Reflective Practical Learning

On Tacit Knowledge, Embodied Experience, and Professional Judgement

There is a form of knowledge that does not first reveal itself in what we say, but in what we do. It appears in the skilled hand, in the attentive gaze, in the pause, in timing, in the care that prevents us from intervening too early, and in the decisiveness that enables us to act when action is needed. It appears in the teacher who senses that a student has not understood, even though the student nods. It appears in the social worker who hears that there is something more behind a story than the words alone express. It appears in the therapist, nurse, physician, supervisor, and experienced practitioner who knows that a situation is rarely exactly as it first appears.

This is not knowledge without thought. Nor is it a form of mysticism. It is practical, experience-based, and often embodied knowledge. It has developed through repeated participation in real situations, through trial and error, through attentiveness, failure, correction, and new understanding. It is not always easy to formulate, but it is nevertheless real.

Michael Polanyi expressed this in his well-known formulation: We know more than we can tell. It is a simple sentence, but it opens a large space for understanding professional practice. We can recognize one face among thousands of other faces without being able to explain exactly how we do it. We can ride a bicycle without being able to give an adequate technical account of all the movements that keep us in balance. A blind person can allow the cane to become an extension of the body and transform small touches against the ground into meaningful information about the world. Knowledge does not reside only in concepts. It resides in action.

In many professions, there has long been a tendency to think of knowledge primarily as something theoretical, explicit, and linguistic. First comes theory, then application. First comes understanding, then action. But in practice, the relationship is often more complex. The experienced practitioner does not simply act according to rules. She acts in situations that are unclear, changing, and often marked by conflicting considerations. She must see, listen, assess, wait, ask, intervene, and sometimes refrain from intervening. She must understand while the situation is unfolding.

Donald Schön called this reflection-in-action. It is not merely reflection afterwards, when the day is over and one can calmly think through what happened. Nor is it merely planning before action. It is a form of thinking that takes place in the midst of action. The professional practitioner is not a mechanical executor of predetermined procedures. She is a participant in a living situation in which action and understanding constantly influence one another.

This is especially important in work with people. For human beings cannot be fully understood as technical problems. A technical problem can often be solved by applying the right method in the right way. But a human problem is rarely only technical. It contains history, shame, hope, power, vulnerability, relationships, and unpredictability. There is, of course, professional knowledge, research, methods, and procedures that are necessary. But there is also a grey zone in which the professional must exercise judgement. It is precisely here that the artistry of practice becomes visible.

Artistry does not mean acting arbitrarily. It does not mean replacing knowledge with gut feeling. It means that knowledge has taken the form of judgement. It has become part of the way one perceives and moves within the situation. The skilled practitioner has learned to see differences that the novice does not see. She notices nuances, ruptures, moods, and possibilities. She knows when a conversation should be opened, and when it should be allowed to rest. She knows when a question can carry meaning, and when it becomes intrusive. Such knowledge cannot be reduced to a manual.

This also challenges the distinction between body and thought. The Western tradition of knowledge has often been shaped by a dualism in which the body is understood as something lower, mechanical, or subordinate, while thought is understood as the true site of knowledge. But professional practice shows that this distinction is insufficient. The body is not merely a tool that carries out what the head has decided. The body is itself part of understanding. We sense situations before we have concepts for them. We notice unease, distance, trust, resistance, and openness. Often the first understanding comes as bodily attentiveness before it becomes a formulated thought.

This does not mean that all bodily or tacit knowledge is good knowledge. This is crucial. Tacit knowledge can be wisdom, but it can also be habit. It can be professional experience, but also prejudice. It can express care, but also cowardice. It can be the result of long practice, but also of an institutional culture in which people say: “This is simply how we do things here.”

For this reason, tacit knowledge must not be romanticized. It must be brought into the light. It must be examined, challenged, and tested. Reflection is precisely about this: making what we take for granted visible to ourselves. When we become aware of the frames of understanding we bring into practice, we can also begin to choose between them. We can ask: Why do I perceive the situation in this way? What am I noticing? What am I overlooking? What assumptions do I have about the other person? What history, culture, or professional habit is shaping my gaze?

In this sense, reflection is not only a method for becoming more skilled. It is also an ethical necessity. For the person who works with people has power. The teacher has power over the student’s space for learning. The social worker has power over how a person’s life situation is understood. The therapist has power over which stories are given room. The supervisor has power over which questions are asked, and which questions are never asked. If the professional does not reflect on her own practice, tacit knowledge can become tacit power.

It is therefore not enough to have experience. Experience can make us wiser, but experience can also make us overconfident. It can open our gaze, but it can also close it. The experienced practitioner may see more than the novice, but may also stop wondering. “I have seen this before” can be a useful recognition. But it can also be the beginning of a misinterpretation. For the other person is never merely an instance of something we already know.

Reflective practice therefore involves a double movement. On the one hand, we must acknowledge the knowledge that lies in action, the body, and experience. On the other hand, we must dare to examine this knowledge critically. We must both trust our practical judgement and be willing to put it at risk. We must be able to act within the situation, but also learn from what happened. We must be able to ask whether what we did was, in fact, wise.

This may be the very core of professional maturity. The mature practitioner knows that she knows something. But she also knows that her knowledge is not complete. She has experience, but does not turn experience into a shield against criticism. She has professional confidence, but not certainty. She knows that theory is necessary, but she also knows that theory alone can never carry an encounter with another human being. She has learned that professional practice is a conversation between knowledge and situation, between body and thought, between action and reflection.

In teaching and supervision, this becomes especially clear. Students can read about professional practice, but they must also learn to enter into it. They must practise seeing, listening, assessing, and acting. They must experience that knowledge is not only something one has in the head, but something that must become active in encounters with people. This is why field education, supervision, and reflection on concrete experiences are so important in professional education. It is there that theory takes on body. It is there that concepts meet the resistance of reality.

But the task of supervision is not only to help the student put into words what she is already doing. It is also to help her discover what she does not see. The good supervisor does not only ask: What did you do? She also asks: What did you notice? What were you thinking at that moment? What did you sense in your body? What made you choose precisely that action? What else could the situation have meant? In this way, supervision becomes a space where tacit knowledge can be examined without being destroyed.

For there is a danger here. Not all knowledge becomes better by being made fully explicit. Some practical knowing may be disturbed if it is broken down too forcefully into rules and explanations. A person riding a bicycle may lose balance if she begins to analyse every movement while cycling. The experienced conversation partner may become stiff and artificial if she constantly monitors her own technique. Reflection must therefore not be understood as permanent self-control. It must be understood as an alternation between presence and afterthought, between flow and examination, between action and learning.

Professional practice at its best is neither pure routine nor pure theory. It is a living form of knowledge. It appears in actions that are both professionally grounded and sensitive to the situation. It requires that we know something, but also that we allow ourselves to be corrected. It requires that we dare to act, but also that we dare to ask afterwards whether the action was good.

When we say that our knowing lies in our doing, we are therefore not saying that words and theory are unimportant. We are saying that knowledge must be understood more broadly than what can be written down in a textbook. We are saying that professional judgement develops in the meeting between theory, experience, body, action, and reflection. We are saying that a human being does not understand the world merely by observing it from the outside, but by participating in it.

Perhaps this is what makes professional work both demanding and meaningful. We never work only with tasks. We work in situations where something is at stake for other people. Then we need more than procedures. We need more than good intentions. We need a knowledge that is thoughtful, embodied, experienced, and ethically awake.

Such knowledge cannot be possessed once and for all. It must continually be developed. It must be practised. It must be tested. It must be reflected upon. And perhaps it must, again and again, begin in the simple recognition on which all practical wisdom rests:

We know more than we can tell.

But we are responsible for trying to understand what it is we do.

We know more than we can tell.

This essay was developed on the basis of the lecture Reflektiv praktisk læring. Veiledning og utvikling i komplekse organisasjoner [Reflective Practical Learning: Supervision and Development in Complex Organizations], held by me on 10 June 2009. The lecture draws particularly on Elizabeth Anne Kinsella’s article “Embodied Reflection and the Epistemology of Reflective Practice,” as well as on Donald Schön’s works on the reflective practitioner, Michael Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowledge, and Gilbert Ryle’s understanding of practical knowing. This essay was written in a conversation with OpenAI/ChatGPT.