ALACT Model
The ALACT model is a five-phase reflection cycle developed by Fred Korthagen for use in teacher education. The acronym stands for Action, Looking back, Awareness of essential aspects, Creating alternative methods of action, and Trial — the start of a new cycle.
The five phases
The cycle moves from doing through reflecting and back to doing, designed so each pass through the loop becomes the action phase of the next.
Action — the teacher does something: teaches a lesson, runs an activity, manages a moment.
Looking back — the teacher revisits the action, recovering what happened in the classroom, what the learners did, what they themselves did and felt. This phase is descriptive rather than evaluative.
Awareness of essential aspects — the teacher identifies what mattered in the situation: the patterns, the tensions, the assumptions that drove their behaviour. The Dutch phrase bewustwording — awareness coming-into-being — captures the move from rich description to focused insight.
Creating alternative methods of action — the teacher generates other ways the situation could have been handled or could be handled in similar future situations.
Trial — the teacher tries one of those alternatives in practice, which becomes the action phase of the next cycle.
Realistic teacher education
ALACT is the operating cycle of what Korthagen calls realistic teacher education, set out in Linking Practice and Theory: The Pedagogy of Realistic Teacher Education, co-authored with Jos Kessels, Bob Koster, Bram Lagerwerf, and Theo Wubbels and published in 2001 by Lawrence Erlbaum (now part of Routledge / Taylor & Francis). The book argues that conventional teacher education over-relies on the transmission of theory, which trainees struggle to apply to practice, and that genuine teacher learning starts from concrete experience, surfaces personal concerns, and only then connects to theory — a deliberate inversion of the standard sequence.
The book brings together fifteen years of teacher-education research at Utrecht University and the Netherlands School of Educational Management, combining the ALACT cycle, three foundational principles of teacher learning, and accounts of how teacher educators can support each phase of the cycle in practice.
Position relative to other reflection models
ALACT sits in the same family as the Gibbs Reflective Cycle and David Kolb's experiential learning cycle but differs in two ways. It places concrete creation of alternatives as a distinct phase rather than folding it into evaluation or planning, and the looking-back phase is explicitly descriptive — separated from evaluation — to slow down the rush to judgement. Korthagen has subsequently extended ALACT into core reflection, which adds layers of values, identity, and mission to the awareness phase.
References
- Korthagen, F. A. J., Kessels, J., Koster, B., Lagerwerf, B., & Wubbels, T. (2001). Linking practice and theory: The pedagogy of realistic teacher education. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
- Korthagen, F. A. J. (2017). Promoting core reflection in teacher education. korthagen.nl