Looking In and Looking Out
The two movements
| Movement | What the practitioner does |
|---|---|
| Looking in | Find space; pay attention to thoughts and emotions; write down significant ones |
| Looking out | Describe the situation around those thoughts and feelings; identify significant issues |
Carper’s patterns reapplied to looking in/out
| Pattern | Key questions |
|---|---|
| Aesthetics | What was I trying to achieve? Why did I respond? Consequences for student/others/myself? How did others feel? |
| Personal | Why did I feel as I did? |
| Ethics | Did I act for the best? What factors influenced me? |
| Empirics | What knowledge did or could have informed me? |
| Reflexivity | Does this connect with previous experience? How could I handle it better? Consequences of alternatives? How do I now feel? Can I support myself and others better? |
Why both movements
Looking in alone becomes psychological. Looking out alone misses the practitioner. The pair together produces the full reading.
Johns’s model asks the reflective practitioner to do two related but distinct things: look in on themselves, and look out at the situation. The two movements together give the model its depth. The article goes into both movements and shows how Carper’s five patterns of knowing can be applied to the material each one produces.
The looking-in movement
Looking in requires the reflective practitioner to find a suitable space, take some time alone, and focus on themselves.
The instructions are deliberately practical. Find a space to focus on self. Pay attention to your thoughts and emotions. Write down those thoughts and emotions that seem significant in realising desirable work.
Three things matter in this instruction.
Space. A noisy staff room or a busy corridor is not the right setting. The practitioner needs somewhere they can think. This might be a classroom after hours, a library corner, a quiet room at home.
Attention to thoughts and emotions. Both layers. A teacher who only notices thoughts has missed the emotional data. A teacher who only notices emotions has missed the cognitive layer.
Writing down the significant ones. Not everything that comes to mind is worth recording. The practitioner uses judgment about what seems significant. The act of writing slows the thinking and produces a record.
This is the inward-facing part of the model. It treats the teacher’s own thoughts and feelings as data worth gathering systematically.
The looking-out movement
Looking out requires the practitioner to write a description of the situation surrounding those thoughts and feelings. What issues seem significant?
The looking-out move places the inward thoughts and feelings in their context. The teacher’s anxiety is not floating free. It is happening in a specific situation: a particular class, a particular conversation, a particular event with a particular student.
The looking-out description is similar to the description stage of the wider model, but more focused. It is specifically the context that produced the inward responses the practitioner just gathered.
A reflection that does only looking in becomes psychological. A reflection that does only looking out misses the practitioner’s own contribution. The two together produce the full picture.
Carper’s patterns through looking in and out
The looking-in and looking-out moves give the practitioner the raw material. Carper’s patterns of knowing then provide lenses to read that material.
Aesthetics
The aesthetic pattern in this context asks key questions about what the teacher was trying to achieve with particular approaches in the classroom and why they were using those approaches. It also considers the consequences of these actions, not only for the teacher but for the students and the wider school community.
This is the pattern that holds the situation as a whole. A teacher reading their material aesthetically is asking what the situation looked like, what the through-line was, and how the parts connected.
Personal
The personal pattern relates to personal understandings, beliefs, and values around the role of teachers and how these are affecting the teaching situations. It also covers the personal responses the teacher had to experiences, which affect what they know and how they know.
The question here is “why did I feel the way I did within this situation?” The answer often surfaces beliefs and values the teacher had not articulated.
Ethics
The ethical pattern asks whether the teacher is doing things for the right reasons and whether they are doing the best for the people they work with. The question is whether they acted for the best.
This pattern also asks what factors, either embodied within the teacher or embodied within the environment, were influencing the way they were acting. Both internal and external influences come into the ethical reading.
Empirics
The empirical pattern asks what knowledge informs the practice. What literature has the teacher read? What courses have they taken? What understandings are they trying to apply?
A teacher whose empirics is thin tends to act on intuition or tradition. A teacher with strong empirics has a wider toolkit to draw on.
Reflexivity
Reflexivity is the part where the teacher is not so much being reflective as being reflexive. They are looking at their own response to particular situations and how they are making connections between their actions and knowledge.
The reflexive questions in this section include: Does this situation connect with previous experiences? How could I handle this situation better? What would be the consequences of alternative actions? How do I now feel about the experience? Can I support myself and others better? How available am I to work with students, families, and staff to help them meet their needs?
Reflexivity asks the practitioner to keep examining their own ongoing relationship to the work. It is not a one-off question but a continuing one.
Why the pair matters
Looking in alone risks becoming psychological reflection without a situation to test it against. The teacher who reflects only on their own thoughts and feelings can produce intricate inner descriptions that have lost their grip on what actually happened in the classroom.
Looking out alone risks the opposite problem. The teacher who describes only the external situation, without examining their own thoughts and feelings, treats themselves as a transparent observer. Their own contribution to the situation drops out of the analysis.
The pair, used together, keeps both errors in check. The inner material is grounded in a real situation. The situation is read by a teacher who has examined their own role in it. The combined reading is deeper than either move on its own.
Aesthetics, personal, ethics, empirics, reflexivity
Aesthetics holds the situation as a whole and asks what the teacher was trying to achieve. Personal asks why the teacher felt as they did. Ethics asks whether the teacher acted for the best. Empirics asks what knowledge informed the practice. Reflexivity keeps examining the teacher’s ongoing relationship to the work.
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