Looking In and Considering the Cue

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, plus the framework for considering what internal factors are influencing the practitioner.

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.

Considering the cue: internal factors

A specific cue in Johns’s model is “what internal factors were influencing me?” This cue gets a framework of its own because internal factors are easy to under-explore.

The framework breaks internal factors into domains.

Expectations from self

What does the teacher expect of themselves? Several pieces sit here.

Obligation and duty. A sense of what the teacher feels they have to do. This sense is sometimes accurate and sometimes inflated.

Conscience. What feels right or wrong to the teacher in this kind of situation.

Beliefs and values. The deeper convictions about what teaching is for and how students should be treated.

Normal practice. A felt obligation to conform to what the teacher usually does or what is usually expected.

Fear of sanction. Anxiety about consequences if the expectations are not met.

A teacher reflecting through these expectations of self may discover that some are productive and some are corrosive. A sense of duty can carry the work; a fear of sanction can distort it.

Negative attitude

The framework also asks about negative attitude toward the student or family. What factors influenced the teacher’s actions that came from a negative reading of the people they were working with?

This is a hard question to answer honestly. A teacher who acknowledges that they had a negative attitude toward a particular student is doing real reflective work. A teacher who insists they had no such attitude when the actions suggest otherwise is not.

Expectations from others

What did the teacher think others expected of them? Several specifics sit here.

Loyalty conflicts. Loyalty to staff versus loyalty to a student or family. These can pull in different directions.

Anxiety about ensuing conflict. Worry that addressing something will produce conflict with colleagues, parents, or administrators.

Fear of sanction. Anxiety about consequences from those whose expectations the teacher might disappoint.

These external expectations live inside the teacher as internal pressures. They are real even when nobody articulates them out loud.

Time and priorities

Teachers are extremely busy. Internal reflection sometimes surfaces that an action was shaped less by deliberate choice than by time pressure and competing priorities.

Naming this is useful. It points to the structural conditions that need to change as much as to the teacher’s choices.

Why considering this cue matters

Considering the cue “what is the internal influence on teaching?” helps the reflective practitioner give equal weight to the internal perspective of reflection as much as to the external focus.

This balance matters because the external focus tends to draw the teacher’s attention more easily than the internal focus. A teacher reflecting on a difficult class will naturally start with what students did, what colleagues said, what the schedule produced. The teacher’s own internal contribution gets less attention.

Adding reflexivity, the conscious internal focus, means the reflection avoids becoming purely a contemplation of external circumstances. It is more than navel-gazing because it is paired with looking out and with the analytical questions of the wider model. The combination gives the practitioner an opportunity to acquire a deep level of learning from their experience.

This is where the real value of the staged model becomes apparent. A teacher who can move between looking in and looking out, between the patterns of knowing and the internal influences, has a richer understanding than any one of these moves alone could produce.

Flashcard

What four domains does Johns's model use to consider internal factors influencing the practitioner?

Tap to reveal

Answer

Expectations from self, negative attitude, expectations from others, time and priorities

Expectations from self include obligation, duty, conscience, beliefs and values, normal practice, and fear of sanction. Negative attitude examines feelings toward students or families. Expectations from others covers loyalty conflicts and anxiety about ensuing conflict. Time and priorities names the pressure of competing demands.

A note on the difficulty of looking in

Looking in is harder than looking out. Looking out describes situations and other people, which the teacher does naturally. Looking in describes the teacher’s own thoughts, feelings, expectations, and attitudes, which requires honesty about oneself.

A teacher who has not built the practice of looking in will find the inward-facing parts of Johns’s model thin. The cues will produce vague answers or defensive ones.

The fix is patience and practice. The first attempts at looking in often produce surface answers. With time, deeper material surfaces. A teacher who has practised looking in for a year produces inward observations the same teacher could not have produced in their first month of reflection.

This is partly why Johns recommends working with a supervisor. The supervisor can ask “is that really what you were feeling, or is there something else?” without the question becoming intrusive. Solo looking in tends to stop at the first plausible answer. Supervised looking in goes further.