Six Phases of Gibbs Cycle
The six phases of Gibbs’s cycle
| Phase | Core question |
|---|---|
| Description | What happened? |
| Feelings | What were your reactions and feelings? |
| Evaluation | What was good or bad about the experience? |
| Analysis | What sense can you make of the situation? |
| Conclusion | What can be concluded in a general sense? |
| Action plan | What will you do differently next time? |
Gibbs developed the cycle to facilitate the reflection involved in Kolb’s experiential learning cycle.
Eight elements of deep reflection (the cycle helps build these)
- Making sense of experience : analyse to find meaning
- Standing back : get perspective by stepping out of activity
- Repetition : go over events several times
- Deeper honesty : acknowledge what is hard to admit
- Weighing up : be balanced; take everything into account
- Clarity : see events more clearly, like in a mirror
- Understanding : gain insight that cannot just be taught
- Making judgments : draw conclusions to move forward
Gibbs’s reflective cycle is a structured debriefing tool that turned Kolb’s experiential learning theory into a practical sequence teachers could actually use. Six phases walk the reflective practitioner from what happened to what to do differently. The cycle is widely used because the structure works for beginners without being too rigid for experienced reflectors.
How Gibbs developed the cycle
Gibbs presented the cycle as a way to facilitate the reflection involved in Kolb’s experiential learning cycle. Where Kolb described reflection abstractly as a stage in learning, Gibbs gave the practitioner a sequence of questions to actually answer.
The full structured debriefing has six phases. Each is a stage of reflection with a specific question to address. The order matters in Gibbs’s version more than in Dewey’s. The discipline of not jumping from description to conclusion is part of the value.
Phase 1: Description
In the description phase, the practitioner explains what they are reflecting on.
The question is “what happened?” Don’t make judgments at this point or try to draw conclusions. Simply describe.
A useful description might include background information, such as what is being reflected on and who was involved. The discipline is to keep the information relevant and to-the-point. A description that fills three pages with side details has wandered. A description that names the event, the people, and the basic shape in a paragraph or two has done its job.
Common errors in this phase include moving too quickly to evaluation (“the lesson was a disaster”) and burying the actual events under detail (“first the bell rang, then I walked in, then I greeted the class, then…”). The description is the foundation. If it is unclear, every later phase suffers.
Phase 2: Feelings
Discuss your feelings and thoughts about the experience.
Several questions help open the phase: How did I feel at the time? What did I think at the time? What did I think about the incident afterwards?
The instruction is to discuss your emotions honestly. This is the phase where Gibbs picks up Boud’s insight about the role of emotion. Without naming the feelings, the reflection runs on top of them without working through them.
A typical entry in this phase might note the surprise of being thrown by an unexpected student response, the embarrassment at not having an answer, the relief when the lesson moved on, and the lingering worry afterwards. All four feelings shaped how the rest of the lesson went and how the teacher reads it now.
Phase 3: Evaluation
The evaluation phase asks how well you think things went.
Useful questions include: How did you react to the situation, and how did other people react? What was good and what was bad about the experience? If you were reflecting on a difficult incident, did you feel the situation was resolved afterwards? Why or why not?
This phase is also a good place to begin including theory. The discipline here, which Gibbs stresses, is to discuss the theory and not just describe it. A teacher who writes “this connects to Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development” without explaining how has dropped a name. A teacher who writes “the students were trying to operate in what Vygotsky called the zone of proximal development; their performance was uneven because the scaffolding I provided ran out at the wrong moment” has used the theory.
The evaluation phase produces value judgments. The next phase asks what those judgments mean.
Phase 4: Analysis
In the analysis phase, the practitioner considers what might have helped or hindered the event.
This is where the reflective practitioner has the opportunity to compare their experience with the literature they have read. The phase is very important, particularly for higher-level reflection.
Gibbs is direct about what the analysis phase asks: as a reflective practitioner you need to bring the theory and experience together. The previous phase invited theory in. This phase asks the practitioner to use it as the analytical lens.
A teacher who can name a relevant theory has done part of the analysis. A teacher who can apply the theory to interpret what happened has done the analysis well. The interpretation may be tentative, may require further reading, may turn out to be wrong. But the move from “what happened” to “what theory makes sense of it” is the analytical work.
Phase 5: Conclusion
In the conclusion, the practitioner acknowledges several things.
Whether they could have done anything else. A genuine consideration of alternatives, not a rhetorical question.
What they have learned from the experience. Specific learning, not generic.
Whether they could have responded in a different way. This is similar to the first question but asks specifically about response, not just about the action.
If the practitioner is reflecting on a positive experience, the conclusion considers whether they would do the same again to ensure a positive outcome and whether anything could be changed to improve things further.
If the incident was negative, the conclusion explores how it could have been avoided and how to make sure it does not happen again.
The discipline of the conclusion is honesty. A conclusion that says “I would do nothing differently” after a difficult event is rare and probably defensive. A conclusion that names two or three specific things to change shows genuine thinking.
Phase 6: Action plan
The action plan is the subject of the next article in this chapter, so only a short note here.
The action plan summarises what the practitioner will know and do differently to be better equipped for a similar event. The plan needs to be specific enough to act on. “I will be more aware” is too vague. “I will speak to two specific colleagues this week about the pattern I noticed” is workable.
Eight elements of deep reflection
Gibbs’s cycle is not just a sequence of phases. The cycle is designed to develop the type of thinking associated with deep reflection. The literature names eight elements that the cycle helps build.
- Making sense of experience. We do not always learn from experiences. Reflection is where we analyse experience and actively try to make sense or find the meaning in it.
- Standing back. It can be hard to reflect when we are caught up in an activity. Standing back gives a better view or perspective on an experience, issue, or action.
- Repetition. Reflection involves going over something several times to get a broad view and check that nothing is missed.
- Deeper honesty. Reflection is associated with striving after truth. Through reflection, we can acknowledge things we find difficult to admit in the normal course of events.
- Weighing up. Reflection involves being balanced in judgment, taking everything into account rather than only the most obvious points.
- Clarity. Reflection can bring greater clarity, like seeing events reflected in a mirror. This helps at any stage of planning, carrying out, and reviewing activities.
- Understanding. Reflection is about learning and understanding on a deeper level. This includes gaining valuable insights that cannot just be taught.
- Making judgments. Reflection involves drawing conclusions to move on, change, or develop an approach, strategy, or activity.
The eight elements describe what good reflection feels like from the inside. Running the six phases without producing any of the eight elements is going through the motions. Producing all eight is the depth Gibbs was aiming for.
Description, feelings, evaluation, analysis, conclusion, action plan
Description names what happened. Feelings names the reactions. Evaluation judges what was good or bad. Analysis brings theory to bear and explains what was going on. Conclusion identifies what was learned and what could have been done differently. Action plan states what to do next time. The six phases together produce reflection that goes beyond surface observation.
How the phases work together
The six phases produce an arc.
Phases 1 and 2 are the data collection. The practitioner gathers what happened and how they felt about it.
Phase 3 makes the value judgments. Good or bad? What worked or did not?
Phase 4 brings theory and experience together to explain why.
Phase 5 closes the loop on this incident. What did I learn?
Phase 6 looks forward. What will I do?
A reflection that runs all six phases tightly takes time. Most practitioners find that with practice, the cycle gets faster. The first few times, a serious Gibbs reflection might take an hour to write. After several months of practice, the same depth can come in 20 minutes. The structure becomes internal.