What This Theme Explores
Learning by Doing and Coaching asks how professionals acquire the tacit artistry needed for messy, indeterminate problems—skills that can’t be reduced to procedures or mastered through lectures. It argues that genuine competence emerges in the midst of action, as learners try things, see consequences, and revise on the fly through Reflection-in-Action. Coaching is essential because a master can make the invisible structure of practice visible—demonstrating moves, posing generative questions, and staging situations where the student’s next action becomes the site of learning. In doing so, the theme challenges the hierarchy embedded in Professional Artistry vs. Technical Skill, insisting that artistry is not an optional flourish but the core of professional education.
How It Develops
Schön launches the theme by diagnosing the “dilemma of rigor or relevance” in the Preface and Chapter 1-2 Summary: the reigning Critique of Technical Rationality shows that tidy, theory-first curricula fail precisely where practice is most complex. As a remedy, he turns to “deviant traditions” that already teach artistry—studio and conservatory models—framing the practicum as a place where students primarily learn by doing under coaching.
This vision takes concrete shape in the design studio, the book’s prototype of the Reflective Practicum (Chapter 3-4 Summary, Chapter 5-6 Summary). Through the studio master Quist working with students like Petra and Judith, Schön parses the craft of coaching itself: how a coach reframes a problem, demonstrates design “moves,” and enters a reflective conversation with the student’s drawing. The famous “paradox of learning to design” underscores why doing must precede rule learning: one can’t understand the meanings of design operations until one has begun designing.
Schön then broadens the lens in Chapter 7-8 Summary and Chapter 9-10 Summary, tracing the practicum’s logic across domains: a master class with Pablo Casals, psychoanalytic supervision, and counseling seminars co-taught with Chris Argyris. Despite differing surface forms—music, therapy, organizational consulting—each scene centers on a student attempting a live performance while a coach shapes attention, extends repertoire, and models reflection-in-action.
Finally, the argument culminates institutionally in Chapter 11-12 Summary, where Schön urges professional schools to build curricula around reflective practica. His MIT experiment shows both the promise and friction of embedding coached, project-based work inside the university: it bridges school and world, but demands new roles, spaces, and evaluative norms.
Key Examples
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The Desk Crit (Quist and Petra). When Petra stalls, Quist doesn’t explain principles abstractly; he overlays tracing paper and draws through possibilities while talking, turning demonstration into dialogue. His running commentary—“The kindergarten might go over here... then you might carry the gallery level through” (45)—lets Petra witness the sequencing, testing, and reframing that constitute design thinking in action.
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John Dewey’s foundational idea. Schön grounds the practicum in Dewey’s developmental theory that learning begins with action. Dewey’s formulation reframes “arts and occupations” as cognitive engines, legitimizing a curriculum where doing is not application of prior knowledge but the source of knowing.
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Coaching models in practice:
- “Follow me!” In Casals’s master class, imitation is a disciplined path to perception: by becoming an “absolute copy,” the student acquires fine-grained sensitivity to phrasing and tone that no verbal description could impart.
- “Joint experimentation.” Architect Dani asks what Michal wants to achieve, then co-designs experiments to realize her aims. Coaching becomes a partnership that builds the student’s agency and judgment rather than substituting the coach’s intent.
- “Hall of mirrors.” In psychoanalytic supervision and the Argyris seminars, the relational dynamics of coach–student echo those in the student’s client work. This recursive setup turns the practicum itself into a case, making immediate interactions a mirror for professional practice.
Character Connections
The coaches—Quist, Dani, Casals, Argyris—embody different stances on how artistry is transmitted. Quist models “thinking-in-action” by drawing; Dani shares control to cultivate the student’s intentionality; Casals enforces imitation to calibrate nuance; Argyris surfaces defensive routines so learners can confront the very habits that block reflection. Together they show coaching as a repertoire, not a recipe: the coach’s artistry lies in diagnosing what kind of intervention the learner and situation require.
The students—Petra, Michal, Judith—illustrate how learning by doing depends on engagement, not passive reception. Petra’s openness lets Quist build from her moves toward a design logic she can own; Michal’s dialogue with Dani grows her capacity to set and test her own criteria; Judith’s resistance to Northover crystallizes a “learning bind,” revealing that without trust and willingness to experiment, coaching cannot take root. Their trajectories make clear that the practicum educates dispositions as much as skills: curiosity, tolerance for ambiguity, and readiness to reframe.
John Dewey functions as the intellectual mentor behind these relationships. His philosophy legitimizes the primacy of experience and the educator’s role in structuring situations that elicit inquiry, giving Schön both a vocabulary and a warrant for elevating coached action to the center of professional education.
Symbolic Elements
The studio/practicum operates as a “virtual world,” a protected, consequence-light space where high-stakes realities can be simulated and slowed down. Its meaning lies in the permission it grants: to try, err, and revisit moves under guidance, transforming mistakes into resources for reflection.
Quist’s tracing paper symbolizes coaching that layers expertise without erasing the learner’s agency. The transparency communicates respect—building on the student’s work while making the coach’s thinking visible and revisable.
The dialogue—of words, sketches, gestures, musical phrases—embodies Schön’s “reflective conversation.” Unlike a lecture’s monologue, this turn-taking is itself a model of practice: noticing, proposing, testing, and reframing in rapid sequence until a problem “talks back” and suggests the next move.
Contemporary Relevance
Schön’s model anticipates today’s project-based classrooms, clinical simulations, coding bootcamps, and the spread of executive coaching. Across these arenas, learning is organized around real or realistic tasks, a mentor who shapes perception and repertoire, and cycles of rapid feedback that cultivate judgment. The contemporary “practice turn” in the social sciences echoes the same insight: tacit knowledge and situated performance drive competence. In a world of fast-changing problems, the practicum’s aim—teaching people to learn while doing—has become not a pedagogical preference but a professional necessity.
Essential Quote
“Recognition of the natural course of development ... always sets out with situations which involve learning by doing. Arts and occupations form the initial stage of the curriculum, corresponding as they do to knowing how to go about the accomplishment of ends’’ (Dewey, 1974, p. 364).
Dewey’s claim reframes doing as the origin of knowing, not its mere application. It justifies the practicum’s sequence—act, notice, reflect, adjust—as the very engine of understanding, and it elevates the coach’s role from informer to designer of experiences. Schön’s pedagogy is, in effect, Dewey’s insight operationalized for modern professional education.