The reflective approach poses a series of questions for the researcher: What is appropriate to reflect on? What is an appropriate way of observing and reflecting on practice? When we have taken the reflective turn, what constitutes appropriate rigor? And finally, what does the reflective turn imply for one's research stance toward the research activity and toward oneself? This book brings together fourteen case studies on reflective practice representing a diversity of theoretical persuasions, methodological approach, and points of view. The contexts of these studies vary from the public school classroom to the commercial sector, encompassing teachers and students, public planners, managers and administrators, and private citizens reflecting on the effects of history. But disparate as the settings and approaches of the contributors are, notes editor Donald Schon, they all observe, describe, and try to illuminate the things practitioners actually say and do, by exploring the understandings revealed by the patterns of spontaneous activity that make up their practice. Whenever these patterns appear strange or puzzling, the authors assume that there is an underlying sense to be discovered and that it is their business as researchers to discover it. As a consequence, they are sometimes led to reflect on thier own understandings of their subjects' understandings; in order to discover the sense in someone else's practice, they question their own. "The Reflective Turn" is intended as a supplemental text/case book in graduate and upper-level undergraduate teacher-education courses, and the insights and new models provided by its contributors will make it indispensable to researchers on educational practice.