The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action

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Basic Books, Aug 6, 2008 - Psychology - 352 pages
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 Schon 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 Schon'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.
 

Contents

PREFACE
From Technical Rationality to ReflectioninAction
Design as a Reflective Conversation with the Situation
The Patient as a Universe of
The Structure of ReflectioninAction
Reflective Practice in the ScienceBased Professions
Limits to ReflectioninAction
ReflectioninAction Within an Organizational Learning
Patterns and Limits of ReflectioninAction Across the Professions
Implications for the Professions and Their Place in Society
NOTES
INDEX
Copyright

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About the author (2008)

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

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