UK guide
Reflective practice with Gibbs and Kolb
Reflective assignments are a staple of UK nursing, teaching, social work and professional qualifications — and the most common way to lose marks is to describe instead of analyse. OwnVoice structures your reflection around the cycle your module expects, using your real experience as evidence.
Gibbs' Reflective Cycle (1988)
| Description | What happened? Keep it factual and brief — the marks live later in the cycle. |
|---|---|
| Feelings | What were you thinking and feeling? Honesty here sets up real evaluation. |
| Evaluation | What went well and what did not? Balance the positives and negatives. |
| Analysis | Why did things go that way? Connect your experience to theory and literature. |
| Conclusion | What else could you have done? What have you learned? |
| Action plan | What will you do differently next time? Make it specific and measurable. |
Kolb's Experiential Learning Cycle (1984)
| Concrete experience | Describe the doing: the situation, task or encounter you are reflecting on. |
|---|---|
| Reflective observation | Step back and review: what did you notice, and from whose perspective? |
| Abstract conceptualisation | Link the experience to theory: models, frameworks and module readings. |
| Active experimentation | Plan how you will apply what you learned, and how you will test it. |
Stage-by-stage drafting
Pick Gibbs or Kolb for any Outcome or Reflection and write stage by stage, with guiding questions you can edit, reorder by drag-and-drop and save as reusable templates.
Your experience, treated as evidence
UK programmes in nursing (NMC), teaching, social work (Social Work England), business and health all credit structured reflection on your own practice. The Experience Bank keeps entries versioned and linked to the coursework they support.
Theory links with real citations
Each stage nudges you to connect your experience to module readings, and generates Harvard, APA 7 or MLA 9 references — including the standard citation for Gibbs (1988) or Kolb (1984).
Critical reflection, not diary entries
Markers want analysis, not narrative. Prompts push you from 'what happened' towards evaluation, theory links and a concrete action plan — the stages where UK rubrics award the most marks.
Turn an experience into a structured reflection
Add your experience to the Experience Bank, choose Gibbs or Kolb, and draft stage by stage with guiding questions, autosave, version history and DOCX/PDF export.