What is Gibbs' Reflective Cycle?
Graham Gibbs published the cycle in 1988 in a book about learning by doing. Nearly four decades later, it's still the most-taught reflective model in UK healthcare and education. Here's why — and how to actually use it.
The six stages
- Description — what happened? Facts only, no interpretation.
- Feelings — what were you thinking and feeling at the time?
- Evaluation — what was good and bad about the experience?
- Analysis — what sense can you make of the situation? Why did it go that way?
- Conclusion — what else could you have done?
- Action plan — if it arose again, what would you do?
Why it works
Most untrained reflection collapses Description and Analysis into a single sentence — 'the session was hard because the client was resistant' — and then jumps straight to Action. Gibbs separates the stages on purpose. The discipline isn't in any one stage; it's in not skipping the boring ones.
Feelings and Evaluation, in particular, are where novice reflectors flinch. They feel self-indulgent. They are not — they are the data layer the Analysis stage needs. Skip them and your Analysis becomes a guess.
Common mistakes
- Writing Description as opinion ('the session was awkward') rather than fact ('the client looked away for most of the first ten minutes').
- Using Analysis to justify what you did instead of interrogating it.
- Writing an Action plan you already know you won't follow. If it isn't specific and scheduled, it isn't a plan.
A worked example, briefly
Description: I ran ten minutes over. Feelings: relieved we'd reached something real, guilty about the next client. Evaluation: the depth was good; the timekeeping wasn't. Analysis: I treated the breakthrough as more important than the boundary, which mirrors a pattern from my training year. Conclusion: I could have named the time and offered to return there. Action: next session, I set a soft 50-minute marker out loud.
Six stages. Three minutes to write. A pattern named that supervision can now work with.
Gibbs isn't the only model — Driscoll is shorter, Rolfe is sharper, Kolb is more theoretical. But for most people most of the time, the six stages are the right tool. Start here. Outgrow it later.