Hillocks response - re: the obviousness of his ideas

Some bloggers have pointed out the rather obvious nature of Hillocks' insights. Indeed, his call for reflective practice is hardly revelatory to most of us. If anything, grad students tend to be burdened with an overabundance of intellectual curiosity and self-awareness. For many of us, self-examination is compulsive; we can't not do it.

That said, we still need people like Hillocks and Schon, if only to make our implicit actions more explicit. The importance of this metacognitive awareness is difficult to overstate. I suspect that Grath was right on the mark; these theories may be easy to conceptualize now, but in an actual classroom (once we get our "hands dirty"), certainty can very quickly devolve into uncertainty, not just because of all the daily minutiae, but because students and their writing processes may not fit into our existing theoretical assumptions. Contradictions between theory and practice inevitably exist, and even well-intentioned theories can become inflexible or orthodox.

Hillocks, then, plays a vital role, reminding us that theories are not static, but fluid and flexible. We should be encouraged to challenge pedagogical paradigms through frame experiments. Reflective practice, while it seems rather facile in the abstract, demands that we question even our most fundamental assumptions, and that isn't an easy thing to do.