Reflective Writing: Everything You Need to Know About Gibbs Reflection Model

It is also said that people learn from their experiences. If a person does not consciously think about the ways they can perform better next time, it will be hard for him/her to learn anything. This is a stage where the Gibbs model of reflection can be taken into account as it allows you to let an individual know what he/she did well in that situation and how can he/she do even better in the future if the same situation takes place. Our nursing assignment writing expert hopes that after reading this blog, you will have a better understanding of the self-reflection model.

6 Stages of the Gibbs Reflective Cycle with Examples

Gibbs model of reflection was developed in 1988 by Graham Gibbs. It includes a framework best for observing experiences and allows planning and learning from that specific situation, incident, or event so that the things can be even better than before. It includes 6 different stages such as - 

• Description of your experience gained from a situation
• Thoughts and feelings related to the experience
• Evaluation of both the good as well as the bad experience
• Analysis to understand the situation in a better way
• Conclusion about what you have learnt and what different could be done at that time
• Action plan explaining the ideas to deal with such future occurred situations

Below is the explanation of each of the steps as under the Gibbs Reflective Cycle and how you can use it for writing the assignments.

Description

Here, you are required to explain the incident, situation, or event in detail. While explaining, remember to include the following given points;

• What happened?
• Where and when did the situation take place?
• Who was present at the moment?
• What did you and the other people did to overcome that situation?
• What were you doing there?
• Explain the outcome? 

Here’s an example for writing the description using Gibbs reflective cycle:

Feelings

This section allows you to describe your thoughts and feelings you had at the time of that incident and the ways in which it affected the experience. 

The questions to be answered under this section are – 

• How did you felt at the time of the incident?
• Describe your own thinking about the incident?
• How the other people are feeling now about the incident that has occurred earlier?
• Explain the feeling before and after the incident
• Describe how other people felt about the incident?

Let’s have a look at the example below:

Evaluation

Being a nursing assignment writer, you have to evaluate which sort of work can work and what cannot work in that particular situation. You have to be very honest and objective while evaluating the situation. To provide the best part of your reflection, you must focus on the positive as well as the negative aspects of that incident or situation. 

Helpful questions to assist you in evaluating a situation are given below – 

• Describe the things that went well
• Explain what did not go well according to you
• Define bad as well as good about your experience
• How the other people and you had contributed yourself to that incident?

Analysis

This is where you explore what happened related to a situation. In the above steps, you have discussed the details that happened around the situation. Now, you are required to extract the actual meaning of it. You must focus on the different aspects including both negative and positive. 

Make sure to answer these questions to prepare the best analysis report:

• State the reasons behind the things went well
• Explain the mistakes why did things do not went right 
• Make a sense about the situation
• Include academic literature that can help to understand the situation for you and the other as well

Conclusion

This is a section of the Gibbs reflective cycle in nursing where you are asked to conclude each aspect of the situation. You have to summarise what you have learnt from it and showcase the impact so that possible results can be presented for such cases if the situation take place again in the future. Here’s what your conclusion should answer:

• What have you learnt?
• How the situation could be more positive for the people involved?
• State the required skills to cope with such a situation in a better way
• Additional things that could be done by you

Action Plan

This is the final step of the Gibbs Reflective Model where you should explain the various actions to be developed to handle such future scenarios. In the conclusion, you make promises to yourself after experiencing the situation. In case, if the same scenario takes place, you must prepare the best action plan as per your learning so that the same mistakes do not occur again. 

So, these were the steps and process involved in the Gibbs Reflective Model for an event, incident, or scenario. If you’re reading this, then I’m sure that you are pursuing a nursing course and most likely have received an assignment on reflection. Well, don’t worry, you can use the above steps to carry out your reflection task. And if you need a professional’s help, do get in touch with us at Online Assignment Expert. We have a team of certified academic writers who will provide you with the best nursing assignment help.