A Reflective Account of a Teaching and Learning Session Using Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle

Introduction

Reflective practice sits at the heart of effective teaching. The capacity to look back on a session, interrogate what happened, and translate that scrutiny into improved practice is widely regarded as a defining feature of the skilled educator rather than an optional extra (Schon, 1983). Schon’s distinction between reflection-in-action, the rapid, tacit adjustments a practitioner makes while teaching, and reflection-on-action, the more considered analysis undertaken afterwards, is especially useful here, because it frames reflection not as a single event but as a continuous professional disposition. For trainee and early-career teachers in particular, structured reflection offers a means of converting the often overwhelming immediacy of the classroom into ordered, actionable learning. This account uses Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle (Gibbs, 1988) to examine a single teaching and learning session. The model was selected because its six stages, description, feelings, evaluation, analysis, conclusion and action plan, move deliberately from the descriptive to the analytical and finally to the future-oriented, discouraging the superficial “it went fine” judgement that can characterise less disciplined reflection. Where Schon offers a broad philosophy of professional thinking, Gibbs supplies the procedural scaffolding that makes that philosophy usable for a novice, which is why the two are treated as complementary throughout this piece.

The session discussed below is hypothetical, constructed for the purposes of this coursework to illustrate how the cycle can be applied. It does not describe a real class, learners, or institution, and no genuine grades or individuals are referenced. Even so, the scenario has been designed to be realistic and to raise the kinds of pedagogical tensions that practitioners routinely encounter, so that the reflection remains meaningful. Throughout, the discussion is linked to established educational theory, most notably the work of Vygotsky (1978) on the social nature of learning, Black and Wiliam (1998) on formative assessment, and Petty (2009) on evidence-informed classroom method. The aim is to demonstrate not only that reflection has taken place, but that it has been conducted with sufficient theoretical rigour to yield conclusions that could genuinely alter future practice.

The Teaching and Learning Session: Context

The hypothetical session was a fifty-minute lesson delivered to a mixed-ability group of approximately twenty-four learners at Key Stage 4 level, forming part of a scheme of work on persuasive writing in an English course. The intended learning outcome was that, by the end of the session, learners would be able to identify three rhetorical devices, ethos, pathos and logos, and use at least two of them in a short piece of their own writing. The lesson followed a fairly conventional structure: a starter activity to activate prior knowledge, a period of teacher exposition supported by modelled examples, a paired analysis task, an independent writing task, and a plenary to consolidate learning. As the teacher, I planned the session, prepared the resources, and delivered it alone, with a teaching assistant present to support two learners identified on the group’s provision map, one with a diagnosis affecting working memory and one for whom English is an additional language. The group’s prior attainment data indicated a wide spread, from learners working securely above age-related expectations to a cluster of four or five working below, which had obvious implications for how the material needed to be differentiated. The reflection that follows treats this single session as the unit of analysis, while acknowledging that it forms one link in a longer instructional sequence.

Description

The lesson began on schedule with a starter task in which learners were asked to rank three short advertisements according to how persuasive they found them, and to note one reason for their top choice. This generated a reasonable level of talk, and most pairs were able to offer a justification when invited to share. I then moved to a period of direct instruction, introducing the three rhetorical appeals with a visual glossary and two worked examples projected on the board. I modelled the analysis of the first example aloud, thinking through why a particular sentence appealed to emotion, before asking learners to attempt the second example in pairs.

At this point the pacing began to slip. The paired analysis took noticeably longer than the ten minutes I had allocated, partly because several pairs were unsure what counted as pathos as opposed to ethos, and partly because the distinction between an emotional appeal and a credibility appeal is genuinely subtle in short advertising copy, where the two frequently overlap. I circulated and offered clarification, repeating similar explanations to successive pairs, but I was conscious of the clock and eventually brought the task to a close before all pairs had finished. The independent writing task that followed was therefore compressed into roughly eight minutes rather than the fifteen I had planned. During this phase the teaching assistant worked closely with the two supported learners, but the compressed timing meant I was unable to check in with the wider group of lower-attaining learners as I had intended. In the plenary, I asked a small number of learners to read a sentence they had written and to name the device they had used. Several could do so confidently; others had not progressed far enough to have a sentence ready, and one or two became visibly reluctant to volunteer. The lesson ended a couple of minutes late as I hurried the final instructions for the homework task, which meant the consolidation I had planned for the plenary was truncated.

Feelings

Before the lesson I felt reasonably confident, having prepared the resources carefully and rehearsed the modelled examples. During the early phase this confidence held; the starter had gone well and I sensed that the class was engaged. As the paired task overran, however, my confidence gave way to a growing anxiety about time. I became aware of a tension between wanting to let learners work through their genuine confusion and needing to cover the planned content. This is a recognisable dilemma in the literature: the pull between coverage and depth is one of the more persistent pressures on teacher decision-making, and in the moment I experienced it not as an abstract debate but as a tightening sense of pressure. My internal response was to prioritise the timetable, and I recall a distinct sense of frustration, directed largely at myself, when I realised the independent task would have to be curtailed.

By the plenary I felt somewhat deflated. Seeing that a proportion of the class had not produced a written sentence undermined my sense that the learning outcome had been met, even though other learners had clearly grasped the concepts. There was also a quieter, more uncomfortable feeling that I had, in the interests of getting through the material, effectively left some learners behind, and that this ran counter to the inclusive values I hold as a teacher. That discomfort was sharpest in relation to the lower-attaining cluster, precisely the learners for whom careful pacing and scaffolding matter most, and I was conscious that my decision to press on had a differential impact rather than an even one. After the lesson I felt a mixture of disappointment and curiosity: disappointment at the uneven finish, but also a genuine interest in understanding why the paired task had absorbed so much more time than anticipated. Acknowledging these feelings honestly matters, because, as Boud, Keogh and Walker (1985) argue, attending to the emotional dimension of an experience is not self-indulgence but a necessary route into deeper learning; unexamined negative feelings can otherwise distort judgement or discourage future risk-taking. Naming the frustration also helped me to separate it from the analytical work that followed, so that the evaluation could rest on evidence rather than on a lingering sense of having underperformed.

Evaluation

Weighing the session as a whole, there were clear strengths alongside the evident weakness of poor time management. The starter activity was a definite success: it was accessible, it activated prior knowledge, and it created a low-stakes entry point that drew in a wide range of learners, including several who are usually more hesitant to contribute. Judged against Petty’s (2009) criteria for an effective lesson opening, it did the two things such an opening should do, it created interest and it surfaced what learners already knew, so that the new material had something to attach to. The modelling of analysis was also effective, in that several learners in the plenary were able to reproduce the reasoning I had demonstrated, suggesting that the “thinking aloud” strategy had communicated the underlying process and not merely the answer.

The principal weakness was the collapse of the lesson’s timing, which in turn meant the independent writing task, arguably the point at which the intended outcome was to be evidenced, was too rushed for some learners to succeed. It would be too simple, though, to file this purely under “ran out of time”. A more searching evaluation suggests the overrun was a symptom rather than the cause. The paired task overran because a significant number of learners lacked the secure conceptual grounding to complete it at the pace I had assumed. In that sense the difficulty was diagnostic: it revealed that my exposition, though clear to me, had not yet produced secure understanding in a portion of the class. There is a further dimension to the evaluation that concerns differentiation. Although the lesson was delivered to a mixed-ability group, the paired task made broadly the same cognitive demand of every pair, with the same materials and the same time allowance; it was differentiated, at best, only by outcome. For the higher-attaining learners this was adequate, but for the lower-attaining cluster the task offered too little structured support, and the evaluation must acknowledge that the uneven finish was in part a predictable result of insufficient differentiation rather than simply of misjudged timing. Evaluated positively, the session generated valuable formative information; evaluated critically, I neither planned for that information nor responded to it flexibly enough in the moment.

Analysis

Making sense of these events requires moving beyond the description to the theory that explains them. The most illuminating lens is Vygotsky’s (1978) concept of the zone of proximal development, the distance between what a learner can achieve independently and what they can achieve with appropriate support from a more knowledgeable other. The paired analysis task was, in effect, an attempt to have learners operate within this zone, using peer collaboration as the scaffold. The overrun suggests that for many learners the task sat beyond the zone rather than within it: without sufficient guided practice, the gap between the modelled example and independent application was too wide to be bridged by peer talk alone. This is a subtle but important point about the ZPD, that peer collaboration only functions as a scaffold when at least one partner has a sufficiently secure grasp to support the other; where both members of a pair are equally uncertain, the pairing offers reassurance but little cognitive traction. Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976), who coined the term scaffolding, emphasise that support must be calibrated to the learner and then gradually withdrawn as competence grows. My lesson moved from heavy support (teacher modelling) to light support (unstructured pair work) too abruptly, omitting an intermediate stage of guided practice in which I might have worked through a further example with the whole class before releasing responsibility. The scaffolding was not so much badly built as removed too soon.

This maps closely onto the gradual release of responsibility model, often summarised as “I do, we do, you do” (Fisher and Frey, 2013). My lesson contained a strong “I do” phase and a “you do” phase, but the crucial “we do” phase was underdeveloped. The significance of that missing phase is that it is precisely where the teacher can observe emerging understanding and intervene while there is still time to shape it; by collapsing the middle stage I removed my own best opportunity to detect and correct misconceptions before they hardened. This is also where the analysis connects most directly to formative assessment. Black and Wiliam (1998), in their influential synthesis of the research, argue that the regular elicitation of evidence about learning, and the use of that evidence to adapt teaching, is among the most powerful levers available to raise attainment, and that it benefits lower-attaining learners disproportionately. Judged against this, my lesson contained almost no formative checkpoint between the exposition and the independent task. Had I embedded a quick check of understanding, a targeted question or a mini-whiteboard response, immediately after the modelling, I would have gathered the diagnostic information earlier, when there was still time to act on it, rather than discovering the gap only as the paired task stalled. Petty (2009) makes a compatible point in arguing that effective teaching depends on checking understanding continually and adjusting accordingly, rather than delivering content and hoping it has landed; his notion of “medal and mission” feedback, telling learners both what they have achieved and what to do next, presupposes exactly the kind of mid-lesson evidence I failed to collect.

The absence of differentiation deserves separate analytical attention, because it is not the same problem as the missing “we do” phase, even though the two interacted. A genuinely differentiated lesson would have anticipated the spread of prior attainment and built in graduated support: for example, a partially completed analysis frame for the lower-attaining cluster, a fully open task for the most secure, and targeted questioning routed to particular learners. Tomlinson (2014) frames differentiation as the proactive adjustment of content, process or product in response to learners’ readiness, rather than a reactive rescue attempted once a task is already failing. My in-the-moment circulation and re-explanation was reactive differentiation of the least efficient kind, the same explanation delivered repeatedly to pair after pair, which was both time-consuming and a likely contributor to the overrun. Planned differentiation would have front-loaded that support into the task design and freed me to monitor rather than firefight.

There is also a classroom-management dimension that is easy to overlook but genuinely relevant. As the pacing slipped and some pairs finished while others floundered, the conditions for low-level disruption began to emerge, the familiar pattern in which learners who have completed a task, or who have given up on it, drift off task. Rogers (2015) argues that much classroom behaviour is a function of lesson structure and pace rather than of individual defiance, and that clear routines and well-judged pacing pre-empt the majority of disruption before it starts. Read through this lens, the timing problem was not only an instructional issue but a behavioural risk: a better-differentiated task with an extension ready for early finishers would have protected the learning climate as well as the learning. Finally, a metacognitive strand runs through the whole episode. The confident learners in the plenary were, in effect, demonstrating that they could not only use the devices but articulate why they worked, a form of self-regulated awareness that the wider literature associates with durable learning. Prompting learners to verbalise their reasoning appears, on the evidence of this session, to have helped consolidate their grasp of the concepts, whereas those who worked in silence had less opportunity to test and refine their thinking. Kolb’s (1984) experiential learning theory offers a final, integrating perspective: learning proceeds through a cycle of concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualisation and active experimentation, and my learners were pushed towards active experimentation (writing their own persuasive sentences) before they had adequately completed the reflective and conceptual stages. The analysis therefore converges, from several theoretical directions, on a single underlying issue: an imbalance in the structure and targeting of support, rather than a simple failure of clock-watching.

Conclusion

Drawing these threads together, the central lesson of this reflection is that time management in the classroom is frequently a downstream consequence of instructional design rather than an independent skill to be improved in isolation. The session did not overrun because I was careless with the clock; it overran because the sequence of activities asked learners to work independently before they were ready, because no formative checkpoint alerted me to the shortfall in time to respond, and because the task made a uniform demand of a decidedly non-uniform group. Where the lesson succeeded, through an accessible starter and clear modelling, it did so because those elements were well matched to what learners could do. Where it faltered, it did so because the scaffolding was withdrawn too quickly and too evenly, leaving a portion of the class, disproportionately the lower-attaining learners, outside their zone of proximal development.

I have also concluded that the affective and analytical dimensions of reflection are connected. My in-the-moment frustration nudged me towards a rigid decision, pressing on with the plan, precisely when a more responsive, formative approach was called for. In Schon’s (1983) terms, my reflection-in-action failed me at the critical moment, and it is only through reflection-on-action, disciplined by Gibbs’ structure, that I have been able to see why. Recognising that pattern is itself a professional gain. Had I not used a structured model such as Gibbs’ cycle, I might have concluded only that I “needed to watch the time”, a superficial and largely unhelpful resolution. The disciplined progression through description, feelings, evaluation and analysis has instead surfaced a more precise and more useful understanding of what actually needs to change, and, crucially, why each change follows from a specific weakness rather than from a vague intention to do better.

Action Plan

Should a comparable situation arise, I would make several concrete changes, each tied directly to the analysis above rather than added as a generic resolution. First, I would restructure the lesson to include an explicit “we do” phase: after modelling the analysis of the first example, I would work through a second example collaboratively with the whole class, inviting contributions and correcting misconceptions in real time, before releasing learners into paired work. In practical terms this means re-timing the lesson so that the guided phase is protected, even at the cost of trimming the exposition, and preparing two or three deliberately chosen examples that expose the pathos-versus-ethos ambiguity that caused most difficulty. This directly addresses the abrupt and premature withdrawal of support identified through Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976) and Fisher and Frey (2013).

Second, I would build in a brief, formative check of understanding immediately after the exposition, for example a single mini-whiteboard task requiring each learner to label a sentence with the correct rhetorical device, so that every learner’s response is visible at a glance. Following Black and Wiliam (1998) and Petty (2009), this all-class response technique would give me diagnostic information early enough to adapt the lesson, whether by reteaching a specific device, by regrouping learners, or by adjusting the demands of the subsequent task. The essential principle is that the assessment must feed a decision I make within the same lesson; evidence gathered too late to act upon is of little formative value.

Third, I would plan differentiated support into the task rather than improvising it. Concretely, I would prepare a scaffolded analysis frame with sentence starters and a short definition bank for learners who need it, an open version of the same task for those who are secure, and a challenge extension, for instance identifying a device that combines two appeals, for pairs who finish quickly. Following Tomlinson (2014), this proactive differentiation would target support where the prior-attainment data indicates it is needed, and, by giving early finishers a genuine next step, it would also close down the drift that Rogers (2015) identifies as a common trigger for low-level disruption. I would additionally brief the teaching assistant in advance on which learners to prioritise and what specific misconceptions to watch for, so that the in-class support is directed rather than opportunistic.

Fourth, I would plan the lesson with flexible timing built in, designating the paired analysis as an activity that can expand or contract and marking a clear decision point in my plan at which I will judge, on the basis of the formative check, whether to extend the guided phase or move on. Anticipating that decision in advance, rather than improvising it under pressure, is intended to prevent the frustration-driven rigidity I identified in the feelings and conclusion stages.

Finally, at the level of my own development, I intend to continue using a structured reflective model after teaching, and to seek feedback from a colleague or mentor observing the “we do” phase and the formative checkpoint specifically, since peer observation offers a perspective on my practice, particularly on how evenly I distribute my attention across the ability range, that self-reflection alone cannot supply. I will review the impact of these changes after the next comparable session, gathering simple evidence such as the proportion of learners producing a completed sentence, thereby closing Gibbs’ cycle by feeding this action plan back into a fresh round of experience and reflection. In this way the reflection becomes not a retrospective exercise but a genuine engine of ongoing professional improvement.

References

Black, P. and Wiliam, D. (1998) ‘Assessment and classroom learning’, Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice, 5(1), pp. 7-74.

Boud, D., Keogh, R. and Walker, D. (1985) Reflection: Turning Experience into Learning. London: Kogan Page.

Fisher, D. and Frey, N. (2013) Better Learning Through Structured Teaching: A Framework for the Gradual Release of Responsibility. 2nd edn. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Gibbs, G. (1988) Learning by Doing: A Guide to Teaching and Learning Methods. Oxford: Further Education Unit, Oxford Polytechnic.

Kolb, D.A. (1984) Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Petty, G. (2009) Teaching Today: A Practical Guide. 4th edn. Cheltenham: Nelson Thornes.

Rogers, B. (2015) Classroom Behaviour: A Practical Guide to Effective Teaching, Behaviour Management and Colleague Support. 4th edn. London: SAGE.

Schon, D.A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books.

Tomlinson, C.A. (2014) The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners. 2nd edn. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wood, D., Bruner, J.S. and Ross, G. (1976) ‘The role of tutoring in problem solving’, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 17(2), pp. 89-100.