Reflection in Action

Reflection is when you can think deeply about a problem and have the ability to make changes accordingly. When reflecting, you should be able to use prior experiences to help understand how they shape the future. In order for leaders to make decisions, they must have the cognitive skills that are required and these skills occur in three different and very distinctive stages. The first stage, the declarative stage, is when they learn the facts and they are loosely connected, but there is an increase in expertise. The second stage, the associative stage, is reached when there is a there is growth in declarative knowledge and you are becoming more of an expert. This is when you move from declarative knowledge (knowledge about) to procedural knowledge (how to knowledge). The third and final stage, the autonomous stage, is a refinement stage.
Most people assume that they already conduct action research, but reflection is a very important aspect of research. It is natural to act and then review the results of the action. Most of the time, many of us do not reflect as regularly or as critically or as systematically as we should. With regular, critical and systematic reflection we can have more confidence in our research conclusions. Without it we may overlook some important evidence. In particular, it seems to be uncommon for people to pay a lot of attention to evidence which doesn't fit in with what they expect or assume. In action research people are encouraged to seek out disconcerting evidence -- evidence which doesn't match what they expect or assume.