Gibbs reflective model book

Gibbs’ Cycle

Gibbs’ cycle is a reflective model which helps you analyze situation based on six elements. Gibbs introduced his reflective cycle model in 1988.In this reflective cycle model, it shows you that your experiences have shaped you but it is not enough for your future analyses and your future decisions. It is showing that you can also learn from these experiences in six phases. These phases consist of Description, Feelings, Evaluation, Analysis, Conclusion, Action Plan. First three steps focus on what happened during the experience and second three steps focus on how you can improve yourself about similar experiences.

1.Description

This step discusses the situation to give proper explanation for circumstances or situations without focusing on conclusions immediately. At this stage, person must know what happened. You can ask these questions to understand a situation better in this step.

· What happened?

· What was the situation?

· What did you do?

· What did others do?

· What was the outcome?

2.Feelings

This step considers your feelings and emotions during the time of event or experience. You do not make decisions or judge situation based on feelings in this step. The main purpose of this step is awareness of your feelings. You can ask these questions to be aware of your feeling during experience.

· How are you feeling about the experience now?

· How do you think other people are feeling about experience now?

· What did you feel while this situation took place?

· What do you think other people felt during this situation?

3.Evaluation

In this step, you need to see pros and cons of situation and you should know what you learned from incident. What approach worked and, which ones did not work during incident. You also need to evaluate situation or experience based on your and other people’s reactions during incident. These questions might help you to evaluate situation better in this step.

· What was good and bad about experience?

· What have you learnt?

· What went well?

· What didn’t go so well?

4.Analysis

In this step, you see what you gained from this experience. You analyse outcome of experience to see what caused problems or what caused to positive consequences. Because of this experience, you suppose to know what to do in similar, future situations. You need to learn from your mistakes after experience to make better decisions.

· What factors helped for positive consequences in this experience?

· What factors caused problems for negative consequences in this experience?

5.Conclusion

This step is summary of what you have learnt from experience and ask yourself what else you could have done in this situation. The information you gathered in conclusion step can help you avoid making bad decisions in future. You can also ask these questions to conclude experience better in this step.

· What will be strategy if same event happens again in future?

· Could a different approach change something for this experience?

· How could this have been a more positive experience for everyone involved?

6.Action Plan

In the future, you can take better actions for similar situations because of your experience. You should eliminate the negative things that happened in last incident. You can ask these questions to take better actions for similar situations in future.

· What improvements can be made?

· How future training and learning can improve future project planning?

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