February 3, 2012
Educating Reflective Practitioners in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Larry Susskind, Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning
During the January Independent Activities Period (IAP), a small group of students and faculty met to think about ways in which the Department of Urban Studies and
Planning might do more to ensure that its students graduate with the competences required to be reflective practitioners. For several decades, mostly at the prompting of Professor Donald Schon, the department focused on how this might be accomplished. In his book, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think
in Action (Basic Books, 1984) Schon argued that successful planners (and other professionals) end up relying less on the formulas and methods learned in graduate school than on the improvisational skills they hone in practice. He argued that individuals can enhance their ability to “reflect-in-action” by “reflecting-on-action.”
So, Schon’s idea was that we ought to encourage students to begin learning from their own experience while they are in school.
Since Schon’s death in 1997, the Department’s commitment to training reflective practitioners has waned. It is time, I believe, to reinvigorate that commitment. To do so, we need to clarify what we mean by reflective practice and decide how to help students learn from all the field-based activities (i.e. practicums, studios, internships, client-oriented research projects and part-time jobs) they engage in while they are at MIT. Co-Lab is poised to take the lead on this and Professor Ceasar
McDowell is preparing possible teaching protocols that might help.
How would we know a ‘reflective practitioner’ if we saw one?
Mark Smith summarizes one of Schon’s most important ideas in his profile of Don in the Encyclopedia of Informal Education (2001): when practitioners try to make sense of situations they perceive to be unique, they see these situations in terms of circumstances that are already part of their repertoire. They have to decide not to classify new situations under old categories or rules. They have to accept them as unfamiliar, that is, as both similar to and different from what they already know. The familiar functions as a precedent, or metaphor, for the unfamiliar. (Schön 1983:
138)
In this way we engage with a situation. We do not have a full understanding of things before we act, but, hopefully, we can avoid major problems while 'testing the water'. When looking at a situation we are influenced by, and use, what has gone before, what might come, our repertoire, and our frame of reference. We are able to draw upon certain routines. As we work we can bring fragments of memories
into play and begin to build theories and responses that fit the new situation.

The question we addressed in our IAP discussion was how to enable students to do this (i.e., to interpret what is happening in their own experience and build their capacity to improvise while taking account of what they already know). We also talked about how to track student improvement in this regard.
What kind of coaching or question-asking should the Department provide before, during and after each instance of student engagement with a client or community?
We started with a hypothetical. Imagine a student who is eager to learn as much as possible from her upcoming community-based work assignment. We assumed that she already knows quite a bit about the subject matter, let’s say, community economic development. We also assumed that she took the assignment because she wants to enhance her ability to apply what she knows while also helping a particular
“client” organization. We made a provisional list of things we might tell that student before she started work. For instance,
1. Don’t be too locked in, have an open mind, avoid preconceptions.
2. Make contact ahead of time with individuals in the community or the client
organization.
3. Be willing to talk about your own experiences; describe what has gone well for
you in the past, and what has been difficult.
4. Make sure you understand “their” assumptions, expectations and goals.
5. Be on the lookout for obstacles or constraints.
6. Focus on things you can do that help the organization as well as yourself. Be sure
to arrange a clear feedback loop (that includes the people you will be working
with and your on-campus advisor).
7. Don’t let difficult people or personalities get to you.
8. Find out all you can about how the organization communicates.
These are some of the things we might say to this student before she begins her work. We also tried to think of things we would say to her during the semester, as the work unfolded, and at the end of the assignment, to be sure that she takes away all possible insights from the experience. In general, we found ourselves thinking about ways of preparing students “to be uncomfortable,” heightening their awareness and focusing their attention.
Our list of things to talk about during the student’s field-based experience, while there is still time to make changes, included:
1.
What is the organization not asking you? What are you not asking them?
2.
Have you re-set your expectations? Have they re-set their expectations about your role and responsibilities?
3.
What could/should you do differently in the time you have remaining? Why?
4.
What do you wish you had known coming into the assignment? What skills do you now think you might want to develop further? Why?

5.
Can you think of your experience so far in terms of “double loop” as opposed to “single loop” learning? That is, are you learning about things you would do differently in future field-based or practice-based assignments and not just in this same situation?
Don Schon (following Gregory Bateson) put a great deal of emphasis on double loop learning. In this case, that refers to lessons learned or insights related not just to the current situation but to parallel situations in the future. Or, it might refer to not just what this student has learned from the experience, but what other students might take away from what has happened to her. Or, it could refer to what the community or organization might have learned from this engagement so that future interns can be selected and trained more effectively.
Finally, coming back to Schon’s ideas about improvisation, the question we agreed that we would ask the student is, “What have you learned that can be used in all kinds of situations, in an improvisational way, rather than what have you learned that ought to be repeated only in similar situations?”
Any kind of mid-course corrections should also feed into what the Department ought to learn, and not just this individual, about engaging in this kind of work.
We had some difficulty specifying a way to ensure that this kind of reflection happens every time a student engages in practice-like assignments while they are at MIT.
We then shifted our attention to the kinds of questions we would urge the student to consider after her assignment had ended. Our list, in this case, was pretty straightforward:
1.
What lessons would you take from this experience?
2.
How well were you prepared for the assignments you were given? Are there new or improved skill sets that are now top priority for you?
3.
What did you learn about yourself from this experience?
4.
What did you learn about the specific organization or community you worked with? What did you learn about communicating effectively in places like this?
5.
What would you tell your “successor?” (What would you have done differently? Why? What do you wish you knew before you started? Why?)
6.
What connections between theory (what you have learned in class) and practice (what happened “on the job”) are now clear to you? Explain why you think that.
7.
What might the Department do to share what you have learned with other students and faculty?
8.
Have you views about a successful outcome in this kind of situation changed at all? Explain why.
We then tried to figure out how we might assess the adequacy of the student’s answers to these questions. Are any and all answers to questions like these

satisfactory? Does the quality of the “evidence” or the quality of the student’s lesson-drawing matter? Can and should faculty try to judge student answers and provide feedback and advice accordingly? Or, should the faculty serve only as a sounding board at each point in the conversation? Should the Department be worried that students might not have done enough or done the right things to help a client agency or community?
Can we encourage “meta-learning?”
We asked ourselves whether it is possible for students to learn to improvise? Do repeated efforts at improvisation automatically improve the quality of improvisation? Our views on these questions were mixed. There is some interesting published work on improvisation, particularly in fields like music, theatre, and psychotherapy. Skilled jazz instrumentalists, for example, have an easier time improvising with strangers than beginners do. This suggests that it may be easier for individuals who are confident about their basic skills and knowledge to improvise. Also, there turn out to be tacit signals that experienced jazz musicians and improvisationalists in the theatre recognize and embrace immediately. These are not visible to those who are less experienced. In both music and theatre, when improvisation works, it is seamless. This is largely because all the players involved accept whatever is happening. They don’t question what their counterparts are doing or their motives for doing it. In comedy improv this is known as the “Yes, and” rather than the “Yes, but” rule. This is a principal that can be taught. The question the Department needs to ask is do we have faculty or adjunct instructors who can teach meta-skills or insights like these?
In the same vein, we talked about how budding professionals learn much more than they know, and know much more than they learn in class. How can we help students understand this? What should faculty be saying about this? We also identified story-telling as an important skill that students need to perfect in the context of field-based assignments. They need to be able to tell stories about themselves and present what is happening to them in a story-format that will help them communicate with and learn from others. We need to increase student awareness about the importance of meta-learning. Meta-insights or meta-learning appear to be what distinguish highly capable from less capable professionals. We need to instill awareness of this in our students while they are at MIT.
Are there other theoretical constructs that can help us train reflective practitioners?
We found Gibbs’s (1988) Learning by doing: a guide to teaching and learning
methods. Cheltenham: The Geography Discipline Network particularly helpful. We like the scripts he offers. (Available to download http://www.chelt.ac.uk/gdn/gibbs
[accessed 07.07.04]). Here’s the summary diagram and the questions he would urge faculty to ask students during and after each field-based experience:

Description of event
Personal action plans
Description of feelings
Conclusions
(specific)
Evaluation of experience
Conclusions
(general)
Analysis
Description:
What happened? Don’t make judgments yet, just describe the event/experience
Feelings:
What were your reactions and feelings?
Evaluation:
What was good or bad about the experience? Make value judgments
Analysis:
What sense can you make of the situation? What was really going on? Are there patterns or themes emerging? Bring ideas from other experiences to inform this analysis.
Conclusions (general):
What can be concluded, in a general sense from these experiences and analyses you have undertaken?
Conclusions (specific):
What can be concluded about your own specific, unique, personal situation or way of working?

Personal action plans:
What are you going to do differently in this type of situation next time? What steps are you going to take on the basis of what you have learnt?
“Identity Work” and Its Relation to Reflective Practice: Building Skills and
Developing A Professional Identity
There is a desperate need for the DUSP to make an explicit commitment to help students with the “identity work” that all professionals need to do when they are trying to meet the demands of certification and figure out what kind of professional they want to be. If you ask students in DUSP what they are training to become, some will answer -- very tentatively – that they are training to become urban, regional or community planners. Many will say, though, that they are preparing to work on a specific set of issues, but won’t identify themselves as planners. It’s a bit strange that students enrolled in a professional degree (Master of City Planning) program are not quite sure whether they are going to be planners or something else. In part, this reflects continued confusion within the profession about what planning means and what professional planners are expected to do. Many years ago, DUSP decided to add Urban Studies to its title. This was an acknowledgment that the Department had expanded the range of disciplines represented on the faculty. The view then
(and now) is that physical planning on its own can not provide a sufficiently comprehensive or powerful enough approach to understanding and addressing urban problems. So, all the applied social sciences were added. The planning profession (or, at least the establishment that represents the 36,000 or so planners in America) wasn’t able to keep up. The academic wing got out ahead of the practice wing. So, on top of all the usual difficulties any new professional has figuring out who they are and whether they want to join a guild, planners are burdened by great confusion regarding the scope of their responsibilities. We see this confusion today in the ongoing discussions about what the MCP core courses ought to cover.
Furthermore, planning takes place in a highly politicized environment that more or less requires professional planners to own up to their ideological predispositions.
This makes the problem of figuring out one’s professional identity as a planner even harder.
In light of all this, is not surprising that students in DUSP want and need time to think through why, or if, they want to be professional planners and what that might entail. This kind of identity work rarely happens in the classroom. It happens in the student lounge, over a beer, or in a car as a student-faculty team drives back from a community engagement of one kind or another. Some students think they are in the
MCP program to master an academic discipline or a body of theoretical knowledge.
Others believe they are at MIT to gain a set of skills they’ll need to function effectively in the political world. Today, most are place-based in their orientation,

although not all. Very few of the faculty have experience as professional planners, so they can not model for students what their future professional practice might look like. All of this adds up to a setting in which students need to be able to use fieldbased assignments to pursue, for themselves, the identity work required to help them sort out how they fit into the planning profession (if at all), and if so, what being part of the planning profession means with regard to their likely career path.
Part of being a reflective practitioner involves coming to grips with all these questions and formulating a personal professional identity.
How can DUSP help its student build their reflective capabilities (i.e. refine their personal theories of practice and clarify their professional identities) while they are studying at MIT?
As we discussed this, it became clear that any Department effort along these lines needs to start during orientation week. DUSP needs to make students mindful of the fact that they have as much to learn from field-based experiences as they do from scheduled classes. Indeed, in our view, DUSP ought to stress that “learning to learn” from field-based experience is one of the most important things the Department can help students accomplish. We also need to underscore the fact that MIT is committed to helping students learn from a variety of field-based assignments
(while they are at MIT), and then be very clear about how we expect to do that.
We agreed that the Gateway class needs to include a reflective component (as well as space for the first round of identity work that students need to do). The “Chase-
A-Planner exercise required on-and-off over the years is certainly one way to help with this. All DUSP curriculum descriptions should emphasis that the Practicum is a key step in building each student’s reflective capabilities and refining their personal theories of practice. And, we need to show how this will be accomplished. The introductory courses in each of the program areas in the Department (i.e. CDD, EPP,
HCED and IDG) should make more of an effort to pinpoint the ethical dilemmas and life choices that professional planners are likely to face in practice, whether they are similar or different in each sub-area of specialization.
We agreed that the Department should begin assembling tangible artifacts of each student’s field-based efforts as soon as they arrive at MIT. These might take the form of reflective portfolios that begin with a video interview when a student first arrives at MIT and include elements added each semester as students reflect (in writing or on camera) on their evolving sense of themselves as professionals. These could be useful to subsequent generations of students, so they should be accessible on-line. Entries should be added to these portfolios at the end of each semester, or at the conclusion of each instance of field-based engagement. From out standpoint, reflective portfolios could be the focal point of each student’s professional development plan.

The initial video interview should provide a baseline that students and advisors can use as a touchstone during the subsequent two years. We talked about each student being assigned a Practice Advisor (perhaps a DUSP alum) along with an Academic
Advisor. We are not confident that very many DUSP faculty members are in a position to advise MCP students with regard to their personal professional development as planners.
We discussed a possible questionnaire that students could be asked to fill out when they first arrive and revise each semester all the way through to an exit interview when they graduate. We think the Department needs to find a way to check in with students during each field-based engagements (in much the way we imagined talking with our hypothetical community development student). Perhaps on-line supports can be created to help with this. Students need to be prodded to document their efforts along the way
As we tried to clarify the kinds of things students hope to learn from various fieldbased experiences, we thought that it might be important to emphasize the various roles that planners have traditionally played: policy analyst, advocate, mediator, designer, futurist, etc.). Once an all purpose list of roles is developed, the
Department should be clear what it thinks the most important dilemmas are that planners in each role typically face. This would provide a framework for students to assess “how they are doing” and “what they are learning” in each of their field-based assignments. The Gateway class used to examine the roles that planners play and the practice dilemmas associated with each. It might be good to resurrect and update that material.
In general, we felt that support for reflective practice should be built into the
“exoskeleton” of the MCP program, rather than into regular courses. Advising
(particularly if each student had an experienced Practice Advisor with whom they could checked in periodically), internships, part-time jobs, summer jobs and presentations by experienced practitioners (like Humphrey Fellows, mid-career MS students and Mel King Fellows in Co-Lab) are all part of the exoskeleton of the
Department. These activities are more likely to help students build their reflective capabilities than traditional seminars or lecture classes.
We agreed that some group in the DUSP should have primary responsibility for coordinating efforts aimed at enhancing the reflective capacities of our students. If
Co-Lab is willing to take responsibility for overseeing and coordinating the build-out of the Department’s practice-related exoskeleton (i.e. through the Mel King Fellows
Program, perhaps), that would be ideal. We are unlikely to get better at this as a teaching program unless someone can be held accountable for the improvements that need to be made.
Three other ideas emerged from our conversations. First, it is important for the
MCP program to clarify near-term, middle-term and long-term objectives with regard to helping students develop their reflective capabilities. While it is probably

too soon to spell out performance standards, it will hard to hold anyone accountable if we don’t set increasingly specific goals in this area. Second, we want to underscore the fact that just asking students to write out their reactions to various field-based experiences, even if they do it regularly, isn’t enough. A conversational format seems to us to be critical. Finally, we wondered what the possibilities might be of adding video documentation of each student’s engagement in the field. It would be a lot easier for faculty or Practice Advisors to talk with students about their community-based work if there were a record of specific events or interventions to review. This would be the best way, from our standpoint, of capturing student efforts to improvise in the face of the real pressures of practice.
To summarize, we are calling for face-to-face debriefings coupled with video documentation (as part of a Reflective Portfolio); regular check-ins with a Practice
Advisor; get–togethers in which groups of students and Practice Advisors can meet to share notes, and career counseling that is more attentive to the specific professional roles we expect our graduates to be able to play. We didn’t have much time to discuss it, but someone suggested we think about a kind of Grand Rounds like those that medical students take part in. What if we took a week off from classes every year, brought students to watch (alumni) practitioners at work in the Boston area during that week, and then had a department-wide review of everyone’s reactions? Discussions back at MIT following such visits might provide a valuable stimulus to Department-wide conversations, even among faculty who have no practical planning experience.
What are some things the Department might try next?
(1) Begin the process of helping students create Reflective Portfolios. Perhaps a small sample of students could volunteer to do this during the Spring 2012 semester.
(2) Acknowledge the importance of “identity work” and the department’s commitment to help students work thorough their place in the profession in all published material about DUSP.
(3) Invite Boston-area alumni to volunteer as Practice Mentors for a sample of students interested in face-to-face discussions about their field-based activities. Assess the idea of Practice Mentors.
(4) Draft written protocols for students to fill out on line or discuss with a
Practice Advisor before, during and after each field-based activity. Co-Lab should take the lead on this.
(5) Debrief a series of 2 nd year MCPs to find out how they have used various field-based learning opportunities while they have been at MIT to build their reflective capacities. This could provide valuable input for on-going conversations in the MCP Committee.
(6) Ask Co-Lab to take the lead in producing a more complete plan for enhancing the Department’s “exoskeleton” to present to the whole DUSP by the end of next academic year.
(7) Commit DUSP funds to support these efforts.