Stages of Structured Reflection
The five stages
| Stage | Question |
|---|---|
| 1. Describe | What happened? Who was involved? What part did each play? What was the result? |
| 2. Thinking and feeling | What was significant? What was I thinking and feeling? What was I trying to achieve? How do I feel about the outcome? |
| 3. Evaluation | What was good and bad? What were the consequences of my actions and others'? |
| 4. Analysis | What sense can I make? What factors influenced me? What sources of knowledge informed me? What could I have done differently? |
| 5. Conclusion and action planning | What needs to change? What stays the same? What actions can I take next? |
Why this is a “staged model”
The reflection moves from purely descriptive accounts toward analytical and thought-through accounts of practice. The teacher’s learning and plans for action are the focus.
What stage 4 (analysis) does
This is the most significant stage. The reflective practitioner draws all the strands together to create a meaningful understanding. Values, assumptions, beliefs about teaching and learning, knowledge, and the perspectives of others all come together here.
Johns’s model of structured reflection is one of the more popular staged models. Its strength is that it walks the practitioner explicitly from description through to action, with each stage doing different work. A teacher using Johns’s model produces reflections that go beyond surface description and into genuine analysis.
The five stages, briefly
The model has five stages, each with its own focus.
- Describe the event or experience. Capture what happened.
- Thinking and feeling. What did the practitioner think and feel during and after?
- Evaluation. What was good or bad? What were the consequences?
- Analysis. What sense can be made? Why did things happen this way?
- Conclusion and action planning. What needs to change?
Each stage will be covered in detail. The point of having five separate stages is that each focus needs its own attention. A reflection that mixes them together produces vague writing that captures none of them well.
Stage 1: Describe the event or experience
The first stage is descriptive. The practitioner gives a clear account of what happened.
Useful questions in this stage include: What happened? Who was involved? What part did you and others play? What was the result?
The aim is a clear understanding of the event itself, before any judgment or analysis enters. A teacher describing a difficult lesson at this stage does not yet say “the lesson failed” or “the students were difficult.” They say what happened in sequence: the lesson started with a warm-up, the warm-up took longer than planned, the main activity began with three groups working well and one group struggling, the teacher intervened twice in the struggling group, the lesson ended with the planned exit activity but only half the students had finished.
A description like this gives the rest of the model something concrete to work with. A description that says “the lesson was bad” gives the rest of the model nothing.
Stage 2: Thinking and feeling
The second stage is the practitioner’s response to the event.
Useful questions here include: What was significant about this experience to me? What was I thinking and feeling during the experience? What was I trying to achieve? How do I feel about the outcome of the event?
This stage takes Boud’s insight about emotion and folds it into the structured model. Without naming the thinking and feeling, the rest of the reflection runs over them rather than working with them.
A teacher who realises in this stage that they were thinking “I cannot let this group fall behind” and feeling “anxious about the timing” has produced data that the analysis stage can work with. A teacher who skips this stage has lost that data.
The practitioner also names what they were trying to achieve. This is often forgotten in reflection. The original intention shapes how the event should be read. A lesson aimed at consolidation is judged differently from one aimed at first introduction, even if they look similar from outside.
Stage 3: Evaluation
The third stage makes value judgments about the event.
Useful questions: What was good and bad about the experience? What were the consequences of my actions and the actions of others?
The teacher looks at the positive aspects of their work and at the areas needing improvement. The evaluation starts to identify the key components of each. It also looks at the actions that occurred and at who was involved in them, and begins to consider why those actions were taking place.
The discipline of this stage is to be honest about both sides. A reflection that records only failures is not balanced. A reflection that records only successes is not honest. A real evaluation has both, often in the same paragraph.
Stage 4: Analysis
The fourth stage is the most significant in Johns’s model. This is where the reflective practitioner draws all the individual strands together to create a meaningful understanding.
Useful questions: What sense can I make of the situation? What factors (values, assumptions, meaning perspective, experiences) influenced my feelings, thoughts, and actions? What sources of knowledge influenced or should have influenced my actions? How did others feel and how do I know? What could I have done differently? What would be the consequences of those other actions? How do I now feel about the experience? What have I learned about my practice, myself, my organisations? What would I do now in a similar situation? What factors might get in the way of me applying my learning?
The questions are extensive because the analysis stage is where the real work happens. The practitioner brings in:
Values and assumptions. What do I believe about my role as a teacher, and how does that show up in my actions?
Beliefs about students as learners. What do I assume about how students learn, and is that assumption supported by what just happened?
Knowledge of teaching and learning. What do I know that could have informed this situation? What did I draw on, and what did I miss?
Perspectives of others. How did the students feel? How would a colleague read this event? What would the students’ parents see?
Future consequences. What might happen if I do this differently next time?
A skilled analysis stage produces understanding that did not exist before the reflection. A weak analysis stage produces a list of platitudes.
Stage 5: Conclusion and action planning
The final stage is where the practitioner takes the next steps. This is where decisions are made about what needs to change, what needs to stay the same, and what specific actions can be taken in the classroom to move forward.
The decisions need to be specific. “I will be a better teacher” is not a decision. “I will pre-teach the vocabulary for the difficult section before introducing the main activity” is.
The conclusion stage also includes recognition of what is working well and should not change. Not everything in a reflection needs to lead to a change. Sometimes the analysis confirms that the current approach is right and the issue lies elsewhere.
Why the staged structure helps
The five stages stop the reflection from collapsing into a single move.
Without the structure, most teachers reflecting on a difficult event jump from description to analysis to conclusion in two paragraphs, missing the thinking and feeling and the evaluation along the way. The reflection sounds reasonable but skips the layers that produce depth.
With the structure, the practitioner has to pause at each stage. The pause produces material. The material accumulates across the stages. By the time the conclusion stage arrives, there is something real to base it on.
This is part of why Johns’s model is popular for teaching reflective practice to people new to it. The structure scaffolds the work. Once the structure is internalised, the practitioner can run it more loosely.
Description, thinking and feeling, evaluation, analysis, conclusion and action planning
Description gives a clean account of what happened. Thinking and feeling captures the practitioner’s response. Evaluation makes value judgments about good and bad. Analysis brings everything together to produce understanding. Conclusion plans the actions that will follow.
Where Johns’s model sits among the others
Johns’s model overlaps with Gibbs’s six-phase cycle. Both walk through similar terrain. The differences are in emphasis.
Gibbs gives more weight to the action plan as a separate phase. Johns folds it into the conclusion stage.
Johns gives more explicit weight to influencing factors and sources of knowledge in the analysis stage. Gibbs covers similar ground but more briefly.
Johns is more explicitly designed to be used with a supervisor or guided reflection partner. The model assumes the practitioner is not working alone.
A teacher choosing between the two might pick Gibbs for solo journal reflection and Johns for reflection done with a mentor. Both produce strong work when used carefully.