Reflective Practice Week 6

I have been doing some reading on the work presented by Donald Schon on learning, reflection and change.I am particularly interested in his theory of double loop learning and reflection in action. I realise that I have never thought about reflection of learning as reflection during the learning process. I have always focused on reflection once the learning has been completed. I think many teachers would be encouraging this type of reflective practice.
I really like the reference to teaching reflection in action as teaching children to think on their feet.
In his work together with Chris Argyris,Schon says that learning involves the detection and correction of error. This view determines their concepts of single-loop and double-loop learning.
Single-loop learning occurs where something goes wrong, then the starting point for many people is to look for another strategy that will address and work to correct the error, within perimeters of their current thinking. In other words, given or chosen goals, values, plans and rules are drawn upon to fix the error. The fact that it may be these very goals, values, plans and rules that were influential in creating the error are never questioned. According to Argyris and Schön (1974), this is single-loop learning.
They suggest that another response is to question to goals, values, plans and rules themselves and examine these critically. This they describe as double-loop learning. Schon and Argyris explain that this kind of learning may then lead to an alteration of the goals, plans, rules and values creating a shift in the way that strategies are determined in correcting error, in other words, there may be a complete shift in thinking about how to solve the error or problem.

Today,we revisited the Habits of Mind in the context of a scientific way of thinking. We have started to discuss how the Habits of Mind and how these kinds of thinking may actually be happening or evident in our everyday lives. I have printed off some of the Habit of Mind chain strips. This week, as people identify Habits of Mind thinking displayed by others in the class, we will fill in a chain strip. The chain strip asks for the persons name, which Habit they exhibited and what they actually did to display the identified way of thinking.
For next week:
I have created a powerpoint with some questions. I am going to use the Record Narration function to record students responses to these questions.
The questions will give me information on what children think learning is, how they know if they are learning and if they know what to do next with their learning.