Reflective practice

Reflective practice is the capacity to examine one's own actions, assumptions, and frameworks in order to learn from experience. Developed most fully by Donald Schön in his 1983 book The Reflective Practitioner, the concept challenges the technical-rationality model of professional knowledge — the assumption that competent practice consists of applying established theory to concrete situations. Schön argued that much professional expertise consists of "knowing-in-action" that cannot be fully articulated in advance, and that the development of such expertise requires continuous reflection on practice itself.

Schön distinguished between reflection-in-action — thinking about what one is doing while doing it, adjusting one's approach in real time — and reflection-on-action — reviewing past practice to understand what happened and why. Both are forms of double-loop learning at the individual level, though reflective practice can also be institutionalized through practices like case review, after-action reports, and structured debriefing.

The concept connects to theories of institutional learning, experiential learning, and professional judgment. It also relates to the growing field of reflective design — the practice of building systems that make their own assumptions visible to their users.

Reflective practice is not navel-gazing. It is the disciplined habit of treating one's own expertise as provisional — of holding one's most confident judgments lightly enough to revise them when experience contradicts them. The professionals who develop this habit are not those with the best training; they are those with the best relationship to their own fallibility.