Reflection as the Key to Intuitive Knowing

In The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (1983), Schön introduced the idea of knowing-in-action or “reflection-in-action,” observing that “[w]hen we go about the spontaneous, intuitive performance of the actions in everyday life, we show ourselves to be knowledgeable in a special way. Often we cannot say what it is that we know . . . [because it is] implicit in our patterns or action and in our feel for the stuff with which we are dealing” (p. 49). According to Schön, knowing-in-action complements reflection