Reflective Essay Sample: Schon in Practice: Reflection During a PGCE Placement

Model Answer

This essay draws on Schön’s (1983) distinction between knowing-in-action, reflection-in-action, and reflection-on-action to examine a Year 8 geography lesson from my second PGCE placement, in which a planned group activity had to be substantially adapted midway through the lesson. Schön’s framework was chosen over more linear, staged models because teaching frequently demands judgement formed in the moment, under time pressure, rather than a tidy sequence of description followed by analysis after the fact; his model captures that immediacy while still making space for structured analysis once the lesson has ended. The school, class, and pupils referred to have been anonymised throughout in line with placement confidentiality requirements and my provider’s code of professional conduct.

Knowing-in-Action: The Plan Going In

The lesson was the second in a short sequence on tectonic hazards, and the planned task asked pupils, working in fixed groups of four, to role-play different stakeholders – a local resident, a geologist, an aid worker, and a government minister – responding to a fictional earthquake scenario, before feeding back their group’s position to the class. This task drew on routines I had used successfully twice before with a different, generally more compliant Year 8 class, and I planned it with a fairly automatic, tacit confidence that the structure would work again largely unchanged; this is what Schön (1983) terms knowing-in-action, the largely unreflective, practised competence that experienced and developing practitioners alike bring to familiar-seeming situations, built up over repeated, mostly successful attempts rather than derived afresh each time from formal planning theory. I had prepared clear role cards, a feedback template, and a ten-minute planning window, and my mentor had approved the plan the previous day without significant amendment, which further reinforced my sense that the lesson was well prepared and unlikely to need major adjustment on the day. This class was, however, meaningfully different from the group I had used the activity with previously: it contained a wider spread of prior attainment in geography, a higher proportion of pupils with identified additional needs, and, as I would only fully appreciate afterwards, a class dynamic in which a small number of pupils were quick to disengage visibly and vocally rather than quietly, a difference my planning had not explicitly accounted for because the activity structure itself had felt, from my prior experience, essentially routine and low-risk. I had checked the SEND register for the class the previous week as part of routine planning, but I had focused mainly on access arrangements such as seating and printed materials rather than on whether the cognitive demand of specific roles within the task was well matched to the additional needs recorded there, a gap that only became apparent once the lesson was already under way.

Reflection-in-Action: What Happened, and What I Did in the Moment

Roughly six minutes into the planning window, it became apparent that one particular group of four, seated near the window, had disengaged almost entirely from the role-play framing and were instead arguing loudly about an unrelated break-time incident, while two other groups had finished their allocated roles far faster than planned and were sitting with little to do. Rather than continuing to circulate on my planned route around the room, which is what my knowing-in-action would ordinarily have had me do, I found myself pausing beside the disengaged group, kneeling to their eye level, and asking a direct, low-key question about which stakeholder they had actually managed to agree a position for, rather than restating the instructions from the front, which I judged, in that moment, was more likely to escalate than resolve the situation given how publicly it would have called the group out. Simultaneously, I made a quick, in-the-moment decision to give the faster-finishing groups an extension task I had not originally planned, asking them to draft two follow-up questions to challenge another group’s stakeholder position, partly to keep them purposefully occupied and partly because it occurred to me, mid-lesson, that this would strengthen the feedback discussion that was due to follow. Schön (1983) describes this kind of on-the-spot adjustment, made without stepping back to consciously theorise before acting, as reflection-in-action: thinking that shapes what one is doing while still doing it, rather than analysis that follows afterwards. I was also, at the same time, monitoring the rest of the room out of the corner of my attention, aware that spending too long with either group risked the remaining groups drifting off-task in turn, which meant the two adjustments had to be quick, roughly ninety seconds each, rather than the more considered interventions I might have designed given time to plan them properly in advance.

Reflection-on-Action: Analysis After the Lesson

Reflecting afterwards, in the more deliberate, stepped-back sense Schön (1983) terms reflection-on-action, I can identify several things about the episode that were not obvious to me in the moment itself. First, the disengaged group’s difficulty was not primarily a behavioural issue, as I had half-assumed while responding to it, but appears in hindsight to have stemmed from the role-play framing itself being less accessible to them than to other groups; their assigned role, the government minister, required a more abstract grasp of policy trade-offs than the more concrete resident or geologist roles, which is consistent with Vygotsky’s (1978) argument that tasks pitched beyond a pupil’s current zone of proximal development, without adequate scaffolding, tend to produce disengagement that can present, superficially, as a behavioural rather than an instructional problem; Moon (2004) similarly warns that surface-level behavioural readings of classroom moments can obscure the underlying learning difficulty that actually produced them, which is a useful caution against my own initial, in-the-moment reading of the group as simply off-task rather than under-scaffolded. Second, my improvised extension task for the faster groups, though it worked well enough in the moment, was not tied to any specific learning objective I had planned in advance, and on reflection I was fortunate rather than skilful in how well it happened to support the later feedback discussion; a more deliberately planned extension task, prepared in advance for exactly this kind of pacing mismatch, would have been more reliably effective and less dependent on a lucky improvisation. Eraut’s (2000) work on professional knowledge is useful here, distinguishing between the tacit, experience-based knowledge that allowed me to respond quickly and calmly to the disengaged group, and the more explicit, propositional knowledge, such as an understanding of scaffolding and the zone of proximal development, that I am only now, in reflection-on-action, connecting properly to what actually happened live in the room. A third point, which only became visible once I compared this lesson with the two earlier, apparently successful runs of the same activity, is that both previous classes had a narrower spread of prior attainment and had been taught the same stakeholder role-play format in a prior unit, meaning pupils there were drawing on a familiar structure rather than encountering it, and its cognitive demands, for the first time simultaneously; this class was doing both at once, which in hindsight made the task considerably harder than my planning had assumed, independent of behaviour or motivation.

Reframing and Future Practice

Schön (1983) argues that reflection-on-action should feed forward into a reframing of how a practitioner understands similar future situations, rather than remaining a one-off post-mortem of a single lesson, and this episode has reframed several aspects of how I now plan role-play and group-differentiated tasks. Practically, I have begun building a pre-prepared, curriculum-linked extension task into every group activity from the planning stage, rather than relying on improvisation if pacing runs faster than expected, so that the quality of the extension no longer depends on what I happen to think of under time pressure. I have also started deliberately varying the cognitive demand of roles within any role-play task, checking explicitly at the planning stage whether some assigned roles require more abstract reasoning than others, and building in a short, whole-class modelling step for the more demanding roles before pupils are asked to work on them independently in groups. More broadly, this episode has made me more comfortable treating my own in-the-moment judgement as a legitimate, though imperfect, professional resource, rather than something to be anxious about simply because it departs from the written plan; at the same time, it has shown me clearly that reflection-on-action, done properly and not rushed, surfaces patterns, such as the mismatch between role difficulty and pupil readiness, that reflection-in-action alone, however competent, cannot reliably catch in real time. I intend to discuss this specific episode, and the reframing it has produced, with my mentor at my next formal observation review, and to use it as a concrete example in my professional development portfolio evidencing Teachers’ Standard 5 on adapting teaching to respond to pupils’ strengths and needs. Loughran (2002) cautions that reflective practice can become a superficial, formulaic exercise if it is reduced to a checklist completed after every lesson rather than genuinely revisited when planning future ones, and I have tried to guard against that here by testing the reframed approach, the pre-planned extension task and the pre-checked role difficulty, in two subsequent lessons rather than only writing about the intention; both lessons ran with noticeably less improvisation required mid-task, which I take as early, if informal, evidence that the reframing has actually changed my practice rather than only my account of it.

References

• Eraut, M. (2000) ‘Non-formal learning and tacit knowledge in professional work’, British Journal of Educational Psychology, 70(1), pp. 113–136.
• Department for Education (2021) Teachers’ Standards. London: DfE.
• Loughran, J.J. (2002) ‘Effective reflective practice: in search of meaning in learning about teaching’, Journal of Teacher Education, 53(1), pp. 33–43.
• Moon, J.A. (2004) A Handbook of Reflective and Experiential Learning: Theory and Practice. London: RoutledgeFalmer.
• Pollard, A. et al. (2019) Reflective Teaching in Schools. 5th edn. London: Bloomsbury.
• Schön, D.A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books.
• Schön, D.A. (1987) Educating the Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
• Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.