Introduction: Is Reflection Making Teachers Less Thoughtful?

This chapter has its origins in a sense of frustration. While it is obvious that teachers should be reflective about their work and in this regard should indeed aspire to become reflective practitioners, the idea of reflective teaching has, in practice, become so formulaic that it often seems to prevent teachers and teacher-students from thoughtful engagement with their practice. In my own work as a teacher educator, I have been wading through numerous reflective essays from students where I felt that very little was happening. Quite often I got the impression that the essays were just reporting on what the students already knew about their practice, rather than that their experience of writing helped with shifting their perceptions and understandings. Also, particularly when such essays were submitted as coursework for marking, I had the impression that students were often writing in socially desirable ways, that is, writing what they thought was expected from them, rather than writing about what they really had encountered. The essays often felt a little too smooth and a little too predictable.

Were my students to blame for this? Was there something lacking in their ability to reflect? That is not the conclusion I want to draw—and it is hardly ever the conclusion I tend to draw about my students. Rather than to raise questions about their abilities, intellectual or otherwise, the first question that always needs to be asked is how we have equipped our students for the tasks we set them, which starts, of course, with the framing of the task itself. One thing I realised over time is that the question that is often posed for reflective writing—the question ‘What have you learned?’—is actually a very unhelpful question. One reason for this is that the question about what someone has learned is, in a sense, a meta-question. It asks for reflection on reflection, so to speak, as it is focussed on drawing conclusions from the reflective process itself. In this regard the question ‘What you have learned?’ draws students away from their practice, rather than bringing them closer to it. This is why, as I will discuss in more detail below, I have started to work with a rather different question—the question ‘How have you been?’—in order to turn the attention back to the practice, of which students, in their role as student teachers, are a crucial ‘component.’

The other thing I realised over time is that reflection is not a formal process but that in order to reflect, we need something to reflect with. Just asking students to reflect on their practice and write reflectively about this without giving them any resources to work with, is actually educationally rather unhelpful. It is, to put it bluntly, as unhelpful as asking someone to draw a picture without giving them paper and pencil. The question of the intellectual, theoretical, discursive and normative resources for reflection is therefore a crucial one, but often one that is overlooked as long as reflection is seen as a formal capacity or ability. The third thing I realised over time is that if we just ask students to reflect, but do not explicitly engage with the question what they should reflect for—that is, how such reflection is supposed to connect back to their practice and practising—we make reflection into an artificial task, not something that may contribute to what, following Dewey, we could refer to as making the work of teachers more intelligent or, as I wish to suggest in this chapter, making the work of teachers more thoughtful.

In this chapter, I will explore these three questions—What to reflect for? What to reflect with? and ‘What to reflect about?’—in more detail in order to overcome the formulaic and formal approaches to reflection in teaching and teacher education that, I think, have become part of the contemporary ‘dogma’ of reflective teaching. The chapter is organised in the following way. I will begin with a discussion of the work of Donald Schön, whose book The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, originally published in 1983, still provides an important reference point for the discussion about reflective practice.Footnote 1 While Schön’s book has been praised and criticised, rereading the book 35 years later has been a worthwhile experience, not just because of the elegant way in which Schön puts forward his ideas, but also because some of his observations have actually become more urgent in our times than they probably were back then.

I will then devote three sections to the three questions mentioned above: What to reflect for? What to reflect with? and What to reflect about? In doing this, I will put forward the idea of existential reflection and will explain why I think that it is important that we see reflection as a substantial process rather than a formal operation, which highlights the need to link reflection to educational theory as an important resource for reflection, and to normative questions about what education is for. In order to give the discussion a fresh impetus, I will summarise my thoughts under the heading of ‘thoughtful teaching’, at least in order to have a different phrase from the now perhaps rather stale phrases of ‘reflective teaching’ and ‘reflective practice.’

From Technical Rationality to Reflection-in-Action

Donald Schön’s 1983 book The Reflective Practitioner may have become so popular that rather than engaging with the detail of the content, many people may just refer to it as an indicator of the term ‘reflective practitioner’ and the wider idea of reflective practice. Rereading the book, I actually found much that is still of value for current discussions, and some of it, as mentioned, that is actually quite timely. In an age in which the idea of evidence-based teaching, that is, teaching based on the outcomes of large-scale randomised controlled trials, is being pushed as the future for education (see Biesta, 2007, 2016), Schön’s case for an understanding of knowledge that takes professional practice as its frame of reference rather than an idealised idea of ‘real’ scientific knowledge, is still very relevant, also because he connects this philosophical discussion to political questions about the status of professions, professionals and professional expertise in modern societies (see particular Schön, 1983, Chaps. 1 and 10).

His is a search for an ‘epistemology of practice’ (p. viii) that is very different from ‘the kinds of knowledge honoured in academia’ (p. vii), and the phrase he uses for this epistemology of practice is ‘reflection-in-action’. Schön distinguishes reflection-in-action from what he calls ‘technical rationality’, and what is key here is that these are not (just) two different forms of knowledge but first and foremost two very different ways to understand what the work of professionals such as teachers actually entails. His main message is that the idea of ‘technical rationality’ is actually a distortion of most of what such work is about. Why is that so?

Schön explains that technical rationality sees professional activity basically as ‘instrumental problem solving made rigorous by the application of scientific theory and technique’ (ibid., p. 21). One issue he has with this understanding of professional activity is that it depicts the work of professionals as that of problem solving. The point he makes here is that professionals, such as teachers, do not simply solve problems that are given to them, but are crucially involved in figuring out what the problem in the situations they encounter actually is. Professionals are not just involved in problem solving, therefore, but also in what Schön calls problem setting (ibid., p. 40). The other issue Schön has with the idea of technical rationality concerns the assumption that the work of professionals would simply consist of the application of (scientific) knowledge handed down to them by scientists. Against this view, Schön emphasises that professionals possess highly complex practical knowledge and are constantly generating such knowledge in the context of their professional practice or, with the nice phrase Schön introduces: in the reflective conversation with the situation (see Schön, 1983, Chap. 3).

Schön also emphasises that whereas problem solving is a technical or instrumental matter—finding the most appropriate means for addressing the problem—problem setting it precisely not an instrumental or technical matter, because it is not about the means but about the ends, that is, about finding out what the issue is and what it would mean to address or resolve it. Schön highlights that problem setting involves two related dimensions, that of naming the things to which we will attend, and that of framing the context within which we will attend to them (see ibid., p. 40). Once a problem has been ‘constructed’, there is, however, still no guarantee that available knowledge will be sufficient to solve the problem. As Schön explains: ‘Even when a problem has been constructed, it may escape the categories of applied science because it presents itself as unique or unstable.’ (ibid., p. 41). After all, ‘in order to solve a problem by the application of existing theory or technique’ the problem, as constructed or defined or identified, must ‘fit’ the existing knowledge, and quite often the fit between the problems we encounter and the available knowledge is far from perfect. Put simply: ‘A physician cannot apply standard techniques to a case that is not in the books.’ (ibid., p. 41). And similarly, available evidence from research may have little to do with this student, in this classroom, at this point in their educational career, on a Monday morning, with storm in the air, and so on.

Schön refers to the tension we encounter here as the dilemma of ‘rigor or relevance’ (ibid., p. 42), highlighting that we can either stick with rigorous (scientific) knowledge that is of limited use to the concrete situation we find ourselves in, or go for relevant (practical) knowledge that, because it is intertwined with the complexities of practice, may be messy but useful. Schön also indicates that one way to deal with this dilemma is actually to change the practice so that the available knowledge can ‘work’. The irony here is that the knowledge available is actually not addressing the problems as they play out in the concrete situations of the practice, because the problems become redefined and reshaped so that they ‘fit’ the knowledge available. This is akin to what, in education, is known as ‘teaching to the test’, where what the test or exam is measuring becomes the focus for the teaching and often the one-and-only focus. We can also see it in situations where scientific evidence doesn’t work, because in those cases it is often not the evidence that is seen as lacking but teachers being blamed for not using the evidence in the ‘right’ way or, even more problematic, students being blamed for not behaving in such a way that the knowledge can ‘work’.

The real situations of education and similar professions are not stable situations that obey the assumptions of scientific knowledge. Rather such situations are characterised by ‘uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflict’ (ibid., p. 50), which is precisely why the work of professionals cannot be about the application of ‘pre-cooked’ (scientific) knowledge but requires reflective engagement with the specifics of the situation, that is, reflection-in-action. It is worth quoting Schön at length in order to get a sense of what reflection-in-action is about. He writes:

When someone reflects-in-action, he [sic] becomes a researcher in the practice context. He is not dependent on the categories of established theory and technique, but constructs a new theory of the unique case. His inquiry is not limited to deliberation about means which depend on a prior agreement about ends. He does not keep means and ends separate, but defines them interactively as he frames a problematic situation. He does not separate thinking from doing, ratiocinating his way to a decision which he must later convert to action. Because his experimenting is a kind of action, implementation is built into his inquiry. Thus reflection-in-action can proceed, even in situations of uncertainty and uniqueness, because it is not bound by the dichotomies of Technical Rationality. (ibid., pp. 68–69)

Finding one’s way, not through blind trial-and-error, but through careful consideration of steps to take, possible and actual consequences, resulting in a readjustment of initial action, are all part of what reflection-in-action is about—indeed as a ‘reflective conversation with the situation’ (ibid., p. 268, emph. added), not an intervention upon it.

Although reflective practice is thoroughly experimental, this does not mean that it is an entirely open process that constantly would start from scratch. On the contrary, professionals bring quite a lot to the reflective conversation with the situation, partly in order to be able to ‘see’ particular issues as instances of something more general so that they become addressable issues, and partly in order to be able to mobilise knowledge and experience in order to try to address the problems once they have been set—yet always remaining ‘open to the discovery of phenomena, incongruent with the initial problem setting, on the basis of which [the professional] reframes the problem’ (ibid., p. 268) and so on.

The Constants of Professional Practice

The naming and the framing that are needed in the process of problem setting are closely connected to a number of ‘constants’ that practitioners bring to their reflection-in-action. Schön discusses four of these constants: (1) the media, languages and repertoires that practitioners use to describe reality and conduct experiments; (2) the appreciative systems they bring to the problem setting, to the evaluation of inquiry, and to the reflective conversation; (3) the overarching theories by which they make sense of phenomena; and (4) the role frames within which they set their tasks and through which they bound their institutional settings (see ibid., p. 270). This may sound quite abstract, so let me briefly elucidate what this means more concretely with reference to teaching and the work of the teacher.

Schön mentions a number of different media of reflection-in-action, including ‘the architect’s sketchpad, the relation between patient and therapist (…), the dialogue of planner and developer, [and] the interactive relations between managers in a corporation’ (ibid., p. 271). In terms of teaching, we can therefore add that the main ‘medium’ of teaching is the relationship between teachers and students. Language and repertoire play a role here too, and Schön emphasises that these cannot really be separated from the media in and through which professionals act as together ‘they make up the ‘stuff’ of inquiry, in terms of which practitioners move, experiment, and explore’ (ibid.). Being skilful in the manipulation of media, language and repertoire is essential for the reflective conversation with the situation. What is interesting about Schön’s discussion here is that he highlights the significance of having a ‘feel’ for the media and language of one’s practice, which indicates that this is not about the clinical application of instrumental knowledge but much more about what we might term ‘knowing one’s way around’ in the practice. The idea of ‘feel’ comes close to what the German educationalist Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), long ago, referred to as the ‘tact of teaching’, an idea reintroduced in the educational discussion by Max van Manen in the 1990s (see Van Manen, 1991).

Knowing one’s way around and having a feel for the situation is one way in which the work of the teacher becomes the work of the teacher, so to speak, and is not just any practice or any way of doing. But the second ‘constant’—the ‘constancy of appreciative systems’ (ibid., p. 272)—is important here too, because one might say that this gives the practice a sense of purpose and a sense of direction. Appreciative systems are ideas about what education is for, and thus play an important role in problem setting and in providing orientation to teachers’ action more generally. If one assumes, for example, that the purpose of education is to make pupils think and act in very specific ways, the way one directs one’s actions and the way in which one constructs problems will be very different from when one starts from the assumption that the purpose of education is to help children and young people to think for themselves and to take responsibility for their own thoughts and actions. If under the first assumption a student who says ‘no’ is seen as a problem, under the second assumption it’s an important sign that students see themselves as independent actors rather than obedient pupils. Schön also mentions that different professions have their own appreciative systems, which explains why working across different professions can be difficult, particularly if one is not aware of these differences. Whereas a psychologist may approach children from a therapeutic mindset—looking for problems that need to be solved—teachers may approach children from an educational mindset, where the child is not a problem that needs a solution but a human being who is trying to find his or her place in the world and needs support, challenge and trust, rather than therapy.

The third constant that makes professional action possible is that of the ‘overarching theory’. Schön explains that overarching theories ‘do not give rules that can be applied to predict and control a particular event’, but that they supply language ‘from which to construct particular descriptions’ (ibid., p. 273). In teaching such theories contain accounts of what it means to teach—for example whether we see teaching as an intervention upon students that is supposed to generate ‘effects’ or whether we see teaching as a dialogic encounter between human beings that is aimed to encourage children and young people to find their own voice—and thus provide important frames of reference for how we understand teaching and how we go about it in the reflective conversations with the situation. What is important here, just as with the role of appreciative systems, is that there is not one theory about teaching just as there is not one appreciative system for education. Some find this onerous and think that the ideal situation is one where everyone would agree on what teaching is and what it is for; others may see it as a sign of the health of the profession that there are ongoing discussions about what the profession is ‘about’ and what it is ‘for’.

Closely connected to these three constants is the fourth constant which concerns the ways in which ‘practitioners frame their roles’ (ibid., p. 274). Highlighting this is first of all important in order to bring into view that how we see ourselves as teachers does make a difference. But it is also important in order to appreciate that just as there are different appreciative systems and overarching theories, there are also different role perceptions about what it means to be a teacher (on this see also Biesta & Stengel, 2016). Schön emphasises that ‘because role-frame remains relatively constant from situation to situation, it bounds the scope of practice and provides a reference which allows a practitioner to build a cumulative repertoire of exemplars, facts, and descriptions’ (ibid., p. 274). But differences in role-frame also ‘help to determine what knowledge is seen as useful in practice and what kinds of reflection are undertaken in action’ (ibid., p. 274). After all, if a teacher sees herself as a manager of learning opportunities, the knowledge they need and the issues they seek to address are very different from the situation where a teacher sees herself as a guide, or a coach, or an instructor, and so on.

A Theory of Teaching, Not a Theory of Reflection

There are a number of observations I would like to make before I turn to the three questions about reflection. The first thing I wish to emphasise is that Schön’s account of the reflective practitioner is not a theory of reflection but a theory of practice. More specifically for the focus of this chapter we could say that Schön’s account provides us with the structure of a theory of teaching, although we have to bear in mind that this structure needs content in order to get to the specifics of teaching. But the idea of teaching as a reflective conversation with the situation in such a way that the situation is not ‘outside’ of the teacher but that the teacher is (also) part of the situation, and of this situation being structured by the four constants discussed above, provides quite a nuanced and also quite a helpful account of the practice of teaching.

I use the word ‘helpful’ here because Schön’s account contrasts sharply, as I have already indicated above, with the idea that has been pushed strongly both from the side of research and the side of policy—but also, ironically in my view, by some in the teaching profession—namely that teaching should be(come) an evidence-based profession in which the application of scientific research about what (apparently) ‘works’ is the central mode of action. Such a view may sound attractive, but actually doesn’t make sense when we begin to look at the specifics, particularly with regard to the application of insights from an abstract research context to a concrete teaching situation (see Davis, 2017a, 2017b). And this is also where Schön’s warning that one way to make technical rationality work is not by refining and improving the knowledge, but by changing the practice so that the knowledge can begin to work in that situation, remains really important. In my view this is a real danger in contemporary education, not just in terms of how some people think teachers ought to conduct themselves, but also increasingly as a pressure upon students and they ways they should behave so that the educational ‘machine’ can work (on this see also Biesta, 2018).

The final point to mention is Schön’s idea of ‘constants’. This is not only a helpful way to characterise how a practice gains its identity over time, but actually is a result of the work of the practitioners who ‘do’ the practice, so to speak. I also wish to suggest that the four constants provide a really interesting ‘frame’ for teacher education and perhaps we could even say that they provide a really interesting curriculum for teacher education. After all, student teachers do need to engage with the medium of teaching, including its language and repertoires, in order to develop a ‘feel’ for the practice. They do need to engage with the question what the practice is for—the appreciative systems. They need to have a sense of what the practice is ‘about’—the overarching theories. And they need to get a sense of their own role in the practice—the role frames. And this brings me back to where I started this chapter, namely what all this might mean for reflection in teaching and teacher education.

What to Reflect for? What to Reflect with? What to Reflect About?

I started this chapter recounting my frustration with the many well-intended reflective essays I have read over the years, focussing on the fact that many of those essays seem to be about what students already knew about themselves and their practice, rather than that the task of writing had helped them to gain new insights and new understandings. I hasten to add, however, that this is not a judgement on their ability or lack thereof, but first of all raises the question of the resources—what have they been given to reflect with—and this may also say something about the way in which the task for such essays is often framed, namely as the question ‘What have you learned?’. In response to these issues, I suggested that we should raise three more precise questions about reflection in teaching: the question what to reflect for, the question what to reflect with and the question what to reflect about. I will now discuss these three questions in reverse order, using insights from Schön to deepen and sharpen the discussion.

What to Reflect About? Existential Reflection

As I have already indicated, I not only think that the question ‘What have you learned?’ is a tremendously difficult question to answer; I also think that it is not a very helpful question if we want to get closer to our practice and practising. This is because the question about what one has learned, is a question that asks for conclusions—which is the reason why I have called it a ‘meta-question’—rather than a question that focusses the attention on the practise and the practising itself. If the practice of teaching can be characterised as a reflective conversation with the situation—and I wish to emphasise once more that the situation is not outside of the teacher, but that the teacher is part of the situation and to a large extent makes the situation what it is—then a much better question to get the practise and the practising into focus is the question ‘How have you been?’ This question asks teachers to pay careful attention to the situation and to themselves in the situation, particularly in order to note how they have been in conversation with the situation.

By trying to document how one has been in a situation—and the situation can be more ‘micro’, such as a brief event, or can be much more ‘macro’, such as trying to capture a week, or a month, or a semester or even longer—one begins to get a sense of what one has noticed in and of the situation, how one has responded (or has decided not to respond, which can be important as well), how one’s attention has been focussed, how one has encountered issues, how one has ‘constructed’ problems out of these issues, how one has acted upon such constructions, how one has perceived what this did with students, how they have responded, and so on. The question ‘How have you been?’ not only brings all these dimensions into focus, but in doing so begins to reveal the complexity and the dynamics of the reflective conversation with the situation—and one could argue that gaining a better understanding of this is a major aspect of enhancing one’s practice and practising.

What is also interesting about the question how one has been, is that it does not immediately ask for reflections—that is for thoughts and description of thoughts—but makes room for the tacit, embodied and bodily dimensions of the conversation with the situation, including feelings and emotions, but also the ‘repertoires’ as Schön calls them, that is the embodied knowledge that, over time, becomes an important part of the professionality of the teacher as well. We can refer to this as intuition—and intuition is an important source and resource in any practice—as long as we acknowledge that our intuitions are not natural but are themselves formed through experience and experiment. To the extent to which the question ‘How have you been?’ can be characterised as a reflective question, I am inclined to say that the reflection that is triggered by this question is not ‘mental’ but first and foremost existential, as the question forces us to focus on how we have been, that is, how we have existed in a situation, and not only on what we were thinking during or after the event. If we want to have a name for this kind of reflection, I would therefore suggest calling it existential reflection.

What to Reflect with? The Question of Resources

While the question ‘How have you been?’ can be asked about many different practices, existential reflection in teaching in a sense asks a more precise question, which we can formulate as ‘How have you been as a teacher?’ Engagement with this question, brings us to the question of resources, that is, the question ‘What to reflect with?’. The question of resources is an important one, because if we just ‘are’ in a situation but have no language, concepts and theories to perceive the situation in a particular way—to see the situation as, for example, an instance of education or as an instance of indoctrination—we are in a sense not seeing anything at all, or we are relying solely upon unexamined assumptions, but not necessarily on assumptions and ideas that matter for our work as teachers. One way to grasp why resources are needed can be found in the very idea of reflection itself, because reflections—for example, of a face in a mirror, the sky in a window, or the sun in the surface of a lake—are in a sense identical images of the original. They just give us back what we put in. In order to see something different and to see differently we need to look from an angle, which is not a matter of reflection but of refraction in the way in which a bundle of white light when going through a prism shows a whole spectrum of colours. This is why we need resources to think and see with—in a sense they allow us to see from a different angle than when we ‘just’ generate reflections of the situation.

Schön is again helpful here, because he not only identifies the resources we need in order to see a situation from an angle, but also because he distinguishes between two kinds of resources: overarching theories and appreciative systems. Overarching theories, as I have already briefly indicated above, provide possible descriptions and accounts of the specific ‘nature’ of the situation. They make it possible to see the situation in a particular way or, to put it differently, to focus our attention on particular dimensions, aspects and manifestations of the situation. The key question is, of course, what kind of overarching theories we should bring to the educational situation. This is not a matter that can easily be resolved, partly because there are quite a number of different overarching theories about education, but also because there is disagreement amongst teachers, amongst researchers, amongst educational theorists and historians, about which overarching theories are relevant, important or true. This in itself is not a worrying situation, as it not only can make teachers aware that the educational situation is multi-faceted, but can also encourage them to think through the situations they are in from a number of differing overarching theories.

One example of an overarching theory has to do with the understanding of the dynamics of the interactions between teachers and students. As I have already alluded to, one way to understand these dynamics—one that, in some circles is quite popular—is to see teaching as an intervention and what happens on the side of the student as an effect of the teaching intervention. There is quite a lot of research that takes this as the basic assumption—such research tends to look for causal connections between interventions and effects which, as a way of looking at the dynamics of teaching is not entirely without reason. There is, however, another overarching theory that conceives the dynamics of the interaction between teachers and students not in terms of intervention-effect-relationships, but as relatively open processes of communication and interpretation. If the overarching theory that sees teaching dynamics in terms of interventions and effects is relatively uni-directional—from the teacher to the student—the theory that tries to grasp the dynamics of teaching in terms of communication and interpretation sees it much more as a two-way process.

One interesting issue is whether, at some point, we might be in a position to say which of these overarching theories is true. I am inclined to say that these are two possible ways in which we can approach the teaching situation—and each will give us a different ‘access’ to the situation. Although there are further discussions to be had about how adequate each overarching theory is—what its potential and its limitations are—this brief example shows that it is only when we have overarching theories that we can begin to see things which, in turn, will have an impact on the kind of reflective conversations we will be having with the situation in which we act as teachers.Footnote 2 And my main point here is that it is only when we bring overarching theories to the situation, that we are able to gain a perspective on the situation, and not just have to ‘accept’ the situation as it ‘is’, if that were ever possible in the first place.

In addition to theories that help us to describe and ‘see’ educational situations in a range of differing ways, the conversation with the educational situation also needs something else in order to be possible and have direction, namely ideas about what the work of teachers is for. This is the question of the purpose or purposes of education, and this question is not a factual or descriptive question but is a value-laden or normative question, because here we encounter ideas about what teaching should bring about. I have already alluded to one of the ‘biggest’ distinctions with regard to the purpose of teaching and education more generally, which is the question whether teaching is a process that is aimed at controlling students, their thoughts and their behaviours, or whether teaching is a process aimed at helping students to think, judge and act for themselves.

If the first can be characterised as a matter of indoctrination—at least at the extreme end of the spectrum—the second can be characterised as ‘proper’ education or, if one wishes to use ‘education’ as a more neutral and descriptive term, as a form of emancipatory education aimed at the (responsible) freedom of students. Views about what education is for provide the work of teachers with orientation and direction. One could even say, following Schön, that appreciative systems, that is, views about what education is for, are essential for problem setting, because problem setting is never just a ‘technical’ matter but always requires an orientation on what one seeks to achieve. Put differently—as I have already briefly indicated before—whether we see a student who resists our efforts as teachers as a student who lacks obedience or as a student who is showing agency and self-determination, depends crucially on whether we see our work as teachers in terms of control or in terms of emancipation. So it is only from within such frameworks, that it becomes possible to define—or with Schön’s word: construct—a problem. And it is only when we have constructed a problem, that we have a starting point for further action, that is, for engaging in the conversation with the situation in a meaningful way.

Just as there are quite a large number of possibly relevant overarching theories in the field of education, I wish to argue against the idea that when it comes to the purpose of education everything is clear and easy. The question of what education is for is actually a highly contested matter, and a topic of much debate amongst policy makers, educators, educational researchers and the general public. My modest contribution to this discussion (see particularly Biesta, 2009, 2010) has been to highlight that in education there are (at least) three different domains of purpose that need to be taken into consideration when asking the question what education is for.Footnote 3 The first is the domain of qualification, which has to do with the transmission and acquisition of knowledge and skills, both in the more narrow sense of the knowledge and skills needed to perform a specific task or do a specific job, and in the wider sense of the knowledge and skills needed, for example, to live in complex modern societies.

Next to qualification—which many would see as a key purpose of education and some, unfortunately, see as the only purpose of education—I have argued that education has a role to play in socialisation, that is, in providing orientation in traditions and practices, again both in the narrow sense of, say, the practice of a particular job, and in the wider sense of the cultural, social, political, religious and so on traditions and practices that make up modern societies. In addition to these two domains, I have suggested that education also has a task with regard to what I have termed ‘subjectification,’ which has to do with supporting and encouraging children and young people to become (responsible) subjects of their own lives, rather than letting their lives (and themselves) be determined by others. Here we can find the ambition for education to work towards the emancipation of children and young people. By referring to qualification, socialisation and subjectification as three domains of educational purpose, I am highlighting that with respect to each domain further judgements and decisions are needed—for example, about which knowledge and skills are worth acquiring, or which traditions are worth being introduced to.

Taken together, the overarching educational theories that help teachers to make sense of the situations they are in and the appreciative systems that articulate potential domains of purpose, provide key resources for teachers in their conversations with the situations they encounter and find themselves in, both in terms of what these situations are (overarching theories) and in terms of what they might be(come) (appreciative systems). Because, as I have emphasised, teachers are not acting upon situations but are actually an important part of what constitutes a situation, these resources are also important for the ‘role frames’ that teachers use to make sense of their work and themselves.

What to Reflect for? Developing a ‘Feel’

The blunt way of answering the question what to reflect for, is to say that reflection is not meant in order to write essays about one’s practice, and also not to improve the writing of such essays. If reflection is the way in which teachers are ‘in conversation’ with the situation, then the main purpose of reflection is to get closer to the situation and develop a ‘feel,’ as Schön calls it, for the practice and the practising in the practice. The notion of ‘feel’ is interesting, because it puts the emphasis on action, on being-in-conversation-with, rather than on thinking about action. This is not to suggest that teachers should not be allowed to think about their actions, but it is important to see that even such thinking about should ultimately ‘land’ in the ‘feel’ for the situation, that is, the ways in which teachers, guided by resources, navigate the situation. The aim is to make action more thoughtful, not to replace action with thinking. Developing a ‘feel’—developing an educational ‘feel,’ developing a teacher’s ‘feel’—takes time, and takes practising, that is, active engagement in the practice, active conversations with the situation. That is the slow work not just of teacher education, but in a sense the life-long challenge for every educational practitioner who understands that teaching is not a matter of the application of knowledge from elsewhere, and even less a matter of following scripts, but that teaching is a practical art that requires ongoing practising in order to keep one’s educational artistry alive.

Concluding Comments: Towards Thoughtful Teaching

In order to become a thoughtful educational practitioner, one needs to engage fully with the practice of teaching as it is ultimately there, in the thoughtful conversation with the situation, that teaching happens. This doesn’t mean however, that there would be no point in stepping back from time to time, which can even be in the form of a writing task. What I have tried to argue in this chapter is that it is important for such tasks that they try to keep students focussed on the practice—which is why I have suggested that reflection should be existential, focussing on the question how someone has been in and ‘with’ a particular situation, and not on the question what one has learned from having been there. The ideas presented in this chapter give further depth to the idea of existential reflection, by highlighting (1) that teachers are a constitutive part of the situations they are in conversation with, rather than that they act upon those situations from the outside, and (2) that the theoretical assumptions they bring to the teaching situation play a key role in framing the situation in a particular way, so that it is important to become aware of the many different ways in which situations can be described and understood and how this may make a difference for the conversations we have with the situation, and (3) that in all this we need to keep the question of purpose, the question what education is or might be for, in focus as well, as it is only with regard to this that it becomes possible to begin to ‘construct’ problems, that is, to get a sense of what the situation needs from teachers. Any work in teacher education and the further development of teachers that takes these dimensions into consideration and that keeps the focus strongly on the teacher’s professional ‘feel’, is likely to make a contribution to the artistry of teaching. This is not in order to make teaching more effective with regard to the production of learning outcomes—to use a popular policy phrase—but to make teaching more attuned to what is encountered in the always new situations in and through which teaching takes place.