A vignette from Donald Schon on reflection-in-action

In a presentation to the American Educational Research Association some years ago, Donald Schon tells the story about a group of seven teachers who were sitting watching a video.  The sentence construction below reflects the nature of a spoken presentation, rather than a piece of academic writing! The video shows a couple of boys playing with pattern blocks.  One boy has a pattern in front of him, the other boy has a pile of blocks.  The first boy, looking at his pattern, is trying to give the second boy directions for completing the pattern with the blocks.  And the teachers are watching the video. It soon becomes clear that the second boy is going off in an increasingly divergent way from the pattern that the teachers can see in front of the first boy.  And the teachers discuss it and decide the second boy is a slow learner and cannot follow directions.  Suddenly one of the teachers says "Wait! I think the first boy gave an impossible instruction".  And they went back and played the tape again, and saw indeed that the first boy had said "Put down a green square".  There were no green squares, only orange squares and the green things were triangles.  Then the teachers began to see the tape in a completely different way.  They then perceived that the second boy was, in fact, a virtuoso at following instructions, at improvising instructions  Schon concludes by saying that it is the business of students to "get it", and of the teacher to see that they "get it".  And if the students don't get it, then there's a need to explain why they're not getting it - categorising them as "slow learners", "short attention span" etc are ways that ensure that the teacher does not have to deal with their not getting it..