How Can the Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle Help You Write an Essay?

Writing essays and papers is often a chore. Writing does not come naturally to many students, some simply lack time to perfect the content and many students need the skill to pass a qualification but will not need this skill for their future profession. However, essays are a crucial part of a university or college education, and every student has to write them at some point.

Learning through past experiences and analysis is one thing, while writing about it may prove to be tougher than it seems. Should you have great ideas for your paper or essay but no desire to compile them into a text, then order essay on a writing service where a professional will turn these ideas into a solid text.

What Is the Role of Reflection in Essay Writing?

Reflection deepens learning. Reflecting on something helps understand what a person learned, why they learned it, and how each step of learning took place. Doing so does not mean reliving every second of past experiences. Reflection is about the ability to link one step to a bigger picture. Each stage of learning is integrated, assimilated, and personalized through reflection. That is why this method is a great tool for essay writing.

Essentially, reflecting on the experience is a cognitive activity, but reflection is also emotional and physical and is linked to our values ​​and social identity. Considering problems from different points of view challenges the assumptions and established patterns of behavior.

What Is the Gibbs’ Cycle?

In 1988, Professor Graham Gibbs published a learning model called Reflective Cycle in the book titled Learning by Doing. The popularity of this cycle has been growing ever since.

The model comprises six steps:

1. Description. What has happened?
2. Feeling. What did you or someone feel?
3. Evaluation. What positive and negative aspects did this experience give you?
4. Analysis. What was the essence of the experience? Can you trace the logical connection between the experience and other situations/people/events?
5. Conclusion. What can one learn from this experience?
6. Action. What can one do differently next time?

Going through all the six steps may help better understand the situation, avoid similar mistakes in the future, gather valuable analytical data, etc.

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How Does It Work?

Students can use the Gibbs’ Cycle to write the following texts:

• Literary analysis papers.
• Reflections on historical events. Here, one can omit the feelings part or narrate from the viewpoint of a historical character.
• Expository, argumentative, and definition essays.
• Critical essays (we highlight this type of writing as it benefits most from using Gibbs’ Cycle).

The list can go on, but you got the gist. But how the Cycle intended for socio-psychological analysis is used for essay writing?

Take, for instance, a descriptive essay describing someone’s summer internship. It would comprise the following information following the Cycle:

1. Basic information about the student’s degree and desired profession and then – information about the company (its name, location, and focus area).
2. The second abstract would dwell on the feelings the writer experienced during the summer internship. For instance: “Most of the time I felt excited, as I earned enough to buy my first secondhand car. Yet, it was difficult to adjust to the fact that summer holiday was no longer a holiday. At some point, I have been down in the dumps because I had little time for my hobby.”
3. At the third stage, one may talk about the reasons that prompted them to seek an internship and choose this particular one. Here one may talk about positive emotional experiences they had or dwell on what made them feel bad: “During my second month of being a secretary, I revealed that this job asks for better people skills which I did have at that time. This fact made my work at the company the most challenging thing that ever happened to me.”
4. The analysis stage may be difficult for some people as the connections are sometimes unclear. In our case, one may write about the skills they got during summer camp several years ago and how they helped them during the internship. They also can notice that the job description and the actual work had few aspects in common.
5. Conclusions stem from the analysis stage. For example, a student can conclude that this job is not what they want in their life.
6. So, here, one may talk about the necessity to ask more questions during job interviews to avoid misunderstanding the scope of work and highlight the importance of their previous experience at the summer camp.

Conclusion

Thinking about what happened and constantly analyzing the past is an in-build feature of human consciousness. Yet, the difference between casual recall and reflective practice is that the latter requires a conscious effort to reflect on events and develop understanding. The reflective practice benefits one not just in writing reflective essays but also in other areas of life.

Reflective practice helps give better project presentations, write better essays, and term papers. It helps reveal new connections between facts that remain unnoticed at the first glance.

People often get misled by the idea that learning is a subtle activity that consists of reading books, attending courses, hands-on training, or working with a coach. Yet, all these things count for nothing without their analysis and drawing conclusions.