The Reviewing Model

The Reviewing Model is one of those deceptively simple yet powerful methods for learning through doing and reviewing. That’s why we use in our Pegasus NLP courses.

What is it?

The model provides a quick-and-easy three-step structure for learning and benefiting from your experience – any experience:

Step 1. What? What did I experience? What did we do? What happened first, next, etc? What was it like? What did I learn? How did I think and feel during the experience?

Step 2. So What? What can I do with what I experienced? What are the lessons and applications? Where can these be used in my everyday life?

Step 3 Now What? Okay, what am I actually going to do in the coming days and weeks? (This is where we commit ourselves to putting the learning points into practise. )

The Model is a based on the Experiential Learning Cycle and has its roots in the work of that great education reformer John Dewey who said that “all genuine education comes through experience”.

Reviewing Model in action (1)

The Reviewing Model can be used during a formal training session. Here you might consider

1. What?: What have I just experienced?
2. So what?:  What is a useful learning point that I can take from this?
3. Now what?: When, exactly, will I apply this learning point?  Today, tomorrow, the day after, etc?  (This really important stage ensures that we ’lock in’ and personalise the learning.)

Reviewing Model in action (2)

You can also use it in your everyday life. Let’s say you’ve just had a confrontation with somebody at work that didn’t go exactly as planned or in which you didn’t really behave as you’d like to have done.

1. What?:  What have I just experienced?  Re-run the interaction in your mind perhaps using Different Perspectives
2. So what?:  What can I learn from this? (Here it is likely that the Different Perspectives Technique will probably give you lots of suggestions on how you could have handled things differently.)
3. Now what?: Make a decision that you will apply this learning point at some stage and in some situation over the next few days — it’s this kind of application of what you have learned that makes learning through doing work.

Simple yet powerful

At Pegasus NLP we love simple yet powerful!  This is why we use the Reviewing Model in all our courses. It has just three stages which makes it easy to learn and therefore more likely to be used.

Complex techniques don’t get used in the same way because they take time to learn and understand fully. For this reason they get put in the must find time to learn this box never again to be revisited!

On the other hand, the simple yet powerful methods get used again and again so we build up experience in using them and therefore tend to refine and personalise them to suit our own style.

(Incidentally, on a technical note, this is how we at Pegasus NLP use the Model and is a little different from the generally available one. Traditionally What? is the prelude to the experience and is called that Experience step.  So What? is the Reflecting step and Now What? is the Applying step.)

Finally, applying the Model to what you have just read…

What? You’ve now read about a simple method for ‘unpacking’ events so that you can learn from them.

So what? What value can this have in your life?  Where can you use it?  Will it be an improvement on methods you already use to learn from your experience?

Now what? if the Reviewing Model has passed the So What? test for you then you can now do something to ensure it becomes part of your routine.  How about using it at the end of a lecture?  At the end of one of those interminable business meetings?  After a difficult or unsuccessful interaction with somebody?