Reflection In Vs Reflection On

I've got my room set up as a recording studio for the next few weeks and so far its been amazing. 

In our 5th grade classes we are working to put together 7 Nation Army by The White Stripes on guitar, bass, xylophone, tambourine, cowbell, drum set, keyboard, glockenspiel, bass drum etc. 

Having the ability to explain the recording and overdubbing process to students and to take their performances and immediately listen and discuss is a seriously cool tool. 

This piece of music is 3 relatively simple riffs. We work together to learn by ear and play it back. The real musical learning comes from the ensemble skills, arrangement decisions, performance practice, dynamics and interpretation of those 3 simple riffs. 

Having the recording immediately available, in relatively good quality (it doesn't hurt to listen to unlike a blown-out and distorting Iphone camera mic) , allows students to assess their musical choices from the perspective of a listener.

it takes the mental task of playing and removes it from the task of listening and assessing musical choices. {Not forever, this is the first part of a process that allows isolation of these skills in order to strengthen their interaction in later performances.} In every class its lead to really good discussions of form, dynamic contrast, entrances, conducting practice, you name it- the critical thinking and applicable skills are off the charts. 

The further ability to record something one way, then record it again another and A/B them lets these 5th graders understand the differences their decisions make. It lets the arrangement be alive to be assessed rather than trying to remember what was happening in the moment, after the moment has passed. Literally creating an object to replace a subjective memory of an experience.

It also lets students talk OVER the performance in RESPONSE TO the performance. " You sounded so cool when you came in {REDACTED}!" or " when we nailed that part where it goes from everyone to just the bass it felt SO GOOD!"  (we talked about dynamics and textures after that). 

Creating a material to work with lets students use their own existing vocabulary and opinions to create documented musical intentions in the form of revisions and recording lists for next class " we should definitely keep in the cowbell and I like the electric piano sound better than the normal piano sound" " we should make sure that we practice switching from the build up back to the verse part where the bass plays" 

Lots of problem solving and musical thinking was happening just because we could look at what we were doing and make clear decisions after the fact. 

Its a lot easier to work from an object/product than it is to work from a memory!

This makes me think about the differences between Reflection On an action and Reflection In an action. When a person is asked after completion of an activity to reflect back on their creative choices they are reflecting ON the process.

Donald Schon in his 1983 book The Reflective Practioner describes the importance of in-the-moment reflection and the impact of reflection on professional practice. Roughly summarized Schon says that through engaging in reflection professionals are able, in the moment, to create new solutions to problems they may not have seen before. He calls this Reflection-In practice.

It’s based on the knowledge of the person reflecting and their ability to create framing for novel problems that allow them to draw solutions from their existing professional repertoire of skills. This approach is very useful to professional musicians, educators, and others. It’s basically an explicit framing of the way that we approach understanding through interrogation of an event based on our own knowledge. We look at what its “like” or “unlike” to define some characteristics it might share with a more familiar situation, where we might be able to engage in some informed decision making based on past experiences. Its a process of generalization, hypothesis, experimentation and iteration.

This reflection creates a loop that leads to new insight and allows for refinement of skills.

In classroom teaching students are reflecting IN the process when a participant speaks their decision making aloud as they do it, they are reflecting on the action IN the middle of the process. This might be useful to create supports for executive function, it might help to make connections between steps in a process, it also may just help students stay in the moment of whatever it is they are doing while providing the teacher insight into what the student is thinking.

Speaking your process as you do it works in a lot of places but in music making this presents some difficulty, especially when there is a saxophone in your mouth or crash cymbals ringing out in front of you. It also requires a vocabulary that might not be present to refine and quantify the choices made.

When making musical decisions a very capable musical artist might execute musical decision making toward realization of musical intent but lack the vocabulary to efficiently characterize the WHY of that choice. There are idiosyncratic phrases and terms that develop but in terms of reflection IN, i find it to be difficult for beginners: they lack the conversational vocabulary to explain what is happening and they are more fully engaged in the doing of the thing because it isn’t a refined, practiced response.

Even when people are reflecting back on a finished process of decision making they mentally they have to hold a representation of their decision making that they can reflect on a process that is finished and then hopefully carry that reflection on into the next iteration. That mental model is, to me, a representational form of Reflecting IN and presents most of the same problems with an additional layer of requiring significant memory resources. It also presents difficulty for students who are less experienced as a result of their lack of vocabulary it is hard to retain and reflect on certain elements. Without the framing they can’t hold onto the picture of what was being done in the moment.

This is why reflection on an object or product is so useful. You can reflect of the effect of the action- was it successful in realizing your intent or not? Can it be improved? - as well as use the object as an anchor for framing thinking that doesn’t require mental modeling to be explicitly held. It allows for development of vocabulary in different and more effective ways as well, a student can hear the concept in execution when the recording is played back. This is much different than asking someone with an untrained ear to try to mentally model from their subjective memory something they may have done. “ play it just like you did last time” is a much more complicated ask than “play it like you play it here”.

Use of recording can free a lot of brain power that can be used to make musical decisions because there is a common point of reference and a distancing of subjective experience in reflection. You can engage with a specific performance and use that specificity to model more general principles. You can play along and create repetition of the successes and help to encode them deeper in the musicians minds.

Using these principles has been a real game changer for me and I hope some folks try it out!

Continuing Questions

What are some ways that we encourage reflection-in or reflection-on in our teaching?
What are some elements of performance that might be better able to be built through reflection on a recording?
How does reflection-on contribute to the ability to reflect-in the moment? why might this be important for building musical agency?