Reflective Cycle

One way to think about how to structure your reflection is to use a reflective cycle. One example of a reflective cycle is Gibbs’ cycle that offers six steps for reflection. Let’s look at what they are. In this cycle, you start with a description, move to thoughts and feelings, then onto evaluation, then analysis, a conclusion, and then your action plan. Let’s look at each step one by one and look at what you might think about or include at that stage in your reflective process. You’ll start off with a description. This isn’t the core or the focus of the reflection, but it sets the stage and provides the context. You’ll want to give some key specific details about what happened. Try to avoid being too general here. Where were you? Who were you with? What did you say and do? What did the people around you say and do? Give enough context, if you’re writing for an instructor, for example, that they can imagine what happened. What was the situation that you’re going to explore in your reflection? Next, you’ll move on to thoughts and feelings. This is where you’ll go back and think about what was going on in your mind and in your emotions during that experience. What thoughts were in your mind? Then try to name some specific emotions that you experienced. Try to really dig in and narrow down to some specifics like curious or engaged, supported or bored. The next step is to move on to evaluation. What was good or bad about the experience? What worked well? What didn’t work. Here you’re starting to look back and think about it in order that you can start to make some choices about what’s next. The next step is analysis. If you’re doing a reflection in the context of a course, this is a really important step to bring in what you’re learning in the course and use that to analyze the experience that you just had. In your course, you’ll be exploring some concepts, some terms, and maybe some theories. This is the time that you really want to show that you know what those are and that you can use them and apply them to your past experience. Bring in those course ideas, use them to think analytically about what happened. Now that you know these new ideas, how can you think differently about your experience? Okay. Next, you’ll move on to a conclusion. So some questions to think about here. Would you do the same thing next time? Why or why not? What else could you have done? And what have you learned from this experience? Lastly, the action plan. Keeping in mind that the whole purpose of reflection is to move us ahead into the future in a better way. Having learned from the past, this is the last step where you’re going to look ahead. What does all of this learning mean for you in the future? How will you apply your learning from this experience and what’s next? By working through these steps in the cycle, you’ll be sure that you really worked through the whole process. Starting with the past, doing some deep thinking and deep analysis and making sure you’ve hit that final step of moving into the future.