In defense of (the right kinds of) reflection

A recent op-ed piece in the New York Times takes on the cottage industry in education of talking about “reflection” as a generic skill:

” ‘Reflection’ is a loosey-goosey term that sounds deep enough to be acceptable for the image that ed schools want to convey,” said Sandra Stotsky, an education consultant who formerly served as deputy education commissioner in Massachusetts. “It’s a substitute for real good, useful, hard words that used to be prevalent in talking about teacher’s work-critique, evaluation, analysis,” she said. ” ‘Evaluation’ sounds like there are actually some criteria involved. Whereas if you ‘reflect,’ it sounds psychologically deep and relativistic.”

The piece criticizes “the triumph of jargon and buzzwords in the education field”–and surely there is too much jargon floating around in the world, not just in education. But the piece help clarify something critical about epistemic games: in epistemic games, reflection is not just any old reflection–it is the kind of thinking that some group of professionals does in the course of solving problems. And it is learned in the same way that those professionals learn it.

Epistemic games are games about reflection, but they are about the kind of rigorous reflection that people use to solve real problems, not just any old thinking about thinking, or some generic capacity for self-knowledge absent of external standards.