Assignment
Assignment
Amrit Virdee
The Gibbs reflective cycle was developed by Graham Gibbs in 1998 and published in his
book ‘Learning by Doing’, it is a structured analysis of a situation that is broken down into six
stages. The Gibbs model acknowledges that personal feelings influence situations and that
analyzing situations using reactions and feelings helps in the learning of what has happened and
how this learning can be applied to future situations. Bulman (2008) describes reflection as
‘reviewing experience from practice so that it may be described, analyzed, evaluated and
consequently used to inform and change future practice’. Hence reflective practice is closely
linked to the concept of learning from experience. The Gibbs model is based on six stages: the
descriptive stage encompasses what actually happened, the feeling stage talks about what were
your feelings and what you were thinking about during the experience, the evaluation stage
which goes through what worked and what didn’t, the analysis stage which involves a recap of
all that has happened, the conclusion stage which goes through what else could have been done
The best way to coach a new employee in using reflective practice is to first show them
how to go through the different stages of the reflective cycle and then have them go through the
process in order to test their understanding. For example, I would get them to first describe an
experience using open ended questions such as ‘In your own words tell me about the
experience?’, ‘Where did it happen?’, ‘Who else was there?’. Next I would encourage them to
talk about how they felt about the experience and what their thoughts were. ‘How did you feel
about the experience?’, ‘What was going through your mind?’ The next step in the cycle would
involve using the ‘5-why’ technique in order to objectively get to what worked and what didn’t.
The ‘5-why’ technique involves asking a further ‘why’ question in order to get a deeper
APPLYING REFLECTIVE PRACTICE: 2
deeper about a situation. The next phase is the analysis phase where all the information is
gathered and recapped. The conclusion phase involves talking about what else could have been
done and the final action plan phase involves talking about if the matter rose again how could
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