Gibbs Reflective Cycle
The Gibbs Reflective Cycle is a six-stage model for structured reflection on experience, developed by Graham Gibbs in Learning by Doing: A Guide to Teaching and Learning Methods, published in 1988 by the Further Education Unit at Oxford Polytechnic. Originally written for higher-education teaching staff, the cycle has been widely adopted across teacher education, nursing, social work, and other professional fields where reflective writing is required.
The six stages
The cycle moves through six stages in sequence and is intended to be repeated across episodes, with each pass feeding planning for the next.
Description: what happened, recounted factually and without interpretation. The stage forces the reflector to lay out the event before judging it.
Feelings: what the reflector and others appeared to be thinking and feeling at the time. Including emotional response is one of the cycle's distinctive moves; many earlier reflective frameworks omitted it.
Evaluation: what was good and bad about the experience, weighed against criteria the reflector makes explicit.
Analysis: what sense can be made of the situation, drawing in concepts from theory, prior experience, and others' accounts. This is where the reflection moves from anecdote to interpretation.
Conclusion: what else could have been done, and what the reflector now understands about themselves and the situation.
Action plan: what the reflector will do differently next time, stated concretely enough to act on.
Position in the reflective practice tradition
Gibbs built on the experiential learning tradition of David Kolb, whose four-stage cycle (concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualisation, active experimentation) had reframed how vocational and adult education thought about learning from practice. Gibbs extended Kolb's compact cycle into a six-stage version with explicit attention to feelings and to action planning. The result is more procedural than Donald Schön's Schon Reflection-in-Action account but more accessible to learners new to reflective writing.
Where it is used
The Gibbs cycle has become the default reflective framework in nurse and allied-health education in the UK, where it structures portfolio entries, revalidation evidence, and assessed reflective essays. It is widely used in teacher-education programmes and in CELTA / DipTESOL portfolio writing as a scaffold for trainees who need a recognisable structure for reflective assignments. Critics note that the structure can become formulaic — reflection-by-numbers — when used uncritically; the framework is intended as a scaffold to remove rather than a permanent template.
References
- Gibbs, G. (1988). Learning by doing: A guide to teaching and learning methods. Further Education Unit, Oxford Polytechnic.
- Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Prentice-Hall.