Donald Schon

Donald Alan Schon (1930-1997) was an American philosopher and professor of urban studies and education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose work reshaped how professional fields understand expertise. Appointed MIT's Ford Professor of Urban Studies and Education in 1972 after joining the faculty as a visiting professor in 1968, Schon argued in his 1983 book The Reflective Practitioner that technical knowledge learned in formal training is not sufficient for skilled professional judgment, and that practitioners instead rely on a tacit, improvisational artistry he called reflection-in-action, thinking on their feet while a situation is still unfolding, and reflection-on-action, reviewing a completed episode afterward to learn from it. Working closely with Chris Argyris, he also studied organizational and societal learning systems and introduced the idea of generative metaphors, the often unexamined frameworks that shape how a problem is defined before anyone tries to solve it. His account of reflective practice became a central reference point in teacher education, medicine, architecture, and social work, where training programs adopted his language to describe how practitioners learn from their own experience on the job.