Phases of Reflective Thought

Dewey’s longer description of reflective thought in How We Think names five phases, sometimes called aspects, of the work. The five describe the journey a thinker takes from a vague sense that something needs attention to a tested idea about what to do. Importantly, Dewey insisted the phases are fluid. They are not a checklist.

Phase 1: Suggestions

The first phase is what Dewey called suggestions. The mind leaps forward to a possible solution.

This is the moment when something pops into the teacher’s head. A class did not go well. The teacher’s mind, almost without permission, throws up a possibility: maybe the topic was too abstract; maybe the students were tired; maybe the warm-up was too long. The first suggestion may or may not be the right one. It is just the start.

Dewey takes this seriously. The leap is part of thinking. Trying to suppress all suggestions until you have proper data produces stiff and slow reflection. The trick is to let suggestions come, write them down, and then test them properly later.

A teacher who is stuck in the early phase has not given herself permission to entertain partly formed ideas. The reflection becomes paralysed.

Phase 2: Intellectualisation

The second phase is intellectualisation of the difficulty or perplexity.

The thinker takes the felt sense of “something is wrong” and turns it into a defined problem to solve. This is the move from feeling to question. From “that did not feel right” to “why did the students disengage at the third example?”

This phase is often the hardest. A teacher who skips it will spend the rest of the reflection working on a poorly defined problem, which produces poorly aimed solutions. A teacher who takes time to define the problem precisely usually arrives at better answers, even if the rest of the reflection is shorter.

The work of intellectualisation includes naming what counts as evidence that the problem has been solved. If the problem is “students disengage at the third example,” what would success look like? Higher participation in the second half of class? Fewer side conversations? A stronger answer to the exit slip? Without this clarity, the test stage later is impossible.

Phase 3: Hypothesis

The third phase is the use of one idea after another as a leading idea to initiate and guide observation.

The teacher takes one of the suggestions from phase 1, sharpens it, and uses it to direct what they look at next. If the leading idea is “students disengaged because the third example was too abstract,” the teacher now watches future lessons specifically for engagement during the abstract sections.

This phase is iterative. The teacher tries one leading idea, sees what it reveals, and may need to switch to a different leading idea if the first does not bring useful information into view.

The literature on this phase often uses the word hypothesis, with the scientific connotation. Dewey was comfortable with that connotation. Reflection in his view shares the form of scientific inquiry, even when the subject matter is not in a laboratory.

Phase 4: Mental elaboration

The fourth phase is mental elaboration, which clarifies the idea by overt or imaginative action.

The thinker works the leading idea out, either in their head or on paper. What would the lesson look like if the abstract example were replaced by a concrete one? What might the students do differently? What might go wrong?

Mental elaboration is the rehearsal stage. The teacher walks through the implications of the idea before testing it. This catches problems early. A teacher who skips mental elaboration ends up testing ideas in the classroom that fall apart on contact, when a few minutes of imagining beforehand would have shown the weakness.

Some of this elaboration happens through actual action: drafting a revised lesson plan, sketching a new sequence, talking the idea through with a colleague. Some happens purely in imagination. Both count.

Phase 5: Testing the hypothesis

The fifth phase is testing the hypothesis. The teacher tries the idea in practice and sees what happens.

This phase produces the data that determines whether the hypothesis was right, partially right, or wrong. The teacher who runs the revised lesson and pays attention to the data has tested the idea. The teacher who runs the revised lesson and convinces themselves it worked without checking has skipped the test.

The test does not have to be elaborate. A revised lesson followed by a short exit ticket on the difficult concept is a test. A revised lesson followed by a quick conversation with a few students is a test. The discipline is to pay attention to evidence rather than impression.

If the hypothesis fails the test, that is not a failure of reflection. It is a successful test that points the thinking back to phase 1 or 2, with sharper material to work with.

The phases are fluid

This is the most important point about Dewey’s five phases. He did not believe there was a strict order. He described them as fluid.

In practice, a reflective teacher might move through the phases in this order: suggestion, hypothesis, intellectualisation (the suggestion sharpens the question), back to suggestion (a new one fits the sharpened question better), elaboration, test.

Or: suggestion, suggestion, suggestion, intellectualisation, hypothesis, test.

Or: intellectualisation comes first because the teacher arrives already with a clear problem, then suggestions, then hypothesis, then elaboration, then test.

All of these are fine. The point is not to follow the phases like a five-step recipe. The point is to make sure each phase has happened somewhere in the reflection. A reflection that has no testing is incomplete. A reflection that has only testing without intellectualisation is firing in the dark.

Flashcard

What are Dewey's five fluid phases of reflective thought?

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Answer

Suggestions, intellectualisation, hypothesis, mental elaboration, testing

The mind leaps forward to a possible solution. The felt difficulty becomes a defined problem. One idea is used to guide observation. The idea is worked out through imagination or action. The idea is tested in practice. Dewey insisted these phases are fluid, not a strict sequence. The point is that each occurs, not the order.

How this differs from later stage models

Later models like Kolb’s experiential learning cycle, Gibbs’s reflective cycle, and Johns’s structured reflection all build on Dewey but tend to be more linear. They name a sequence and ask the reflective practitioner to walk through it.

This has uses. Beginners find a sequence helpful. The structure stops the mind from skipping the harder stages.

The cost is that the sequence can become a checklist. A teacher who runs the Gibbs cycle six times in six weeks may produce six tidy reflections without ever reaching the depth Dewey was pointing at. The discipline of the form is doing work the discipline of the thinking should be doing.

Dewey’s fluid version asks more of the reflector. The reflector has to know when each phase has happened well enough to move on, without a checklist to tell them. This is harder, but it is also closer to what real thinking looks like.

A worked example

A teacher walks out of a lesson feeling it went badly. Suggestions arrive: maybe the topic was wrong, maybe the warm-up was too short, maybe one disruptive student set the tone. The teacher writes them down.

She intellectualises: the actual problem was that engagement dropped sharply in the second half. That is the question to answer.

She picks a hypothesis: the second half was too abstract for this group. She elaborates: if she had used a concrete example before introducing the abstract definition, would the second half have held up?

She tests it. The next lesson on a similar topic, she leads with a concrete example. She watches engagement in the second half. The data does or does not support the hypothesis. Either way, she has done a piece of real reflection.

If the data supports it, she has a working principle for this group: lead with concrete, then abstract. If the data does not support it, she goes back to suggestion and intellectualisation with sharper material.