How professionals think on their feet

In one line: skilled professionals don’t just apply rules from a textbook; they think on their feet and learn by looking back, and teaching should help people do both.

What Schön did

This isn’t an experiment. It’s a book, built on close case studies of professionals at work: an architect teaching a student to design, a psychotherapy supervisor with a trainee, a town planner, a manager and others.

Schön compared what he saw with the standard view of professional skill, which he called technical rationality. In that view, a professional is someone who applies science: spot the problem, pick the right theory, apply it, get the answer. Much professional training is built this way.

What he argued

• The textbook model is incomplete. It works on what Schön called the “high, hard ground”: clear problems that research and technique can solve. But the problems of greatest human concern sit in the “swampy lowland”: messy, unclear, and tangled up with values. There, technique alone falls short.
• In the swamp, you have to work out what the problem is. Often the problem isn’t clear until you start working on it. How you frame it decides what counts as a good answer.
• Experts know more than they can say. Schön called this knowing-in-action: a feel for a situation that’s hard to put into words. An experienced nurse may sense a patient is going off before she can say why.
• Skilled people think while they act. When something surprising happens, they adjust on the spot: they notice what doesn’t fit, try a different approach and watch what happens. He called this reflection-in-action.
• They also look back afterwards. Thinking back over what happened, why, and what you’d do differently is reflection-on-action. It is slower and easier to teach. It’s what good supervision and debriefs aim to support.

How much should you trust it?

Hugely influential, but built on case studies rather than tests.

• The evidence is a small set of case studies, chosen and described by Schön, not controlled research.
• Reflection-in-action is hard to see or measure. Critics, such as Michael Eraut (1995), have questioned how much of it can really happen under time pressure.
• Schön didn’t study healthcare simulation or debriefing. The evidence that debriefing helps (for example Cheng and colleagues, 2014) comes from a separate line of research.
• The “high ground” and the “swamp” are a useful picture, but real clinical work often sits somewhere in between.

If you need to convince someone

In our words (a paraphrase, not a quotation): the problems that matter most at work rarely come with a clear answer, so people need practice at working out what the problem is, not only at applying the rules.

What it means for you

1. Make time to look back. After a practical session, a simulation or a tricky shift, ask: what happened, what surprised you, and what will you do next time? Schön’s ideas suggest that much of the learning from experience gets fixed in place here. That’s why a simulation with no debrief wastes much of its value.
2. Ask about thinking, not just the answer. “How were you thinking about that?” helps a learner with the next problem, not only this one.
3. Use messy, real cases. If you only teach the clear-cut version, people won’t practise framing problems. Bring a real case with no single right answer.
4. Turn insight into action. Reflecting gives insight, but insight doesn’t automatically change what people do. An if-then plan is one way to bridge the gap: start from what you want to do differently, and plan when you’ll do it.

How it appears in Teaching That Lands

Not taught directly in the three core sessions. It’s useful background for why the programme asks participants to rethink a session, not just polish it. Debriefing is parked for a separate simulation-based session.

The small print

• Schön first worked with Chris Argyris on how people’s stated beliefs differ from how they act (see Argyris and Schön). That earlier work, more than this book, is what Rudolph and colleagues’ debriefing with good judgement builds on.
• Reflection-in-action happens during the task, often without stopping. Reflection-on-action happens afterwards. Reflective practice in nursing and other professions often uses these two terms.
• A related idea is Kolb’s experiential learning cycle: an experience, then reflecting on it, making sense of it and trying something new.
• Eraut, M. (1995). Schön shock: a case for reframing reflection-in-action? Teachers and Teaching, 1(1), 9–22. Cheng, A., et al. (2014). Debriefing for technology-enhanced simulation: a systematic review and meta-analysis (a study that pools the results of many others). Medical Education, 48(7), 657–666.