Action Research: Enhancing Reflective Practice

Any person using action research to improve their personal, professional or family life, will go through regular cycles of reflection. In other articles I have stressed the need for this to be done as a protocol and as regular practice, done in the same way each week so that outcomes can be compared over time. It is hoped that reflection aids us in keeping our objectivity opposition research. The danger is that it might actually cause the opposite and that you can end up chasing your tail, or in other words reflecting on your reflections. This article becomes a reflection on the ups and downs of reflective practice, and is spurred on by a number of thoughts experienced and discuss at the Collaborative Action Research Network conference, 2010, in Cambridge.

Thomas Stern of the University of Klagenfurt, Austria (2010) discusses the difference between reflection on what you are doing (first-order reflection) and reflecting on your influence on that process (discussed as second order reflection). As he sees it, second order reflection is done in order to improve the entire experience (and the outcomes for both yourself and the people you are working with). This makes sense, unless we look at our own influence, we cannot begin to unpack how it permeates our outcomes. As an example, a particularly happy upbeat teacher in a classroom full of kids will almost always have improved outcomes over one who is sour. In a similar way, action research transforms the individual doing it because it makes them, at least for that period of time, a learner who is excited by the process, that attitude then maybe increasing the likelihood that action researchers almost always have desirable outcomes.

The consideration that Dr. Stern points out is that reflection can put a candy coating of success over a cycle of activities, or as Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winner, was cited as saying, "Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself.... and you are the easiest person to fool." Stern suggests that we ask the question, "What am I turning a blind eye to? How am I fooling myself?"

Ways We Fool Ourselves Perhaps the most obvious way we fool ourselves is through selective observation. Research cannot get past the fact that data on whatever we research expands. For instance, when I was doing violence prevention work in the United States, directly after we implemented a new program teachers were filled with stories about how students had successfully negotiated a previously violent episode. The students however may not have seen much difference in their activity. From the student's point of view, the teachers had simply not seen the positive behaviors before, because they were focused on the negative. Perhaps parents will identify with this selective observation, some will tend to see only the good in their children, some only the bad. The way we can get past this challenge of reflection is to ask others to reflect with us, on both the data and our reflections. We should regularly ask, "What am I missing?" In research this would be called triangulating the data.

We also fool ourselves by not asking the right questions. When I'm trying to reinvent the direction of my life, I need to ask, "What is standing in my way?" Or, "How does it serve me to stay where I am?" I may not get to my underlying fears and motivations that are the real reason that I am holding back unless I am willing to open up to those answers. Likewise, if a teacher or practitioner only studies what they do, and how it seems from their point of view, they miss the wealth of information that comes from those they serve. In the business world it has become standard to encourage managers to build relationship with their customers for just this reason. The other person always sees things differently than we do. We can't or should not assume any differently, therefore, a practice of having a reflection buddy would be helpful. We enhance our reflective practice the more we ask the question, "How does it seem to you?" Then together with our buddy we probe the differences until we understand alternative points of view.

We also fool ourselves by being unconscious about our beliefs and attitudes. As an example, people who hold a belief about other people who are different from themselves, frequently only see the data that back up those beliefs. Not only does this reinforce stereotypes, but, even worse, it may give someone an arsenal of data through which to "prove them". On the other hand if we reflect on our biases, and realize that we have a tendency to see things in a particular way (as, for example, I almost always see the positive) then we can ask specifically ask what we are missing that might point out the opposite? For instance, it is helpful to me to look for data that would point out the challenging or negative situations or outcomes.

The Implications in All This for Our Practice Taking the way we fool ourselves in opposite order, the aforementioned challenges would lead us to: first reflect upon our beliefs and attitudes, then develop a series of questions which would cause us to look for divergent data and then, finally, set up protocols to help ensure we gather data from multiple points so that we don't just see what we want to see. But is that enough? Doesn't that still leave us open to "turn a blind eye on something important?" (Stern, 2010). It does, and so I would suggest the following:

· Start the first session of the participatory group with a discussion of how we see things and how our beliefs influence what we notice, and then, from an understanding of our underlying assumptions, we can build our work.

· Start every subsequent session with a conversation about what is being experienced that is surprising or, whether or not anything has happened that might challenge our initial beliefs?

· Probe after each discussion that comes to seeming consensus: "What might we be missing here? Is there anything we have not seen? What if we look at it through the eyes of someone very different than us, what would they see?"

What We Can Expect from This Kind of Reflection I think at first we have to be willing to be uncomfortable, before we can seriously move into a place where we challenge our own assumptions, or to ask Richard Feynman's question "How, am I fooling myself?" I think most of us don't really want to know the answer to that question, because it would require at times that we make changes, and it's so much easier to just go along in our own comfortable way. Even if we accept that the growth potential is enormous, we cannot expect it to be easy.

I also think, though, that there are many possible side benefits that will help keep us on course. These include a closer connection to those around us because we can be trusted, and because, when they see us doing our own deep work, it makes us someone with whom they might trust their own more vulnerable ideas or feelings. On a greater scale, when there is a lot of this work going on, we can create a more open and democratic society. On a finite scale it creates better action research, and therefore better outcomes. At the end of the day, by taking a deeper and co-investigative approach we may end up ensuring those same positive outcomes that we were merely reporting earlier. Whatever the cost, if deeper reflection is what we must do in order to ensure success as we reinvent our lives, our businesses and our world, then I am sure that all of us have the courage to do it.