Johns's Model for Structured Reflection

A teacher who sits down to reflect after a difficult class often does not know where to start. The lesson is one tangle of moments, decisions, words, and emotions. Christopher Johns’s model, developed for nursing in 2000 and widely adopted in teaching, gives reflection a clear shape with two movements: look in, then look out.

The two movements

Johns’s model divides the reflective process into two stages that complement each other. Each one does work the other cannot do.

Look in

The first movement is inward. The teacher finds a space to focus on the self and pays attention to the thoughts and emotions that come up.

The instruction sounds soft. It is not. Most teachers’ first response to a difficult class is to suppress the emotion and rush to a fix. Johns’s model argues that the emotion is part of the data. Naming it is part of the work.

Three steps inside the look in stage:

1. Find a space to focus on self. Quiet, uninterrupted, with time set aside.
2. Pay attention to your thoughts and emotions. What is actually going on inside?
3. Write down thoughts and emotions that feel significant in working out what happened.

Significance is the key word. Not every thought is significant. The teacher learns to notice which thoughts keep returning, which feelings sit underneath the surface response, which reactions seem disproportionate.

Look out

Once the inward attention has surfaced something, the second movement is outward. The teacher writes a description of the situation that produced the thoughts and emotions.

The look out stage answers two questions:

1. What was the situation around the inward response?
2. Which issues seem significant?

The order matters. Looking out before looking in tends to produce a tidied-up account that hides the emotional response. Looking in first preserves the raw response, which then gets understood through the description.

Four lenses on the description

Once the description is written, Johns suggested four lenses for examining it. Each lens asks a different kind of question.

Aesthetics

The aesthetics lens asks about the teaching as a craft.

1. What was I trying to achieve?
2. Why did I respond as I did?

The aesthetics lens treats teaching as a designed activity. The teacher had a goal. The teacher made choices. Both deserve examination.

Personal

The personal lens asks about the teacher’s emotional response.

Why did I feel the way I did within this situation?

The question goes beyond naming the feeling. It asks where the feeling came from. Sometimes the answer is straightforward (the lesson was stressful). Sometimes the answer surfaces something deeper (the student reminded the teacher of an old situation, or the teacher’s own anxiety about the topic shaped the response).

Ethics

The ethics lens asks whether the teacher acted well.

1. Did I act for the best?
2. What factors were influencing me?

The ethics lens is rare in reflective practice models. It is one of the strengths of Johns’s model. A teacher faces ethical decisions in many small moments: how to respond to a struggling student, how to handle a parent’s complaint, how to grade fairly across a class with very different starting points. The ethics lens names these as decisions, not just as procedures.

Empirics

The empirics lens asks about knowledge.

1. What knowledge did I bring to the situation?
2. What knowledge could have informed me, and did not?

The empirics lens links reflection to professional reading and ongoing learning. A teacher who runs into a recurring problem and discovers, on reflection, that there is a body of literature she has not read is being honest about a gap.

Flashcard

What are Johns's four lenses for examining a reflective description?

Tap to reveal

Answer

Aesthetics, personal, ethics, empirics

Aesthetics asks about teaching as a craft and the goals being pursued. Personal asks about the teacher’s emotional response and where it came from. Ethics asks whether the teacher acted for the best, and what was shaping the decision. Empirics asks what knowledge informed the situation and what knowledge could have but did not.

A worked example: a difficult parent meeting

A teacher meets with a parent who is unhappy about her child’s recent grade. The meeting goes badly. She uses Johns’s model that evening.

Look in

She notices three thoughts that keep returning. The parent’s tone made her defensive. She replied with more justification than necessary. She walked out feeling that she had not heard what the parent was actually saying.

She also notices a feeling underneath the defensiveness: a worry that her grading is being questioned, which connects to a longer-running worry about whether her assessments are fair to the whole class.

Look out

She writes a description of the meeting. The parent arrived late. She started with the grade. She referenced an earlier assignment. The teacher responded with the rubric. The conversation became about the rubric rather than the child.

Aesthetics

Goal: she had aimed for a calm explanation of the grade. Response: she became defensive when the parent referenced the earlier assignment.

Personal

The defensive response came from the worry about grading fairness, not only from the parent’s tone.

Ethics

She had to decide whether to defend the grade or to listen to the parent’s actual concern. She defended the grade. Looking back, she is not sure that was the best choice. The parent may have wanted to be heard about the child’s experience, not to argue about the grade.

Empirics

She has read on grading rubrics but little on parent-teacher communication. There is a body of work here she could draw on.

The reflection produces both an immediate next step (a follow-up email to the parent) and a longer-term learning agenda (read on parent-teacher communication).

Why the model works

Johns’s model has lasted because it does two things well.

It takes emotion seriously

Most cycle-based models name feelings briefly and move on. Johns places emotion at the centre of the look in step and gives it its own lens (personal). Teachers who find their emotional life shaping their teaching, which is most teachers, find this useful.

It includes ethics as a lens

The ethics lens is not present in Kolb, Greenaway, or even Gibbs in the same explicit way. Johns names ethics as a regular part of reflective practice, which fits the actual nature of teaching.