In 1933 (based on work first published in 1910), John Dewey described five phases or aspects of reflective thought: In between, as states of thinking, are (1) suggestions, in which the mind leaps forward to a possible solution; (2) an intellectualization of the difficulty or perplexity that has been felt (directly experienced) into a problem to be solved, a question for which the answer must be sought; (3) the use of one suggestion after another as a leading idea, or hypothesis, to initiate and guide observation and other operations in the collection of factual material; (4) the mental elaboration of the idea or supposition as an idea or supposition (reasoning, in the sense in which reasoning is a part, not the whole of inference); and (5) testing the hypothesis by overt or imaginative action.In the 1940s, Kurt Lewin developed action research and described a cycle of:
Secondly, it gives the planners a chance to learn, that is, to gather new general insight, for instance, regarding the strength and weakness of certain weapons or techniques of action.
"In the early 1970s, David A. Kolb and Ronald E. Fry developed the experiential learning model (ELM), composed of four elements:[3] Testing the new concepts gives concrete experience which can be observed and reflected upon, allowing the cycle to continue.
These two axes form the four quadrants that can be seen as four stages: concrete experience (CE), reflective observation (RO), abstract conceptualization (AC) and active experimentation (AE) and as four styles of learning: diverging, assimilating, converging and accommodating.
Honey and Mumford gave names (also called learning styles) to the people who prefer to enter the cycle at different stages: Activist, Reflector, Theorist and Pragmatist.
[10] Korthagen and Vasalos also described an onion model of "levels of reflection" (from inner to outer: mission, identity, beliefs, competencies, behavior, environment) inspired by Gregory Bateson's hierarchy of logical types.