Trans-Disciplinary Skills in Gibbs
Five families of trans-disciplinary skills
| Family | Examples |
|---|---|
| Social | Responsibility, respect, cooperation, group decision-making, role flexibility |
| Communication | Reading, writing, listening, speaking, non-verbal |
| Thinking | Knowledge acquisition, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation, dialectical thought, metacognition |
| Research | Forming questions, observing, planning data collection, organising data, interpreting, time management, codes of behaviour, informed choices, ethics |
| Self-management | Implied throughout: managing your own learning, time, and reflection |
Why these skills are trans-disciplinary
They are not specific to teaching, nursing, social work, or any other field. They cross fields. A teacher who builds these skills through Gibbs cycles can use them outside the classroom too.
What “thinking skills” actually contains
- Knowledge acquisition : gathering what is needed
- Comprehension : understanding what is gathered
- Application : using it in practice
- Analysis : taking apart to see structure
- Synthesis : putting back together in new ways
- Evaluation : judging quality and value
- Dialectical thought : holding opposing views in mind
- Metacognition : thinking about your thinking
This is essentially Bloom’s taxonomy plus dialectical thought and metacognition.
A teacher who has run Gibbs cycles for a year has not only reflected on specific lessons. They have built a set of cross-cutting skills that apply to almost any kind of work. Gibbs’s framework calls these trans-disciplinary skills, meaning they are not tied to any one field. The chapter ends with a look at five families of skill the cycle develops.
What trans-disciplinary skills are
Trans-disciplinary skills are the abilities that move freely between subjects, professions, and contexts. A teacher who develops them through reflective practice can use them when planning a course, running a school committee, working with parents, or moving into a different role entirely.
The Gibbs cycle helps the reflective practitioner develop a range of these. Five families show up in the literature.
Family 1: Social skills
Social skills are the skills for working with other people.
Accepting responsibility. A reflective practitioner who is honest about their part in a difficult event is taking responsibility. The action plan that follows lives or dies on whether the practitioner owns the work.
Respecting others. A reflection that genuinely considers the student’s perspective, the colleague’s view, the parent’s experience requires respect. Reflection that flattens others into characters in the practitioner’s story has missed something.
Cooperating. Action plans almost always involve other people. The cooperation is built into the practice.
Group decision-making. Many reflections feed into decisions made with colleagues. The skill of contributing to a group’s decision is part of the work.
Adopting a variety of roles. A reflective teacher is sometimes the analyst, sometimes the listener, sometimes the proposer, sometimes the questioner. Moving between roles fluently is itself a skill.
The Pakistani classroom benefits from these social skills as much as any other. A teacher who practises them through reflection brings them into staff meetings, parent meetings, and student interactions.
Family 2: Communication skills
Communication skills cover the ways we exchange information and meaning.
Reading. A reflective practitioner reads widely: research, colleague journals, student work. The Gibbs cycle’s analysis phase explicitly invites reading.
Writing. Reflection produces writing, sometimes in journals, sometimes in formal reports. The discipline of writing reflections sharpens the skill of writing more generally.
Listening. Action plans built on conversations require listening. Listening is a skill that can be practised, not a personality trait.
Speaking. Reflective practice that includes peer discussion or supervisor conversation builds speaking skills. The teacher learns to articulate observations, reasoning, and tentative conclusions in ways others can engage with.
Non-verbal communication. Reflecting on classroom interactions inevitably involves the non-verbal layer: posture, expression, position in the room. A teacher who reflects regularly on these becomes more aware of their own non-verbal signals.
A teacher whose communication skills are limited to reading and writing is half a communicator. Gibbs cycles, run with discussion partners, build the spoken and listening sides as well.
Family 3: Thinking skills
Thinking skills cover the cognitive operations that make reflection deep rather than shallow.
Acquisition of knowledge. Gathering what is needed to understand something.
Comprehension. Understanding what has been gathered. Knowing the words is not the same as understanding the meaning.
Application. Using the understanding in practice. The action plan phase of Gibbs is partly an exercise in application.
Analysis. Breaking something down into parts to see how it is structured.
Synthesis. Putting parts back together in new ways. The analysis phase of Gibbs invites this when theory and experience get combined.
Evaluation. Judging the quality, value, or fit of something. The evaluation phase of Gibbs is the obvious home of this skill.
Dialectical thought. Holding opposing views in mind at the same time and working with the tension between them. A reflection that genuinely considers the student’s view alongside the teacher’s view, even when they conflict, is doing dialectical thought.
Metacognition. Thinking about your own thinking. Asking whether your reasoning is sound, whether your assumptions are getting in the way, whether you are missing something. The Gibbs cycle is itself an exercise in metacognition.
These eight thinking skills overlap with Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives, with dialectical thought and metacognition added on top. A teacher who practises Gibbs cycles is essentially running their own ongoing course in higher-order thinking.
Family 4: Research skills
Research skills cover the abilities needed to investigate something carefully.
Formulating questions. A good reflection begins with a sharp question. A poor reflection begins with a vague feeling.
Observing. Watching what actually happens, rather than what we expected to happen. This is harder than it sounds.
Planning collection of data. Deciding in advance what evidence will be gathered, how, and when.
Organising data. Sorting what has been collected so it can be read.
Interpreting data. Working out what the data mean.
Time management. Reflection takes time. Allocating that time deliberately is part of the skill.
Codes of behaviour. Knowing the norms of the field. In teaching, this includes professional ethics, school rules, and broader social expectations.
Informed choices. Decisions made on the basis of evidence and reasoning rather than habit.
Ethics. The ability to recognise ethical dimensions of a situation and act in line with considered ethical reasoning.
The connection between Gibbs reflection and action research (covered in earlier chapters) becomes clear here. The same skills support both. A teacher who runs Gibbs cycles is, in effect, running small-scale action research projects.
Family 5: Self-management skills
Self-management skills cover the abilities needed to direct your own work over time.
The original list does not spell out self-management as a separate family in the same way as the others, but the implication runs through all of them. Reflection requires the practitioner to:
Manage their own learning. Decide what to focus on, how to study, when to push deeper.
Manage their own time. Find time for reflection in a busy schedule and protect it.
Manage their own emotional state. Recognise when feelings are blocking the work and address them.
Manage their own commitment. Keep going when the reflection is hard or seems unproductive.
A teacher with weak self-management can have all the other skills and still produce little because they cannot sustain the work.
Social, communication, thinking, research, and self-management
Social skills include responsibility, respect, cooperation, and role flexibility. Communication covers reading, writing, listening, speaking, and non-verbal. Thinking includes the eight cognitive operations from acquisition through metacognition. Research includes question-forming, observing, organising data, interpretation, and ethics. Self-management ties them together over time.
Why these skills compound
The skills are described as trans-disciplinary because they cross subjects. A teacher who builds them through Gibbs cycles can apply them in any field: school administration, community work, family life, professional bodies.
This is part of why reflective practice has spread across so many professions. The skills it builds are useful everywhere. A nurse, a social worker, and a teacher all benefit from the same cluster.
The skills also compound across years. A teacher who practises them for one year is sharper than a teacher who has not. A teacher who practises them for ten years is operating at a different level entirely. Each year’s reflection builds on the previous years’, and the gap between reflective and unreflective teachers widens with time.
A brief summary of the chapter
The chapter has gone deeper into Boud and Gibbs. Boud added an emotional layer most other models ignore and later named the barriers that block reflection. Gibbs gave the practitioner a six-phase cycle that walks from description to action plan and develops trans-disciplinary skills along the way.
A teacher who works with both has access to the strengths of each. Boud’s model handles emotion well. Gibbs’s model handles structure well. Used together, they cover most of what a working reflective practitioner needs in the classroom.
Johns’s model treats structured reflection in similar depth and is the natural companion to Gibbs.