Experience is a good thing, but experience does not mean anything if you do not learn anything from that experience. And in order to learn something from your experience, you have to reflect on what you did, how you did it, and how it could be improved.

Professor Graham Gibbs introduced the step by step process on how to reflect on your work so that you can understand the work better and do better in similar future projects.

Patreon Link: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=36571443

The steps are -

Description: Just describe what happened. No need to analyse anything here. Just simply write down what happened, how did you work, how was the experience, and how did the end result turn out to be. That is it. Just the description of whatever you did.

Feelings: No need to analyse too much. Here, you should write down how you felt when you made certain decisions. No judgement. The feelings. How did you feel while performing whatever task you were performing. And how did you feel after completing this task. In a group setting, how did everyone else feel. Its not easy to find out how everyone felt while working on some project, but, you need to ask them how they felt. It is a necessary step for your future projects. You also need to find out how you feel while going through the reflective cycle.

Evaluation: There will be judgement. In this step, you need to point out what went well for you and what did not go as well for you. Don’t put all negative things, there can be things you did well that can be repeated in the future. were there any negative situations that you were able to solve before finishing the project. Or did something negative hindered the best outcome you were trying to get.

Analysis: This is where a lot of work is needed. You need to find out the why. All of the what questions have been answered. Now, why. What is the reason things did not go your way. There can be a lot of reasons for any single flaw in a project, and you need to carefully find out why something went wrong. In this step, you also need to find out previous references of similar issues. Whatever the issue you are facing, it is very much likely that someone else has faced the same issue or a similar issue before. You can find out any academic references that talks about the problems you are facing and how to improve the situation.

Conclusion: List down what you learned from the entire process. How could you have improved upon the situations you have faced. What actions you could have taken to get better results. And what are the skills you are lacking that you can acquire, that could have helped everyone in that situation.

Action plan: after the conclusion section, you know about the things that you can do differently if you face the same problems again. So, next time, when you start another similar project, you will already have those pitfalls in mind when creating your action plan. And, the skills you can probably develop, should be developed.

A detailed example is also discussed in the video.

Timestamps:

Introduction - 0:00
Reflective Cycle - 0:18
Description - 1:00
Feelings - 1:26
Evaluation - 2:26
Analysis - 3:00
Conclusion - 3:59
Action Plan - 4:25
Example Scenario - 5:01
Bonus - 9:17
Outro - 9:55