Using Johns Model
What Johns’s model is for
| Use | What it does |
|---|---|
| Critical incident analysis | A guide for analysing one specific powerful event |
| General reflection on experience | Useful for complex decision-making |
| Guided reflection with a supervisor | Structured supervision conversation |
| Structured diary or log entries | Provides shape for ongoing journaling |
Carper’s four patterns of knowing (1978)
| Pattern | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Aesthetics | The art of practice; understanding the situation as a whole |
| Personal | Self-awareness; how the practitioner shows up |
| Ethics | Moral and value-based knowledge of right action |
| Empirics | Scientific knowledge; what research and theory say |
Johns’s addition: the fifth pattern
Reflexivity : examining how one’s own role and assumptions shape the situation
Strength of the model
One of the few reflection models that explicitly refers to the development of an epistemological base for reflection. The practitioner is not just reflecting; they are also building the foundations of how they know what they know.
Adapting the model
For an ongoing situation, the reflexive section can be adapted using cues from another model, or the practitioner can develop their own set of cues.
Johns’s model is more than a reflection structure. It is a guide for analysing critical incidents, a frame for guided reflection with a supervisor, and a way of building an epistemological base for the practitioner’s professional knowledge. The article looks at how the model is actually used.
Using Johns’s model for analysis
Johns’s model can be used as a guide for the analysis of a critical incident or for general reflection on experience.
A critical incident is a specific event that stands out: a turning point, a difficult moment, a powerful success, an unexpected failure. The literature in nursing, social work, and teaching has used the term to mean events that are significant enough to warrant focused reflection.
Johns’s model is well-suited to critical incidents because the staged structure breaks down a single complex event into manageable analytical pieces. The teacher can spend serious time on one incident and produce real understanding rather than skating across many incidents superficially.
The model is also useful for more general reflection on experience, especially where the situation involves complex decision-making and analysis. By breaking the reflection process into clearly defined stages, the model simplifies the complex nature of the process and enables critical reflection to take place.
A teacher facing a complicated situation (a parent dispute, a class with multiple competing dynamics, a curriculum decision) can use Johns’s model to think it through in stages rather than tackle it all at once.
Working with a supervisor
Johns supports the need for the reflective practitioner to work with a supervisor throughout their learning experience. He refers to this as guided reflection.
The model lends itself to collaboration with others. The high level of analysis it asks for is hard to do alone. A supervisor or mentor (someone in the school who can play that role) becomes a thinking partner.
Johns considered that through sharing reflections on learning experiences, greater understanding of those experiences could be achieved than by reflection as a lone exercise. This is consistent with the wider literature: peer or supervisor input usually produces deeper reflection than solo work.
A teacher using Johns with a mentor walks through the cue questions in conversation rather than only on paper. The mentor asks for clarification, points out things the teacher missed, offers alternative readings. The reflection becomes dialogical.
Structured diaries
Johns recommends that teachers use a structured diary. The whole process gets recorded to support the supervisory relationship.
The structured diary uses the model’s stages and cue questions as headings. Each entry walks through description, thinking and feeling, evaluation, analysis, and conclusion. Over time, the diary becomes a record the teacher and supervisor can refer back to.
The structured diary is different from a free-form journal. The structure does work that a blank page does not. It pushes the teacher to address each stage rather than dwell on the parts that come easily.
The diary also creates continuity. A teacher who looks back at six months of structured entries can see patterns: which kinds of incidents recur, which interventions worked, which assumptions kept showing up. This historical view is one of the model’s strongest gifts.
Carper’s four patterns of knowing
A distinctive feature of Johns’s model is that it draws on Carper’s (1978) four patterns of knowing. The patterns provide a way of thinking about what kinds of knowledge inform a practitioner’s decisions.
Aesthetics
The aesthetic pattern is the art of practice. It is the practitioner’s grasp of the situation as a whole: the feel of the room, the sense of what this particular student needs, the timing of an intervention.
Aesthetic knowledge is hard to articulate. A skilled teacher often knows that a moment is right for a particular question without being able to say exactly why. This kind of knowing is real and matters, even though it does not fit neatly into evidence-based language.
In Johns’s model, considering the aesthetic pattern means asking what the teacher was trying to achieve, why they responded as they did, what the consequences were for everyone involved, and how others were feeling.
Personal
The personal pattern is the practitioner’s self-awareness. It covers personal understandings, beliefs, values, and how these affect the teaching situation.
Personal knowing also includes the practitioner’s emotional response. Why did I feel the way I did within this situation? The answer is part of the data.
A teacher who has done little personal work may have many beliefs and values they cannot articulate. The personal pattern in Johns’s model invites the practitioner to do that articulation.
Ethics
The ethical pattern is moral knowledge. Did I act for the best? What ethical considerations were at play?
This includes questions about what factors, embodied within the practitioner or embedded within the environment, were influencing them. The ethical pattern is not separate from the personal pattern; the two interact.
A teacher reflecting through the ethical pattern might ask whether their decision served the student’s actual interests, whether they were being fair across the class, whether they were acting in line with their professed values.
Empirics
The empirical pattern is scientific knowledge. What knowledge informed me? What research, theory, or evidence was relevant? What did I draw on?
This connects the practitioner to the wider professional knowledge base. A teacher who never asks empirical questions may be acting on intuition or tradition without testing those against what is actually known.
Johns’s fifth pattern: reflexivity
Johns added a fifth pattern to Carper’s four: reflexivity.
Reflexivity is the practitioner examining how their own role and assumptions shape the situation. It is one step deeper than the personal pattern. The personal pattern asks who I am and what I bring. Reflexivity asks how my being who I am is shaping what I see and what is happening.
A teacher who notices that they tend to favour students who participate verbally is doing a piece of reflexivity. A teacher who notices that they themselves are uncomfortable with silence and that this preference shapes their teaching is doing reflexivity.
Reflexivity is hard. It requires honesty about one’s own contribution to situations that the teacher would otherwise locate entirely in students or context.
The epistemological strength
This is one of the few reflection models that refers to the development of an epistemological base to reflections. Most reflection models treat the practitioner’s knowledge as a given. Johns’s model, by drawing on Carper’s patterns and adding reflexivity, treats the practitioner’s knowledge as something the reflection itself is building.
What this means is that a teacher using Johns’s model is beginning to understand how they know about their role as teachers, and to understand their roles as teachers and students’ roles as learners more fully. The reflection produces deeper understanding by using the patterns as lenses.
Through this model, the teacher develops a set of questions that guide thinking through the aesthetic aspects of knowing, the personal, ethical, and empirical aspects, and the reflexive layer that examines their own role. This wider toolkit produces wider reflection.
Aesthetics, personal, ethics, empirics, and reflexivity
Aesthetics is the art of practice and the grasp of the whole situation. Personal is self-awareness and beliefs. Ethics is the moral knowledge of right action. Empirics is scientific knowledge from research and theory. Reflexivity, Johns’s addition, examines how the practitioner’s own role and assumptions shape the situation.
Adapting the model to ongoing situations
If you use this model for a situation that is ongoing, you can adapt the reflexive section using cues from another model or develop your own set of cues.
This is one of Johns’s pragmatic notes. The model is designed for events that have ended (a critical incident, a finished lesson). Ongoing situations (a long-running tension with a particular student, a year-long curriculum challenge) need a slightly different treatment.
The fix is to use Johns’s structure for the parts that work and supplement with cues from elsewhere for the parts that need extension. The model is not designed to be rigid. A practitioner who needs to adapt it should adapt it.