involving both the service provider and the client/customer, the interaction itself provides additional tools and information. Coming out of an industrial engineering perspective, processes of decision-making can be structured to require step-by-step participation in problem definition and solution clarification. Best quote: "A skillful teacher draws out critical facts, and by a sequence of astutely chosen questions leads students through a process of inquiry which serves both to structure the "solution space" of the situation at hand and to demonstrate a mode of thinking about business problems."

not great, not bad2
i wasn't too thrilled with this book... mainly because .... i didn't find it eye opening.... i felt that it took simple concepts and made it into high concepts and it became repetitive... if this is what ppl have to read to discover that ppl scale situations differently using a combination of their experience and knowledge... ~ save your money, eating a hamburger would be better off....

chpt 5 talks about the structure of reflection in action...
- evaluatin experiments in problem setting
- bringing past experience to bear on a unique situation
- rigor in on the spot experiment
- virtual worlds
-stance in inquiry

ie. schon's virtual world is to simulate reality... the practitioner constructs and manipulates virtual worlds in order to experiment rigorously (#3 see above)... pg 157... ie. architecture & sketchpad, engineer and models/computer simulation, etc.... we should know this... that's all i mean...