Practice, reflective practice, and experience are often treated as if they mean the same thing, but they refer to different processes. Confusion between them leads to the assumption that time spent doing a job automatically leads to improvement or professional wisdom. This assumption is not supported by research in professional learning.
Practice refers to the repeated performance of a task or activity. Through practice, a person may become faster, more accurate, or more confident. Practice often involves small adjustments based on feedback. For example, a photographer may adjust exposure, a builder may refine technique, and a counsellor may improve listening skills. Practice therefore tends to improve technical skill and efficiency. However, practice alone does not necessarily lead to deeper understanding or better judgement. A person may repeat the same actions for many years and become highly efficient, but still make poor decisions or fail to consider wider consequences.
Experience is often used to mean time spent in a role or occupation. In everyday language, an experienced person is someone who has been doing something for a long time. This definition is based on duration rather than learning. Experience in this sense does not guarantee improvement, reflection, or professional growth. It simply indicates exposure to situations over time. Someone may have twenty years of experience, but it may in reality be one year of experience repeated twenty times. Experience therefore describes exposure and duration, not necessarily learning or improvement.
Reflective practice is different from both practice and experience. Reflective practice involves deliberately thinking about what happened, why it happened, what assumptions were made, and what could be done differently next time. It includes questioning one’s own decisions, values, habits, and professional context. Reflective practice therefore involves analysis, self-awareness, and change. It turns activity into learning. Without reflection, practice becomes repetition and experience becomes time served. With reflection, practice becomes learning and experience becomes professional development.
Donald Schön argued that professionals improve not simply by doing their work, but by reflecting on their work both during and after action (Schön, 1983). David Kolb also argued that learning occurs through a cycle of experience, reflection, conceptualisation, and experimentation rather than through experience alone (Kolb, 1984). More recent writing on reflective practice emphasises critical reflection, which includes questioning power, culture, values, and professional assumptions rather than simply improving technique (Brookfield, 2017).
We can therefore distinguish the three terms in a simple way. Practice improves skill. Experience represents time and exposure. Reflective practice produces learning and professional growth. A professional may have practice without reflection, and experience without improvement. Reflective practice is the process that turns activity and experience into learning.
This distinction is important in professions such as teaching, counselling, healthcare, and management, where time served is often treated as evidence of competence. Reflective practice challenges this assumption and argues that professional growth depends not on how long we have been doing something, but on how carefully we think about what we are doing and why.
References
Brookfield, S. D. (2017). Becoming a critically reflective teacher (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass. ISBN 9781119049707. Source confidence – Verified via ISBN.
Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Prentice Hall. ISBN 9780132952613. Source confidence – Verified via ISBN.
Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic Books. ISBN 9780465068783. Source confidence – Verified via ISBN.