The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action [Paperback]

Donald A. Schon (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0465068782 | ISBN-13: 978-0465068784 | Publication Date: September 23, 1984 | Edition: 1

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.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

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

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; 1 edition (September 23, 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465068782
• ISBN-13: 978-0465068784
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #36,517 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #57 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Mental Health > Compulsive Behavior

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A must read for self-aware practitioners, August 23, 1998

By 

Richard L Stein (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action (Paperback)

In this book, Schon gives us a language for understanding professional practice. Because the sum of what a professional knows is greater than the sum of what he is aware he knows -- let alone the totality of what he can articulate -- there is a hidden world of practitioner competence. I found Schon to be a little repetitive and his examples difficult to fully conceptualize. However, his discussion of the Technical Rationality model and his vignettes of five professions provide a framework which may be applied to the practice of any profession. I believe that readers of this book can enhance their self-awareness as professionals and artists.

52 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars This is an educational theory book, August 28, 2000

By 

David Stengle (Princeton, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action (Paperback)

This book discusses the history and theory of professional learning. Schon spends a great deal of time justifying what every professional knows - that framing problems is difficult and that book learning is insufficient to deal with these problems.

If you are interested in positivism, technical rationality, and the evolution of the modern professional school, then this book is loaded with meaty material. If, however, you want to apply methods built upon other epistemologies, go straight to his 2nd book, "Educating the Reflective Practitioner".

The book is well thought out, but I found it a heavy read. Not for the faint-of-heart.

I got a lot out of it. Recommended only for epistemology or history of professional school wonks.

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tough reading - but definitly worht it !, June 11, 2000

By 

Rasmus (Denmark) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action (Paperback)

A word of warning. This book is hard to read. Some things are reapeated over and over, while other detailes are never given proper treatment.

But - if you don't mind spending some time reading and analyzing the book, there are heaps of golden nuggets to find.

Schön illustrates why rational design processes doesn't work in reality (for computer enthusiasts this means an explanation of why the waterfall model will never work on real life problems). Instead he tries to explain how designer (architects, musicians, engineers etc.) really work, when they solve real problems. And how to teach expert knowledge to others.

I highly recommend this book for non-whimps...;-)