Peters's DATA Model
DATA in one page
Peters (1991) described a four-step process called DATA:
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| Describe | A detailed, honest account of the incident, including thoughts and feelings |
| Analyse | Identify assumptions, beliefs, rules, and motives that support current practice |
| Theorise | Build a new way to approach the situation, drawing on additional sources |
| Act | Test the new theory in practice |
Goal
To integrate scientific theory and practical theory by reflecting on one’s own working theory, and putting the result into practice.
Useful for
- Cycles of ongoing learning
- Continuous improvement
- Moving past surface descriptions to the assumptions behind practice
A teacher who reflects only on what happened tends to come back to the same conclusions. The next layer down, the assumptions behind the practice, is where the deeper change lives. Peters’s DATA model is one of the cleanest tools for getting there. Four steps. Each one does work the others cannot do.
What DATA stands for
Peters (1991) named a four-step reflective process: Describe, Analyse, Theorise, Act. The acronym is easy to remember. Each step has its own focus.
D: Describe
The first step is a detailed and honest account of a critical aspect of practice. The teacher pays attention to:
- What happened
- Who was involved
- The thoughts, feelings, and emotions of those involved as they related to the incident
Description sounds easy and is in fact difficult. Most teachers compress description into a sentence or two (“the lesson did not go well”) and rush to the analysis. Peters’s first step pushes back against this.
A good description names specific moments, specific words said, specific reactions. The richer the description, the more the next steps have to work with.
A: Analyse
The second step identifies the assumptions, beliefs, rules, and motives that govern the current practice.
The teacher asks:
- Why does this practice operate the way it does?
- What underlying values, beliefs, and assumptions keep the practice in place?
- What sources of information am I using to make sense of the situation?
This is the step that distinguishes DATA from simpler reflection. The teacher is not asking “what went wrong” or “what should I do.” The teacher is asking “what assumption was I working under that produced this outcome?”
A teacher who runs a strict question-and-answer lesson and gets little engagement might find, at the analysis step, that she is assuming all students should answer at the same pace. Naming the assumption opens it up to challenge.
T: Theorise
The third step builds a new way to approach the situation. The teacher takes the assumptions surfaced in the analysis and builds a different working theory.
This step often requires reaching beyond what the teacher already knows. New sources of knowledge become useful: a chapter on dialogic teaching, a colleague’s account of a similar problem, a research summary, a conversation with a student.
The output of the theorising step is a different way of thinking about the situation. Not a fix yet; a new framework that suggests a fix.
A: Act
The fourth step puts the new way of thinking into practice. The teacher tries a different approach in the next round of lessons.
Peters made an important point about this step. Success comes only through additional thought and reflection. Acting once is not enough. The act step has to feed the next round of describing, analysing, and theorising. The model is a cycle of ongoing learning, not a one-shot procedure.
A worked example: a stalled discussion
A teacher leads a discussion in a B.Ed. class on educational policy. The discussion stalls. Three students dominate; the rest are silent. The teacher uses DATA.
Describe
She writes a detailed account. The question she asked. The five-second pause. The first student who spoke (a confident male student in the front row). His response (long, opinionated). The next two students who joined in. The students who looked away. The student in the back who started typing on her phone after seven minutes.
Analyse
She names her working assumptions. She has been assuming:
- Discussion means open floor with hands raised
- Quiet students are quiet by choice
- The opinion of the loudest student represents class consensus
- Silence after a question means students need more time, not that the question failed
The analysis surfaces a set of beliefs she had not examined. Several of them turn out to be untested.
Theorise
She reads a short summary of dialogic teaching and a colleague’s note on think-pair-share. A new working theory: discussion is shaped by the structure provided, not by the willingness of students. A discussion designed without a structured opening favours the most confident speakers. To hear from quieter students, the structure has to give them a way in before the floor opens.
Act
The next discussion opens with a two-minute private write, followed by a one-minute pair share, followed by an open floor. She also names two students at random to speak first, before the most confident hand goes up. She runs the new design and notes what happens.
The act step produces a new description, which feeds the next analysis.
What DATA adds to other models
DATA shares a shape with Kolb’s four-stage cycle and Gibbs’s six-stage cycle. It differs in two ways.
The analyse step is sharper
Most reflection models have an analysis step. DATA names what to analyse: assumptions, beliefs, rules, and motives. This naming is concrete enough to actually do.
The theorise step is explicit
Most cycles fold theorising into the analysis step or skip it. DATA gives it a step of its own, which forces the teacher to build something new before acting. Without this step, the act becomes a guess.
It explicitly builds a new working theory before any action
Most cycles move from analysis straight to action, treating the new approach as obvious once the problem is named. Peters made theorising a step in its own right. The teacher takes the assumptions surfaced in analysis and builds a different framework, drawing on new sources of knowledge. The action then tests this new theory rather than guessing.
Goal of the DATA model
Peters’s stated goal for the model is to integrate scientific theory and practical theory by reflecting on one’s own practical theory. This is a useful framing. Most teachers carry a working theory of teaching that is built from experience but never written down. Reading academic theory in isolation, without examining the working theory, produces little change. DATA brings the two together.
The result is not a switch from practical theory to scientific theory. It is a refined practical theory that has been tested against scientific theory and remains the teacher’s own.
When to reach for DATA
DATA is well suited to:
- Recurring problems whose causes are unclear
- Practices that “work” but the teacher cannot explain why
- Situations where the obvious fix has been tried and failed
- End-of-term reviews where the teacher wants to question their own habits
It is less suited to fast in-the-moment adjustments, where Schon’s reflection-in-action fits better. Different models for different speeds.