Reflective practice is one of the most consistently assessed skills across a PGCE, appearing in placement journals, formal written assignments, and mentor discussions alike. Trainees are frequently told to “reflect” on a lesson without being given a structured method for doing so, which often produces writing that describes what happened rather than genuinely analyzing it. Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle, developed by Graham Gibbs in 1988, gives that process an explicit structure — and understanding each stage precisely is what separates strong reflective writing from a simple lesson recap.
Why Description Alone Isn’t Reflection
The most common weakness in early trainee reflective writing is staying entirely at the descriptive level: “I taught a lesson on persuasive writing. The starter went well and most pupils engaged with the main task. At the end, I gave out an exit ticket.” This is accurate, but it isn’t reflection — it doesn’t examine why things happened, what they reveal about teaching practice, or what should change as a result.
Gibbs’ Cycle forces this deeper analysis by moving through six distinct stages, each asking a different kind of question.
The Six Stages of Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle
1. Description
Question: What happened?
This stage is purely factual — a concise account of the situation, without judgment or interpretation yet. Keep it brief; this is the only stage where description alone is appropriate.
Worked example: “During the independent practice phase of a Year 9 persuasive writing lesson, roughly a third of the class struggled to move beyond identifying persuasive techniques to explaining their effect, despite this being explicitly modeled during the ‘we do’ phase.”
2. Feelings
Question: What were you thinking and feeling, at the time and afterward?
This stage is often the one trainees are most tempted to skip, but genuine reflective models treat emotional response as legitimate data — it often signals where deeper analysis is needed.
Worked example: “In the moment, I felt frustrated, because I’d deliberately modeled the explanation step and assumed pupils had grasped it during the guided practice. Afterward, reflecting on it, I felt uncertain whether the issue was genuinely a lack of understanding, or whether my guided practice hadn’t actually checked understanding closely enough before releasing pupils to independent work.”
3. Evaluation
Question: What was good and bad about the experience?
This stage moves toward judgment, but still stays relatively balanced and specific — listing concrete positives and negatives rather than a vague overall impression.
Worked example: “Positively, the modeling stage itself was clear, and pupils could accurately identify techniques in the guided practice extract. Less positively, my guided practice questioning was largely directed at confident volunteers, meaning I didn’t get reliable evidence of whether quieter or lower-attaining pupils had actually grasped the explanation step before independent work began.”
4. Analysis
Question: Why did this happen? What sense can you make of the situation?
This is the most substantive stage, and typically where connections to educational theory or research are expected in PGCE academic assignments — not as decoration, but as an explanatory framework for what occurred.
Worked example: “This gap likely reflects an assessment-for-learning failure rather than a modeling failure. Relying on volunteered answers during guided practice created an illusion of whole-class understanding, when in reality I was only sampling the most confident pupils — a pattern sometimes described as the ‘illusion of learning’ in classroom assessment literature. A more targeted questioning strategy, deliberately including pupils I had reason to believe were less secure, would have surfaced the gap before independent work began, allowing me to address it while support was still available.”
5. Conclusion
Question: What else could you have done? What have you learned?
This stage synthesizes the analysis into a clear takeaway, distinguishing between what was learned generally and what would be done differently in this specific type of situation.
Worked example: “I’ve learned that checking understanding through volunteered responses alone is unreliable, particularly for a multi-step skill like technique identification followed by explanation. Cold-calling specific pupils, or using a quick written check (e.g., mini-whiteboards) before transitioning to independent work, would give a more accurate picture of whole-class readiness.”
6. Action Plan
Question: If this situation arose again, what would you do differently, specifically?
This final stage must be concrete and actionable — vague intentions (“be more careful about checking understanding”) are weaker than specific, plannable strategies.
Worked example: “In my next lesson involving a multi-step skill, I will build in a specific mini-whiteboard check immediately after guided practice and before releasing pupils to independent work, checking a sample of pupils I have specifically identified as at risk of misunderstanding, rather than relying on volunteered responses alone.”
Why the Cycle Is Circular, Not Linear
Gibbs deliberately designed this as a cycle, not a one-off checklist — the action plan from one reflection becomes input for future description-stage observations, creating an ongoing, iterative process of practice refinement rather than a single closed analysis. In PGCE portfolios and reflective journals, this often shows up explicitly: a later reflection might open by referencing whether a previous action plan was actually implemented and what resulted.
A Common Structural Mistake: Compressing Stages Together
A frequent error in trainee reflective writing is blending description and evaluation together from the start (“The lesson went badly because pupils struggled with explanation”), skipping the neutral factual description and jumping straight to judgment. This tends to produce shallower analysis, because it forecloses on a conclusion before the evidence has been laid out clearly. Working through each stage in order, even briefly, tends to produce more rigorous and more specific conclusions than jumping straight to judgment.
Applying Gibbs’ Cycle to a Positive Experience
Reflective practice isn’t only for things that went wrong — reflecting rigorously on successes is equally valuable, since it clarifies why something worked, which is necessary for reliably repeating it.
Brief worked example (positive lesson element):
- Description: A scaffolded sentence-starter resource significantly improved the quality of lower-attaining pupils’ written explanations during independent practice
- Feelings: Relief and validation that the differentiation strategy planned in advance had worked as intended
- Evaluation: The scaffold successfully reduced cognitive load on sentence construction, allowing pupils to focus attention on the actual content of their explanation
- Analysis: This aligns with cognitive load theory — removing one demand (sentence structure) freed working memory capacity for the higher-order demand (explaining effect), rather than pupils needing to manage both simultaneously
- Conclusion: Scaffolds targeting the mechanical demands of a task (not just content demands) can be a particularly effective differentiation strategy for multi-step writing tasks
- Action plan: Deliberately identify which specific sub-skill (content vs mechanics) is the actual barrier before designing a differentiation strategy for future lessons, rather than defaulting to a generic “extra support” resource
Common Student Mistakes
- Staying descriptive throughout — recounting what happened without genuine analysis of why, which is the single most common weakness in trainee reflective writing
- Skipping the feelings stage as irrelevant — emotional response is treated as legitimate data in most reflective models, not an unprofessional aside to omit
- Vague action plans — “I will try to check understanding more” is far weaker than a specific, describable strategy that could actually be implemented and later evaluated
- Analyzing without connecting to theory or evidence — PGCE academic assignments typically expect the analysis stage to draw on relevant pedagogical research or theory, not just personal intuition alone
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Gibbs’ Cycle the only reflective model used in PGCE courses? No — other models exist (such as Schön’s reflective practitioner framework, distinguishing reflection-in-action from reflection-on-action, or Kolb’s experiential learning cycle), but Gibbs’ Cycle remains one of the most widely used in UK teacher training specifically because its six explicit stages provide clear structural guidance for less experienced reflective writers.
How long should a Gibbs’ Cycle reflection be for a PGCE assignment? This varies by provider and assignment brief, but the analysis and conclusion stages typically warrant the most depth, since they carry the actual evaluative and theoretical weight the assessment is looking for — the description stage should stay comparatively brief.
Can Gibbs’ Cycle be used to reflect on something other than a single lesson? Yes — it can be applied to any bounded professional experience: a parents’ evening interaction, a behavior management incident, a whole unit of work, or a specific piece of pupil feedback, not exclusively individual lessons.
What’s the difference between reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action? Reflection-in-action (a concept from Schön) refers to adjusting your teaching in the moment, during the lesson itself. Reflection-on-action refers to the after-the-fact analysis Gibbs’ Cycle structures — both are considered important professional skills, but they operate on different timescales.
