Sometimes the best thing to do is to use a short, sharp, direct approach. This can be what you need when reflecting with a team, in discussion, at the end of a task or a project. Alternatively, you might want to draw some very quick conclusions from something you have finished, get them written down, and move on to the next task with some simple conclusions clear in your mind.

The ’What? So What? Now What?’ approach has been developed for different professions over the years, with extra questions in each section depending on the experiences of the audience at the time. Terry Borton, a schoolteacher and educational theorist, laid it out first in Reach, Touch, and Teach (1970), intending it at for group facilitation audience, from classrooms to professional training environments. John Driscoll developed this for use in clinical practice, especially for nurses in training (1994, 2007). Rolfe, Freshwater and Jasper (2001, 2011) also wrote about in relation to nursing before addressing its wider use as part of a critical reflection culture for the care sector. Melanie Jasper also described an analogous model she called ERA (2013) which uses ‘Experience, Reflection, Action’ as the names for the three stages.

They all presented this as a cyclical process, to begin again at the conclusion amidst the continuous practice of a clinical environment. The three contributions explored different guide questions at each stage, but the process works in more or less the same way with each. Here I have produced a composite version of these guide questions.