The demonstration of reflection-in-action in maritime training

ABSTRACT

The literature on simulation-based training highlights the importance of post-simulation debriefings as occasions for student self-reflection. Another central feature of these debriefings, which has not gained the same interest, is how debriefings are used by instructors to demonstrate professional modes of reflection-in-action: how they are used to show the deeply reasoned and skilled practices that characterize professional conduct. Based on video recordings of debriefing sessions in a navigation course for master mariners, this study discusses a case where an instructor demonstrates how navigational rules should be applied in line with good seamanship. With a starting point in the visual representation of the scenario, and by re-enacting the students’ performance, the instructor formulates the problem that the students confronted in the scenario as well as potential solutions. In this way, the students’ attempts to solve the task are explicated in terms of the more general lessons that the scenario was designed to teach. The study concludes by a) discussing the empirical case in relation to Schön’s ‘Educating the Reflective Practitioner’ and b) outlining some implications for educational practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Reflection-in-action
• demonstrations
• simulator-based training
• debriefing
• professional education

Introduction

Simulations are central to training in safety-critical domains such as healthcare, aviation, and the military (Aebersold, 2016). In the literature on simulation-based training, the importance of post-simulation debriefing for student learning and reflection is emphasized (Husebø et al., 2013; Kolb, 2014). To support this aim, some researchers suggest the use of structured debriefing models that outline specific phases of the debriefing activities, such as ‘description’, ‘analysis’, and ‘application’ (e.g. Fanning & Gaba, 2007; Kolbe et al., 2015; Sawyer et al., 2016). Other researchers argue that a laissez-faire approach, where no explicit model is used, ‘makes students’ narratives emerge spontaneously’ and opens up possibilities for ‘reflections relevant to students’ experience to emerge in the discussion’ (Nyström et al., 2016, p. 6). Common to these accounts, regardless of whether they argue for a particular model or a less structured approach, is the emphasis on student reflection. This emphasis can also be seen in studies that set out to measure the quality and character of student reflection during debriefings (e.g. Kihlgren et al., 2015). By coding different stages of reflection in a video-recorded debriefing session, for instance, Husebø et al. (2013) conclude that these activities ‘provide students with the opportunity to reflect on their simulation experience’ (p. 140).

Although the emphasis on student reflection is clearly relevant for understanding debriefing as an educational activity within simulation training and beyond, we believe it sometimes comes at the expense of another aspect, i.e. the demonstration of professional reflection-in-action that is relevant to the organization of simulation debriefings. With a starting point in the seminal work of Schön (1983, 1987), we aim to highlight how experienced professionals use visual representations of the students’ prior performance in a simulation to demonstrate reflection-in-action to an audience of novices. Reflection-in-action is here used as a gloss for the deeply reasoned and skilled practices that the experienced professionals aim to make visible to the students. The focus is thus shifted from reflection as something engaged in by students and facilitated by professionals to how professional reflection-in-action is made accessible to novices through debriefing activities.

The case study presented here is based on a collection of video recordings of simulator-based training in a navigation course for master mariners and provides an in-depth exploration of a debriefing session where an instructor uses the prior performance of students to demonstrate professional modes of reflection-in-action. In particular, the study focuses on the way in which the instructor establishes a reflexive relationship between the students’ prior performance in the scenario and the general lessons on how navigation rules should be understood and applied to be in accordance with good seamanship. The study concludes by discussing two conceptualizations of ‘reflection’ in the educational research literature (either as an activity designed for student learning or as a constitutive aspect of skilled performance that is made visible during a debriefing) and by outlining some implications for educational practice.

Donald Schön on reflective practice

For decades, Schön’s work on the reflective practitioner has been central to educational research and practice (Hébert, 2015), particularly in relation to the education of professionals (Ramage, 2017). In The Reflective Practitioner, Schön (1983) argues for a ‘new epistemology of practice’ (p. xi) and sets out to explain the competence that constitutes skilful practitioners’ reflection-in-action in facing complex professional problems. In his subsequent book, Educating the Reflective Practitioner, Schön (1987) extends this idea by arguing that professional education should be centred on the development of students’ reflection-in-action through a process of learning-by-doing, in close dialogue with an experienced practitioner. In this work, a distinction is made between reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action: the former takes place in the midst of action and is integral to competent practice, whereas the latter refers to a retrospective analysis after an event has occurred.

As pointed out in the introduction, the literature on post-simulation debriefings typically uses the work of Schön to highlight the importance of student self-reflection. Dufrene and Young (2014), for instance, state that reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action, as conceived by Schön, ‘provide learners with the opportunity to consciously review their actions during and after an activity or situation’ (p. 372). In a conceptual discussion of simulation debriefings, Dreifuerst (2009) introduces reflection-beyond-action as a more future-oriented conceptualization than those offered by Schön. As with Dufrene and Young, the emphasis is on student reflection as an activity for student learning: ‘debriefing is structured to promote reflection, encouraging students to analyze their own assumptions and think about how to enhance or develop more skilful nursing practice’ (Dreifuerst, 2009, p. 110).

With this focus on student self-reflection, a central question is whether and how students can reflect on aspects of a profession that they have not yet mastered or fully understood the meaning of. In the context of architectural design, Schön (1987) argues that students are neither able to produce designs nor reflect on this production without experience of professional practice and professional reasoning: ‘Only later, when they have learned some aspects of designing, can they advance their learning by reflecting on the tacit knowledge implicit in their own performance’ (p. 88). Before the students reach this point, they need to practise and to observe the conduct of more competent practitioners. Simulation-based training offers students of a professional practice in a specific domain; however, having engaged in practice is not of itself a sufficient condition for being able to reflect on one’s conduct in professionally relevant ways.

This highlights the important role of instructors in demonstrating professional action. For the competent practitioner, student performance in a simulated scenario makes it possible to ‘discern what the student understands, what her particular difficulties are about, what she already knows how to do’ (Schön, 1987, p. 101). In this way, the debriefing provides an occasion for the demonstration of what reflection-in-action might look like in terms of the students’ prior performance. Having monitored the performance of the students, the professional instructor is able to adapt the demonstration to the needs of the students and specifically address what the students should and should not have done – to use a formulation by Kapur (2015; see also Kapur & Bielaczyc, 2012), it provides opportunities for ‘learning from productive failure’. Next, the discussion of how professionals can use debriefings to demonstrate the deeply reasoned and skilled practices that characterize professional conduct will be exemplified by a case study from master mariner training.

Materials and methods

Master mariner education is an example of professional training that aims to prepare students for work in a safety-critical domain where the problems they will encounter as practitioners are seldom straightforward and clear (see Schön, 1983, 1987). Similar to, for example, medicine and law, the skilful professional practice the students are to develop rely as much upon the capability to reflect before taking action as on following a set of predefined rules. Through a four year bachelor programme, which includes training periods on-board ships and in simulator environments, master mariners are taught to enhance their ability to reflect on ill-structured and complex problems.

The larger project of which this study is a part (see Sellberg, 2018; Sellberg & Lundin, 2017, 2018) was designed as a videography, combining ethnography focused on naturally occurring learning activities, the collection of video data to capture these situations, and the sequential analysis of verbal and embodied actions as captured in the video data (Streeck, et al., 2011; Knoblauch & Tuma, 2019). One of the authors (Sellberg) followed various simulation activities for the master mariner students between 2013 and 2017. The empirical data used in this study are part of a larger data corpus of video-recorded simulator-based training in a navigation course collected during autumn 2014. Video data were recorded from five different training sessions in the simulator, resulting in over 60 hours of video-recorded simulator-based training. For this study, four hours of video data from six post-simulation debriefings in the navigation course serve as a basis for in-depth analysis. The data covers 2 of 3 instructors working in the course and 40 out of 60 master mariner students. The video-recorded data from all six debriefings were transcribed verbatim and subjected to repeated viewings and analysis by the authors, both individually and collaboratively (see Heath et al., 2011).

All the simulator-based training sessions had three distinctive phases: briefing, scenario, and debriefing. During the briefing, the instructors provided an outline of the upcoming assignment, and the students received general advice about what they should do and what they should think about in the upcoming scenario (Sellberg, 2018). In the scenario, a total of 10 students at a time worked in pairs, and each of the pairs controlled their own ship bridge simulator (five simulators in total). During this time, the instructors monitored the activity on the bridges from a control room and occasionally provided feedback on the students’ performance (Sellberg & Lundin, 2017, 2018). After the simulated scenarios, the instructor and the 10 students gathered in a classroom for the debriefing. The debriefings generally started with the instructor asking each student bridge team for a self-assessment of their performance using an open question – e.g. ‘How do you think it went?’ or ‘How do you think you did?’ In the next step of the debriefing, the instructor discussed the performance of the five bridge teams in relation to the learning objectives of the exercise, as shown in a PowerPoint presentation. After the general review, a playback of the scenario was used to revisit the students’ actions during the exercise.

The aim of the exercise that we focus on in this case study was to develop the students’ proficiency in handling radar instruments on the bridge and applying The International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREG) in accordance with principles of good seamanship. The scenario was set up so that the students must cross the Traffic Separation Scheme (TSS) at Dover Strait from the British coastline. A crossing of a TSS-lane is a situation where a number of COLREGs apply, including keeping a safe distance from other vessels (Rule 8), the right-hand rule and its exceptions (Rule 9), and showing the intention to cross (Rule 10). Moreover, COLREG stresses that actions at all time should be positive, made in ample time, and with due regard to the observance of good seamanship. Good seamanship is explained to be the kind of behaviour expected from an average good master or seaman in navigating and maintaining a vessel, usually associated with traits such as strong work ethics, good judgement, and a sense of responsibility.

Results

Instances where the instructors demonstrated reflection-in-action frequently recurred in each of the recorded debriefings. In this study, one of these instances is chosen for close and detailed analysis, serving as an empirical illustration of the demonstration of professional reflection-in-action. In the episode chosen, the playback of the scenario was projected on a whiteboard in the debriefing room. This visualization provided a bird’s-eye view of the five simulated ships, and the instructor used the visualization to unpack what the students did during the scenarios and what they should have done differently. In doing this, the instructor begins the analysed episode by recreating the situation that the students were to handle in the prior scenario. The talk that follows is tightly coupled with his actions towards the visualization, as he is using the students’ prior performance to show and tell what good seamanship means in this particular situation. The visualization here works as a shared perceptual field and as an indexical ground for the instructor’s description of the temporal and spatial unfolding of the situation (see Figures 1–4).

Figure 1. ...or you could say that we aim like that 

Figure 2. If this one, so to speak, is on the way down here?

Figure 3. ... n’ then you do that turn in one move

Figure 4. Then you show the intention to cross

Empirical exhibit (translated from Swedish to English)

1. Instructor: It’s when these gone down.. done the turn.. uhm.. then 2. it’s this one then.. one needs to turn to exactly this3. course as in that line.. because then this vessel might4. have turned in like this.. This vessel is on its way 5. down.. or you could say that we aim like that (FIG 1).. 6. So, what intention does one show then? If this one, 7. so to speak, is on the way down here? (FIG 2) 8. Student: Well then it’s a matter of turning in very good time.. so9. that we don’t turn starboard n’ they turn portside10. Instructor: Yes, but then when we come like this.. n’ then you do that11. turn in one move (FIG 3).. n’ aim directly behind 12. Student: Yeees13. Instructor: Then you show the intention (FIG 4) to cross.. It can’t be 14. that you are going in to join.. that’s confused.. One 15. doesn’t think like that initially anyways.. ehhh.. Then 16. this vessel can go on.. they don’t feel like.. yeah, I 17. don’t need to give way for that one.. I can just go 18. on.. N’ so you can go in and cross later.. follow up n’ 19. then the vessels that’s behind can turn where there is more 20. space and then also more time.. that is.. you do a 21. portside turn that doesn’t cause a close quarter situation 22. then.. huh.. that someone else need to solve in a hurry 23. like that.. so you are allowed to turn portside.. but it24. is with restraint so to speak.. You should be clear about 25. the consequence so to speak..

Although the verbal description takes its starting point in the situation that the students encountered, and the visualization shows the moment-by-moment unfolding of the performance of the five groups, the instructor does not simply describe what the students have done. Instead, he presents an analysis of the situation, and the problem that the students in the scenario encountered, in terms of what ‘anyone’ needs to do in such a situation. After having set up the scenario, the instructor poses a question to the student: ‘so, what intention does one show then?’ The question is followed with, ‘if this one, so to speak, is on the way down here?’, paired with a new drawing on the playback. In this way, the instructor is marking ‘this one’ and the ‘way down’ with a new black line on the playback, clarifying the problem at hand (Figure 2). The sequence frames the situation in terms of one of the main points that the simulation scenario was designed to show – that this is a situation where one needs to ‘show intention’ in a certain way. By showing intentions, and doing so in good time, one prevents putting other vessels in a position where they are forced to act to avoid collision, which is at the core of practices of good seamanship.

In his response to the question, the student frames the problem as being about the matter of timing the turn (line 8) rather than intention. The account given for the proposed solution, ‘so we don’t turn starboard n’ they turn portside’, shows how the students, referred to as ‘we’, are talking from the perspective of their own bridge. Although this could be characterized as an instance of the student engaging in reflection-on-action (Schön, 1987), the students’ limited experience is reflected in the description of the navigational problem at hand. As testified by his ‘yes, but’ (line 10), the instructor neither treats the students’ answer as incorrect nor as complete. The instructor moves on by providing the students with a different solution to the situation at hand: to make the manoeuvre by a turn to portside and going in behind the other vessel. The utterance, paired with yet another drawing on the playback, begins to show what that turn would look like (Figure 3). For the students, it is clear that the answers to the instructor’s questions are already known to him. Rather than being a ‘genuine’ question, the interrogative in line 3 is used as the first part of an IRE-sequence – that is, a sequence consisting of a teacher Initiation, a student Response, and a teacher Evaluation (see ; Lindwall et al., 2015; Mehan, 1979). This sequence becomes a device for the teacher to involve the students in a demonstration of the reasoned and skilled practices that characterize professional conduct.

The student agrees with the instructor’s alternative suggestion. The instructor then provides an account of the portside turn by explaining why this situation is one where it is relevant for an exception of Rule 9, i.e. the right-hand rule in favour of good seamanship. The verbal account is paired with his drawing of a hypothetical crossing on the playback (Figure 3). The account is formulated in terms of how other crews might think about the crossing: ‘they don’t feel like … yeah, I don’t need to give way for that one … I can just go on’. In this way, the instructor demonstrates how taking the perspective of other professionals can be done in a specific situation (see also Author, 2017). The instructor’s ‘I can just go on’, together with his drawing on the playback, then shows what this would mean in the continuation of the hypothetical scenario (Figure 4). Like designing, navigation cannot be simply reduced to a set of subskills. As Schön (1987, p. 158) argues, ‘one must grasp it as a whole in order to grasp it at all’. In this instance of the debriefing, the instructor shows how the students manoeuvre their ship in relation to surrounding vessels. In this way, the instructor is making use of his privileged professional experience to explicate how the skilled practitioner not only analyses the actions of others but also takes into account how others analyse their actions and displayed intentions.

At the end of the episode, the instructor concludes his remarks on the situation by formulating the take-home message. The instructor initiated his account by pointing out why an exception to the right-hand rule is relevant to this particular situation. At this point, the instructor talks about the situation in general terms and what to think about in such situations: a) to turn portside to avoid close quarter situations, b) to avoid putting others in a position where they need to take evasive action and c) to do this in an informed manner. Thereby, the concluding remark generalizes the lessons to be learned from this specific situation by explicating what the rules mean in practice and what constitutes good seamanship.

Discussion

Like the design studio that Schön (1987, p. 99) uses as a starting point and example for his writings on the reflective practitioner, learning to navigate ‘rest[s] on an implicit response to the paradox and predicament’ of learning skills involved in professional practice. The master mariner students must begin to navigate before they have full control and a complete understanding of navigational problems. Without this experience, it is hard or impossible to fully grasp the professional relevance of the instructor’s descriptions and demonstrations. From the perspective of the teacher, it is similarly hard to teach navigation and the meanings of the rules of the sea as a set of abstractions. Being a skilled mariner implies having a ‘sense of good seamanship’ (Sellberg & Lundin, 2018), but what this ‘artful competence’ (Schön, 1983, p. 19) consists of is typically treated as tacit and hard to articulate.

Simulation training, like the pedagogy tied to the design studio, partly addresses this issue. It lets the student practise professional skill but embeds the practice within a pedagogy where those experiences are discussed in professional terms. Hébert (2015) writes about Schön’s distinction between knowledge-in-action and reflection-in-action and points out that the former ‘does not necessitate reflection-in-action’ and that ‘reflection-in-action only occurs when one begins to reflect on or explicitly think about the action that is taking place’ (p. 365). The simulation activity as a whole could be seen as a way of modelling reflection-in-action by displaying how the students should reflect on and explicitly think about their own actions. The scenarios are designed so that the students, as a collective, will make mistakes, but these mistakes are then used as central instructional resources during the debriefings. The instructor, with privileged professional experience, formulates and makes explicit the relevant knowledge by critically examining the students’ performance and by offering solutions to navigational problems in line with his experiences of good seamanship. The activity as a whole is designed to address a general lesson, but the sense of the lesson is to be found through the detailed examination of the particular task. Schön (1983) famously argues that ‘competent practitioners usually know more than they can say’ and that these practitioners ‘exhibit a kind of knowing-in-practice, most of which is tacit’ (p. viii). We would argue that the educational arrangement that is created here, the grounding in a concrete case, and the back and forth movement between general rules and specific application become a way of addressing that which might be hard to just tell.

The use of visual technology offers opportunities to portray rule appliance and good seamanship in ways that are tied to concrete situations and at the same time enable the projection of preferable alternatives. A range of different instructional resources were combined in this process: the playback of the scenario, drawings with a marker pen to highlight relevant aspects of the scenario, and the students’ responses. This, in turn, formed the basis for demonstrating alternative solutions by contrasting what was done and what should be done and by comparing the performed courses of action with hypothetical ones. In addition, the birds-eye view of the scenario enabled by the playback offered possibilities for adopting others’ perspectives on the situation – i.e. how one’s own actions could be perceived by other navigational teams. In doing this, the instructor’s reflection-in-action demonstrates how to coordinate with other ships in confined waters in line with COLREG and professional standards of good seamanship (see also Author, 2017). In this way, the debriefings under study take on the form of a master class built on the practice of offering concrete demonstrations of reflection-in-action to the students. In line with previous studies from debriefings in aviation, healthcare and maritime education (Sellberg, 2018, Johansson et al., 2017; Mavin & Roth, 2014), our analysis shows that visualization technologies, such as videos or playbacks of prior performance, have a central anchoring role in the reflective work that takes place during debriefing. By providing a concrete representation of the students’ navigational action, the instructor is able to ‘show examples, non-examples and variations of the quality in question, naming these as he goes along’ (Schön, 1987, p. 160). In this case, the instructors’ showing and telling concerns the quality of good seamanship and how to use this tacit knowledge in and through the professionals’ dialogue with the situation at hand.

This study has set out to discuss the distinction between two interpretations of the notion of reflection as found in the educational research literature: a) as a constitutive aspect of the skilled performance of professionals and b) as an activity designed for student learning. We argue that the literature on simulation-based training, in parallel with the literature on, for instance, teacher or nursing education (e.g. Grushka et al., 2005; Saunders et al., 2016), has tended to focus on the activity of student reflection. Although student reflection is important in many ways, it is also important to note that students do not begin with the tacit knowledge that characterizes professional reflection. As both researchers and teachers, moreover, we know that we need to be careful in assuming ‘that a student who has engaged in reflection has automatically enhanced his or her practice’ (Hébert, 2015, p. 370). As pointed out by Schön, it is only later, when students have learned some aspects of their future profession, that they are able to advance by ‘reflecting on the tacit knowledge implicit in their own performance’ (Schön, 1987, p. 88). Hence, there is also value in studying the professional demonstration of reflection-in-action – how instructors make visible and learnable the deeply reasoned and skilled practices that characterize professional conduct.

Conclusion and implications

The results of this study show how demonstrations during post-simulation debriefings can make professional ways of reflection accessible for novices in a domain they have not yet mastered. Although our empirical case involves a highly specialized domain, it provides general insight into the role of reflection in educating professionals by emphasizing a series of critical features with potential implications for educational practice:

• First, the students’ prior actions during the scenario are used by the instructor as a substrate for the correction of failures and the demonstration of alternative solutions, thereby constituting a pedagogy of productive failure (Kapur, 2015; Kapur & Bielaczyc, 2012).

• Second, the demonstration is not just a lecture but consists of ‘occasioned instruction’ (Lindwall et al., 2015) closely connected to the student case. This, in turn, makes it possible for the students to understand the demonstration in terms of their experience and prior performance.

• Third, visual means are employed to ground general principles in the concrete details of specific situations. In this way, the problems and their solutions are not just formulated in terms of general principles or rules but also shown in their concrete details.

As argued by Schön, skilful practitioners’ ability to handle the complexity of professional problems is at the heart of professional knowledge. Still, it is often overlooked and regarded as more-or-less tacit. However, as shown by Schön, such tacit dimensions can be made visible in professionals’ reflection-in-action when dealing with typical problems within their domain. We would argue that making such forms of professional knowledge visible and accessible for novices is a crucial element of learning in many professional domains, and our case illustrates how this is enabled by a range of instructional means.

Acknowledgments

An early version of the study was presented at the International Association of Maritime Universities Annual General Assembly (IAMU AGA2019), Tokyo, Japan, 28 October– 2 November 2019 and is included in the conference proceedings.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by FORTE (Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare) under Grant number 2018-01198.

Notes on contributors

Charlott Sellberg

Charlott Sellberg has a multidisciplinary background in Cognitive Science, Human-Computer Interaction and Educational Sciences. Her research draws on situated theories of cognition and learning to study the use of digital technologies for work, training and assessment. She has conducted research on simulations in maritime education, office staffs’ digital workscapes, as well as the use of electronic journals in clinical work. Current research explores the entrance of eye-tracking technologies in maritime piloting education, novel approaches for safety training of onboard personnel, and the use of simulations for professional learning across domains.

Oskar Lindwall

Oskar Lindwall has a background in Communication Studies and Educational Research. His research interests include the use of technology in higher education, video research in the learning sciences, ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis. He has conducted research on demonstrations in dental education, critique session in architectural education, practices of instruction in sports coaching, the teaching and learning of crafts, and simulations in healthcare education. 

Hans Rystedt

Hans Rystedt has a background in Educational Sciences. His research concerns how the technological development transform professional knowledge and how novel forms of simulations and visualisations could be used for advancing higher education for the professions. With a point of departure in theories on situated action, the empirical studies include how full-scale simulations could be used for training interprofessional teams in healthcare and how the instructional use of visualizations could bridge between theory and professional practice in dental education.