Experience Reflection and Learning

The chapter has built up Dewey’s theory piece by piece: the definition of reflection, the three lenses, the distinction from routine action, and the five fluid phases. The final piece is how Dewey saw the bigger picture, the relationships among experience, reflection, and learning. This is where the theory connects to the day-to-day life of a teacher who wants to actually grow over a career.

Dewey on experience

Dewey was the father of the 20th century progressive movement in education and an eminent philosopher. His work is helpful for defining and describing the relationships among experience, reflection, and learning, because he was unusually careful about each of those terms.

Experience as interaction

Dewey (1933) stated that an experience is an interaction between the individual and the environment.

This sounds simple but it does work. Experience is not what happens to you. It is the meeting point between you and what is around you. Two teachers who walk into the same staffroom can have different experiences, because the meeting point is shaped by who each teacher is, what they bring, and what they are paying attention to.

This matters for reflective practice. A teacher reflecting on an experience is not reflecting on a thing that happened in the world independent of them. They are reflecting on the meeting between themselves and what happened. Their part of the meeting is part of the data.

Experience is more than activity

An experience first includes more than participation in activities. Experience could be reading a book, taking lecture notes, or talking with others.

This is wider than the everyday use of the word. A teacher tends to think of “experience” as classroom hours. Dewey’s wider sense includes reading, conversation, observation, even private thinking.

This widens the source material for reflection. A teacher who has read carefully about a topic has had experience of that topic, even without classroom hours. A teacher who has talked through a problem with a colleague has had experience of the problem.

Continuity

Secondly, an experience contains what Dewey referred to as continuity: a continuous flow of knowledge from previous experiences.

No experience stands alone. The way a teacher reads today’s class is shaped by yesterday’s class, last term’s class, and a memory from teacher training six years ago. The teacher does not start from zero.

Continuity is what makes learning possible. Each new experience builds on the previous ones. Each reflection on a new experience pulls in what was understood from previous reflections.

A teacher with weak continuity, who treats each class as a fresh start with no memory of what came before, learns slowly. A teacher with strong continuity, who consciously connects today’s events to a growing base, learns fast.

Learning as continuous and cumulative

Learning, therefore, is a continuous and cumulative process. Prior learning becomes the fodder for further understanding and insight.

This is a different picture of teacher learning from the one most teacher training programmes paint. Most programmes teach a body of content (psychology of learning, classroom management, curriculum design) and then send the teacher into the field to apply it. The image is “store the content, then apply.”

Dewey’s image is different. The teacher’s learning is happening all the time, in every interaction with students and colleagues, drawing on everything that came before. The body of content from training is part of the fodder, but only part. The classroom is also fodder. The reflection on the classroom is fodder.

This is why a thoughtful teacher with three years of practice can sometimes be more effective than a less thoughtful teacher with twenty. Years are not the variable. Cumulative learning is.

Four modes of thinking

In How We Think (1933), Dewey distinguishes between four different modes of thinking.

Imagination. Picturing things that are not directly present. Useful for many activities, including planning lessons.

Belief. Holding ideas about how things are without active examination.

Stream of consciousness. The flowing internal monologue that runs while a person is awake.

Reflection. The active, intentional mode that has been the subject of this chapter.

Dewey acknowledges that imagination, belief, and stream of consciousness are certainly part of our thinking activities. But they do not necessarily contribute to learning, and even less to lifelong learning.

This is a striking claim. Most of what we think during a day is not the kind of thinking that produces learning. The flow of imagination, the holding of beliefs, the stream of consciousness, none of these by themselves move the learner forward. Only reflection does.

Why reflection is different

Reflection plays a different role from the other three modes. Several differences matter.

Reflection is active. When we reflect, we examine prior beliefs and assumptions and their implications. This is not passive observation. It is deliberate examination.

Reflection is intentional. It happens because the practitioner chose to do it for a reason. The other three modes happen whether you choose them or not.

Reflection is driven by perplexity. Dewey wrote that “a demand for a solution of a perplexity is the steadying, guiding factor in the entire process of reflection” (Dewey, 1933, p. 14). The perplexity is what holds the reflection together. Without it, the thinking drifts back into stream of consciousness.

Reflection impels to inquiry. Another famous Dewey line: “reflective thinking impels to inquiry” (Dewey, 1933, p. 7). Reflection produces the wish to find out more, to test, to investigate. The other modes do not.

The cycle of reflection and informed action

A key point in Dewey is that informed action follows the reflective thinking process. The teacher reflects, comes to an understanding, and acts differently because of it.

The action is not the end. The action produces new experience. The new experience generates new perplexity, new reflection, new understanding, new action. The cycle continues.

This is what makes reflection the engine of lifelong learning. Without it, experience accumulates without producing growth. With it, each round of experience-reflection-action moves the teacher further along.

The implication for teacher development is direct. A teacher who teaches without reflecting accumulates years but not necessarily expertise. A teacher who teaches and reflects compounds their experience into expertise. The reflection is what makes the difference.

Flashcard

Why does Dewey single out reflection from the other three modes of thinking?

Tap to reveal

Answer

Reflection is the only mode that is active, intentional, and impels to inquiry

Imagination, belief, and stream of consciousness are part of thinking but do not necessarily produce learning. Reflection is different because it actively examines beliefs and their implications, it is driven by a real question or perplexity, and it leads to inquiry and informed action. This is what makes it the engine of lifelong learning.

The big picture

Dewey’s whole framework can be held in mind as a single picture.

A teacher has experiences (interactions with students, colleagues, materials, ideas). Most of the time, the teacher is in stream of consciousness, holding beliefs, imagining things. None of this directly produces learning.

When perplexity arrives (something does not fit), the teacher can choose to enter reflection. Reflection actively examines beliefs and assumptions, runs through fluid phases (suggestion, intellectualisation, hypothesis, elaboration, testing), and produces an informed action.

The action generates new experience, which adds to the cumulative store. The continuity of the teacher’s professional life is built up this way, one cycle at a time.

Without this cycle, ten years of teaching can produce a single year of experience repeated ten times. With it, every year adds to the cumulative store, and the teacher’s expertise compounds. That is the choice Dewey was pointing at.