Cue Questions in Johns Model
Five categories of cue questions
| Category | Purpose |
|---|---|
| 1. Description | Capture what happened with phenomenon, causal, context, and clarifying questions |
| 2. Reflection | Surface intent, response, consequences, and the feelings of self and others |
| 3. Influencing factors | Identify internal, external, and knowledge-source influences on decision-making |
| 4. Alternative actions | Consider what else could have been done and the likely consequences |
| 5. Learning | Articulate what has been learned and how it changes future practice |
Four types of description questions
- Phenomenon : describe the here-and-now experience
- Causal : what factors contributed to this experience?
- Context : what background factors are significant?
- Clarifying : what are the key processes for reflection in this experience?
Reflection questions
- What was I trying to achieve?
- Why did I intervene as I did?
- What were the consequences of my actions?
- How did I feel during the experience?
- How did the students feel?
- How do I know how the students felt?
Influencing-factor questions
- What internal factors influenced my decision-making?
- What external factors influenced it?
- What sources of knowledge did or should have influenced it?
Learning questions
- How do I now feel about this experience?
- How have I made sense of it in light of past experience and future practice?
- How has this experience changed my ways of knowing?
Johns’s model uses a series of cue questions to guide reflection. The questions are detailed because the model assumes a structured, sometimes supervised process. Without the cue questions, the five stages can feel abstract. With them, the practitioner has specific prompts that produce specific material.
Why cue questions matter
The cue questions provide a structured and meaningful approach to reflection. They are not optional add-ons. They are how the model actually gets used.
A teacher facing the broad question “what happened?” produces a vague description. A teacher facing the specific phenomenon question “describe the here-and-now experience” produces something sharper. The narrowness of the question is a feature, not a limitation.
The questions sit in five categories, one for each stage of the model plus an extra category for influencing factors and one for considering alternatives. Each category contains several specific cues.
1. Description questions
The descriptive phase needs questions that help the practitioner describe events. Four types of question sit in this category.
Phenomenon questions
Describe the “here and now” experience. What is the experience the teacher had been involved in? The phenomenon question focuses attention on the experience directly and in detail.
This is the most basic descriptive cue. The teacher writes down what happened, without yet asking why or what it means.
Causal questions
What essential factors contributed to this experience? The causal question begins to trace the chain of events. What led to this? What conditions made it possible?
This is still descriptive rather than analytical. The teacher is identifying contributing factors, not yet judging them or interpreting them.
Context questions
What are the significant background factors to this experience? The context question fills in the setting. The class size, the time of day, what the previous lesson was, what is happening in the wider school, what the relevant academic content is.
Context is often the difference between a reading of an event that makes sense and one that does not. A class that was difficult at 7 AM after a school assembly is a different kind of problem from a class that was difficult at 11 AM in a normal week.
Clarifying questions
What are the key processes for reflection in this experience? The clarifying question focuses the teacher’s attention on questions that ensure there is no influence in terms of selection or assumptions about the experience.
This is a meta-cue. It asks the teacher to check whether they are seeing the situation clearly or whether their selection of details is being shaped by an assumption. A teacher who selects only the bad parts of a difficult lesson has not clarified.
2. Reflection questions
After description, the reflection category surfaces the practitioner’s intent, response, and the experience of others.
The questions in this category include:
What was I trying to achieve? Naming the original intent.
Why did I intervene as I did? Examining the reasoning behind the action.
What were the consequences of my actions? Tracing what followed from the intervention, both for self and for students.
How did I feel about this experience when it was happening? The emotional response in real time.
How did the students feel about it? The other side of the interaction.
How do I know how the students felt about it? Checking the basis of the claim. The teacher’s confidence about students’ feelings should rest on something: their words, their behaviour, their work, a conversation. A confident claim with no basis is a guess.
The last question is one of the more useful in the model. It pushes back against the teacher’s assumed knowledge of what students felt. Often the teacher does not know, and admitting this is the start of better reflection.
3. Influencing-factor questions
Johns gives a separate category to factors that influenced the practitioner’s decision-making. This category recognises that decisions in the classroom are shaped by many forces, some inside the teacher and some outside.
The questions are:
What internal factors influenced my decision-making? What was happening inside the teacher: emotions, prior assumptions, beliefs about role, sense of duty, energy level, time pressure.
What external factors influenced my decision-making? What was happening outside the teacher: the school environment, colleagues, administration, student behaviour, parent expectations, the curriculum.
What sources of knowledge did or should have influenced my decision-making? What was the teacher drawing on for their professional choices? What knowledge could have helped that they did not use?
These questions matter because they push the teacher to look beneath the action to its sources. A teacher who decided to intervene quickly with a particular student may have done so because of an internal pattern (anxiety about silence), an external pressure (the schedule), and an absence of knowledge (no awareness of a different intervention they could have used). Naming all three opens up different fixes.
4. Alternative-action questions
Johns gives a category to considering what else could have been done.
The questions are:
What other choices did I have? The teacher pushes themselves to brainstorm alternatives, even ones they did not think of in the moment.
What would be the consequences of these choices? Each alternative gets traced through to its likely outcome.
This category prevents the analysis from staying stuck on what happened. By imagining alternatives, the teacher opens up the field of possible action for next time.
The cue is honest about the difficulty. Often the teacher will not have thought of a good alternative in the moment. That is fine. The point of the cue is to think of one now, while the pressure is off.
5. Learning questions
The final category is about what has been learned and how it changes the practitioner.
The questions are:
How do I now feel about this experience? Note that this is different from how the teacher felt during the experience. Reflection should change the relationship to the event.
How have I made sense of this experience in light of past experience and future practice? The integration question. Where does this fit in what the teacher already knows, and what does it imply for what comes next?
How has this experience changed my ways of knowing? The deepest question. Has this experience changed how the teacher understands their role, their students, their craft?
A reflection that produces no change in the teacher’s ways of knowing has been valuable but limited. A reflection that produces such a change is the kind of work that develops a teacher over a career.
Description, reflection, influencing factors, alternative actions, learning
Description has phenomenon, causal, context, and clarifying questions. Reflection asks about intent, response, consequences, and feelings. Influencing factors covers internal, external, and knowledge sources. Alternative actions considers what else could have been done. Learning asks how the experience has changed the practitioner’s understanding.
Using the cues without becoming mechanical
A risk of detailed cue questions is that the practitioner runs through them like a checklist. The work becomes the answering of the questions, and the depth of the reflection drops.
The fix is to treat the cues as prompts rather than as a form to fill in. A reflection that addresses three of the four description questions in a way that produces real material is better than a reflection that addresses all four superficially. Johns’s model expects the practitioner to use judgment about which cues matter most for this specific reflection.
The cues are also not strictly sequential. A practitioner working through a complex experience may move between description and reflection cues several times before reaching the influencing factors. The structure is a scaffolding, not a rail.
A teacher who has used the model for some time will tend to internalise the cues and apply them less mechanically. The model becomes a way of thinking rather than a list of questions. That is the goal.