Teacher-research and the art of the professional experiment: Reflective practice in the practical-knowledge tradition

Donald Schön’s (1987) seminal work, “Educating the Reflective Practitioner”, began a movement where reflective practice came to be understood as a hallmark of what it is to be a professional. Thinking-in-action is where the professional calls upon, experience, knowledge, skill and intuition to solve a problem of practice. Reflecting after the fact is called thinking-on-action and provides for a systematic review of the outcome and process arising from solving the problem. Schön then suggested a third iteration of reflection, and it is during this process that the author suggests that the professional may challenge, legitimise and augment practical-knowledge by accessing other sources of information. Less well known are Schön’s approaches to professional experimentation which include move-testing, exploratory experiments, and hypothesis testing where the variables are manipulated in order to bring about the desired result. The present paper uses reflective practice to mediate teacher research into solving a problem of practice around the teaching and learning of language conventions in the author’s own school. Comparisons with action research are made.