Routine Action and Reflective Action
Dewey’s two kinds of action
| Routine action | Reflective action |
|---|---|
| Grounds for action not actively considered | Need to solve a problem drives the work |
| Guided by tradition, external authority, circumstance | Active, persistent, careful consideration of belief |
| Accept everyday school reality as given | Question how problems are framed |
| Find efficient means to externally defined ends | Consider whether the problem itself is well-named |
What unreflective teachers do
- Accept the everyday school reality as given
- Concentrate on efficient solutions to pre-defined problems
- Cannot frame the problem in more than one way
- Are not failing to think; their thinking has limits
Three drivers of Dewey’s reflection process
- Perplexity : a sense that something does not fit
- Goal-directedness : the work points at a purpose
- Testing or evaluation : claims get checked against evidence
Dewey’s reflection is part of experiential learning: the practitioner experiments with forms of thinking and improves the process.
A teacher walks into a school and finds a set of practices already running. The bell schedule, the seating plan, the marking system, the assessment policy. They can either accept all of this as the way things are and find efficient ways to operate inside it, or they can ask which of these practices serves the students. The first is routine action. The second is reflective action.
Dewey’s distinction
Dewey provided a useful distinction between two kinds of action.
Routine action. Action in which the grounds have not been actively considered. The teacher does what they do because tradition, external authority, or circumstance pointed in that direction. The action is not necessarily wrong. It is simply unexamined.
Reflective action. Action that arises from the need to solve a problem and involves the active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it.
Both kinds of action take effort. The difference is what kind of effort. Routine action is efficient at doing what is already being done. Reflective action is the harder work of asking whether what is being done is the right thing.
What unreflective teachers do
Dewey’s description of unreflective teachers is precise.
Teachers who are unreflective about their teaching tend to accept the everyday reality of their schools and concentrate their efforts on finding the most effective and efficient means to solve problems that have largely been defined for them.
Several things are worth noticing in this description.
Acceptance of the everyday reality. The unreflective teacher does not question the structure of the school day, the curriculum framework, the assessment system, or the prevailing classroom culture. These are treated as given.
Effective and efficient means. The teacher works hard. They find ways to deliver the curriculum on time, to mark papers quickly, to maintain order. The effort is real.
Problems defined for them. The problems the teacher works on came from somewhere else. The board, the principal, the parents, the textbook. The teacher solves them but does not author them.
This is not a personal failing. It is a description of where the thinking stops.
A note on what unreflective teachers are not
Dewey was careful to add a clarification.
It is not that unreflective teachers are not thinking. They are. They think hard about how to manage their classes, deliver content, and meet expectations. The point is that their thinking does not allow the possibility of framing problems in more than one way.
The frame is fixed. Inside the frame, the thinking can be sharp. The frame itself is invisible.
A teacher who has always assumed that lecture is the right way to introduce a topic will think hard about how to give a better lecture. They will not think about whether lecture is the right format. The frame, “lecture is right,” is the part that has not been examined.
The drivers of reflective action
In Dewey’s view, reflective action is generated through three things.
Perplexity. A sense that something does not fit. The teacher notices that a lesson did not work the way it was supposed to. A student behaved in a way that did not match the teacher’s mental model. A practice the teacher had always trusted produced an unexpected result.
Perplexity is the start. Without it, there is no reason to reflect. A teacher who is never perplexed is a teacher whose frame is too tight.
Goal-directedness. The reflection has a destination. The teacher is not just turning over events for the sake of it. They are trying to understand something for a reason: to teach this group better next term, to handle this kind of behaviour differently, to get clearer on what their role actually is.
Goal-directedness is what keeps the reflection from drifting.
Testing or evaluation. Whatever conclusion the teacher reaches gets checked. Does this idea hold up against the evidence? Does the change I tried produce the result I expected? If not, what does that tell me?
Testing closes the loop. Without it, reflection produces ideas that may or may not be true.
Reflection inside experiential learning
This places Dewey’s approach into the realm of experiential learning. Experiential learning is the broader tradition that Kolb later turned into a famous model. The teacher learns from experience by reflecting on it carefully.
Dewey believed the process of reflection itself can be improved by having an understanding of, and experimenting with, forms of thinking. Reflection is not a fixed skill that you either have or do not have. It is something you can practise. Different ways of structuring reflection produce different results, and the teacher can experiment with those forms.
This is part of why later writers (Kolb, Schon, Gibbs, Johns) were able to build new structures on top of Dewey’s foundation. He invited the experimentation. He did not lock down the form.
Why this distinction still matters
A century after Dewey wrote, the distinction between routine and reflective action still describes most teaching faculties.
Most teachers do most of their work routinely most of the time. This is not a criticism. The work is hard, the days are long, and routine is what makes the day possible at all. The question is not whether to use routine. It is whether the teacher has any time, structure, or community in which to do reflective action as well.
A school where every minute is consumed by routine has no space for reflective action. The teachers in such a school may be effective in the narrow sense and stuck in the wider one. The students will not see the school improve year on year, because nobody is examining the frame.
A school that protects time for reflection (PLC meetings, peer observation, journal time) creates the conditions for reflective action. Whether the teachers actually use the time is a separate question, but the time has to exist first.
Routine action accepts the frame; reflective action examines it
Routine action takes the school’s current practices and goals as given and finds efficient ways to deliver them. Reflective action arises from perplexity, points at a purpose, and tests its conclusions. Both involve hard thinking. The difference is whether the thinking can question how the problem itself has been framed.
A worked example
Two teachers face the same situation: a Class 9 group keeps failing the end-of-unit test in algebra.
The routine teacher reads the test results, decides the students need more practice, and adds extra practice problems to the next unit. The frame is “students need more practice when they fail.” The teacher works hard and the frame stays in place.
The reflective teacher reads the same results, asks why the students failed, looks at the kinds of errors they made, talks to a few students, and discovers that most of the failures were on word problems where the students could not figure out which operation to use. The teacher concludes that the issue is not arithmetic practice but the link between language and operation. The unit gets redesigned to teach that link explicitly.
Both teachers acted. The first in routine. The second in reflection. Over a year, the second teacher’s students will make different progress.