Running Head: APPLYING REFLECTIVE PRACTICE: 1

Applying Reflective Practice

HCIN-544-02-SU17 - Advanced Health Care Information Management

Amrit Virdee

University of San Diego

August 28th 2017

APPLYING REFLECTIVE PRACTICE: 2

The Gibbs reflective cycle was developed by Graham Gibbs in 1998 and published in his

book ‘Learning by Doing’, it is a structured analysis of a situation that is broken down into six

stages. The Gibbs model acknowledges that personal feelings influence situations and that

analyzing situations using reactions and feelings helps in the learning of what has happened and

how this learning can be applied to future situations. Bulman (2008) describes reflection as

‘reviewing experience from practice so that it may be described, analyzed, evaluated and

consequently used to inform and change future practice’. Hence reflective practice is closely

linked to the concept of learning from experience. The Gibbs model is based on six stages: the

descriptive stage encompasses what actually happened, the feeling stage talks about what were

your feelings and what you were thinking about during the experience, the evaluation stage

which goes through what worked and what didn’t, the analysis stage which involves a recap of

all that has happened, the conclusion stage which goes through what else could have been done

and finally the action plan.

The best way to coach a new employee in using reflective practice is to first show them

how to go through the different stages of the reflective cycle and then have them go through the

process in order to test their understanding. For example, I would get them to first describe an

experience using open ended questions such as ‘In your own words tell me about the

experience?’, ‘Where did it happen?’, ‘Who else was there?’. Next I would encourage them to

talk about how they felt about the experience and what their thoughts were. ‘How did you feel

about the experience?’, ‘What was going through your mind?’ The next step in the cycle would

involve using the ‘5-why’ technique in order to objectively get to what worked and what didn’t.

The ‘5-why’ technique involves asking a further ‘why’ question in order to get a deeper
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understanding of a situation. This is also an effective way in getting an individual to think

deeper about a situation. The next phase is the analysis phase where all the information is

gathered and recapped. The conclusion phase involves talking about what else could have been

done and the final action plan phase involves talking about if the matter rose again how could

they handle things differently.

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References

Bulman C, Schutz S (2008) Reflective Practice in Nursing. Chichester: Blackwell.

Gibbs' Reflective Cycle. (n.d.). Retrieved August 28, 2017, from
https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/reflective-cycle.htm
Amulya, J. (2011, May). What is Reflective Practice? Retrieved August 24, 2017, from
https://ole.sandiego.edu/bbcswebdav/courses/HCIN-544-MASTER /M7/M7
_What_Is_RP.pdf