Description

What happened?

Gibbs (1988) says “Don't make judgements yet or try to draw conclusions; simply describe”.

A sequence of events will prove useful to put together here, along with any other descriptive details you recall. Think about these things to describe your experience:

• When and where?
• Who was there?
• Why were you there?
• In what order did events take place?
• What actions did you and other people take?
• What was the intended outcome?
• What was the actual outcome?

A clear description gives you a narrative of the experience to expand on, and a starting point for your analysis. Getting the sequence of events down will help you track the impact of decisions, behaviours, and changes.

Feelings

How did you and the participants feel?

Gibbs asks, “What were your reactions and feelings? Again, don't move on to analysing these yet.”

You’re still capturing your recollections. Consider:

• How did you feel at the start?
• How did your emotions change?
• What was your reaction to the end or result?
• How did your emotions, beliefs, and values impact on the experience?
• What cycle of emotions did you observe in other people involved?
• How did people appear to respond to you during the experience?
• How do you feel about recalling these emotions now?

This will help you start to uncover the connections between the emotions of people involved, their behaviours, and the actions and decisions that took place. It gives you a chance to include the social circumstances of the experience, and any developments in key relationships between the people involved.

Try to track this emotional recollection to the sequence of events you have already described.

Evaluation

What was the quality and value of your experience, actions, and results?

Gibbs asks, “What was good or bad about the experience?” He instructs you to “make value judgements.” A value judgement is an assessment of the good and bad, or right and wrong, in something. This judgement is based on your own values, or on the system of values in action (like the rules or instructions).

This time, consider:

• What was good, bad, or mixed, about the experience?
• What about the outcome? Was it successful, or desirable?
• Was the outcome functional?
• What went well? What didn't?
• What skills did you have the chance to demonstrate and improve?
• Did you lack any skills that would have made your contribution more effective?

Evaluating is part of Critical Thinking on our Core Skills Framework. This is a good point to start considering different perspectives, such as alternative ways of judging the outcome of your experience, the different points of view of the people involved, and the value of what you learned.

Analysis

What connections, contradictions, assumptions, and context can you add to your reflection?

Gibbs offers some more detailed guidance for this stage: “What sense can you make of the situation? Bring in ideas from outside the experience to help you. What was really going on? Were different people's experiences similar or different in important ways?”

This time, take your descriptions, feelings, and personal evaluation, and ask:

• Why did things go the way they did?
• How does this experience compare to the theory or concept we began with?
• How does this experience compare to other experiences?
• What theories, models, or other research could help me make sense of it?
• How might I have responded differently?
• What alternative responses could other people have demonstrated?
• What specific actions or behaviours could have helped or improved things?
• What actions or behaviours were the successes and valuable aspects dependent on?

You can see the questions we need to ask getting more complex, and more challenging. It’s also clear that you need to engage increasingly with other peoples’ ideas and examples to do this well. You’ve gone from telling the story to placing it into an intellectual context.

Conclusions

Gibbs actually split this into two stages, which most descriptions of this as a cycle tend to fold into one:

General Conclusions: “What can be concluded, in a general sense, from these experiences and the analyses you have undertaken?”

Specific Conclusions: “What can be concluded about your own specific, unique, personal situation or way of working?”

It’s up to you whether you make the distinction, but it might help to deliberately consider the general and specific points together:

• What have you learned?
• What have you got better at?
• What skills have you practised and improved?
• Were there any skills you needed but didn't have, or didn't feel confident in using?
• Could you have done anything differently?
• Should you have done anything differently?
• What would have been a better outcome?
• What was clearly positive about the outcome you did achieve?
• What would you like to get better at next time?

Be careful not to be too negative here, but also be straight with yourself about any areas of improvement. They are a good thing to identify – the only wholly negative experiences are the ones you do not learn something from.

Action Plan

Gibbs calls this ‘personal action plans’ because these are practical steps you can take. He asks, “what are you going to do differently in this type of situation next time? What steps are you going to take on the basis of what you have learnt?”

You might want to consider:

• When and how can I use the knowledge and experience I have gained here?
• What will I specifically change or do differently in my actions or behaviours?
• What will I do differently in the same specific situations?
• What do I need to be aware of when I test the same skills again?
• What can I do next, to learn, practice, or improve?
• When can I do it by?
• What help do I need?

You might want to consider setting yourself some goals or objectives here and making some practical plans for making them happen. If you’re going to do this, find out the information you need to know, especially about training or support, and set yourself a clear timeline for making it happen.

This is a good point to give it a try. Write out the stages on a blank document, then choose something you’ve taken part in and contributed through, to its conclusion, recently. This could be a group project or activity, an assignment, or a task at work. It could be anything you like, where you got involved, applied your knowledge, and practised your skills.

Does this help you to turn your experience into some clear Action Points?

Would you alter the process at all?

What might you do differently to Gibbs’ cycle, the next time around?