How to Write a Reflective Essay
A reflective essay moves between what happened, what it meant, and what you would do differently. Here is the structure most courses actually mark against.
What is a reflective essay?
A reflective essay examines an experience in order to learn something transferable from it. It is the standard form in nursing, education, social work and business courses, and it is usually marked against an explicit reflective model rather than on style.
The distinction from a personal essay matters for marks. A personal essay is exploratory and can end unresolved; a reflective essay is generally expected to arrive at something — a changed understanding, an action plan, a named piece of theory that reframes what happened.
Check whether your course specifies a model. Gibbs' Reflective Cycle (description, feelings, evaluation, analysis, conclusion, action plan) is the most commonly mandated, and if your rubric names it, following its stages explicitly is the single easiest way to secure marks. Kolb and Schön appear too.
Reflective essay structure (Gibbs’ cycle)
Where no model is specified, this sequence is the safe default — it is Gibbs, and most other models are a rearrangement of the same moves.
| Part | Length | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Description | ~15% | What happened, factually and briefly. The commonest error is spending half the essay here. |
| Feelings | ~10% | What you thought and felt at the time, stated plainly. Honesty outperforms professionalism here. |
| Evaluation | ~15% | What went well and what did not. Both — an evaluation with no negative is not one. |
| Analysis | ~30% | Why it happened. This is where theory and literature enter, and it is the section that carries the marks. |
| Conclusion | ~15% | What you now understand that you did not before. Specific, not "I learned a lot". |
| Action plan | ~15% | What you would do differently, concretely enough to actually do it. |
How to start a reflective essay
Open with the incident, briefly and specifically — one or two sentences establishing what happened and why it stuck with you. Do not open with a definition of reflection or a paragraph about the importance of reflective practice; markers see hundreds of those.
Name the model you are using early if your course expects one. A single sentence — "This reflection follows Gibbs' Reflective Cycle" — tells the marker which rubric to read you against, and that is worth doing explicitly.
First person is not only allowed here, it is required. "I" is the subject of a reflective essay, and writing it impersonally ("it was observed that the patient…") is a common way of avoiding the reflection the assignment asks for.
Reflective essay outline
A 1,500-word reflection on a clinical placement incident, following Gibbs.
Working focus: I escalated a patient concern late because I was waiting for certainty, and the delay was a communication failure rather than a clinical one.
Description
The observation, the two hours before I raised it, who I eventually told.
Evidence: Factual and anonymised. Brief.
Feelings
Reluctance to appear incompetent; the specific fear of being wrong in front of the senior nurse.
Evidence: Stated plainly rather than professionally.
Evaluation
The clinical observation was correct. The delay was not, and nothing about the ward prevented me raising it sooner.
Evidence: Both sides, honestly weighted.
Analysis
Hierarchy and escalation: why juniors delay, and what the literature on speaking up in clinical teams says about it.
Evidence: Literature on hierarchy and escalation behaviour in clinical teams.
Conclusion
Waiting for certainty is itself a decision with a risk profile, and I had been treating it as the absence of one.
Action plan
Escalate observations at the threshold of concern, not the threshold of certainty; use SBAR to make an uncertain report sayable.
Evidence: Concrete enough to follow next shift.
Reflective essay example
The analysis section — the part that carries the marks, and the part most often skipped in favour of more description.
What I read as personal hesitancy is better understood as a predictable feature of steep hierarchies. The literature on speaking up in clinical teams consistently finds that juniors delay escalation not because they misread the clinical picture but because the social cost of being wrong is immediate and the cost of delay is diffuse [NEEDS SOURCE: research on hierarchy and escalation behaviour in clinical teams]. That reframing matters for my practice, because it moves the problem from character to process: if the reluctance is structural, then the remedy is a structure. A tool such as SBAR works precisely because it provides a sanctioned way to report something you are not yet certain about, which is the exact situation in which I said nothing.
Mistakes that cost the most marks
Too much description
The single most common failure. Description is the cheapest section and the least rewarded. If half your word count is what happened, you have written a report.
No theory in the analysis
In most marking rubrics the analysis section is where the literature must appear. A reflection that stays entirely inside your own head cannot reach the higher bands.
An action plan nobody could act on
"I will communicate better in future" is not a plan. "I will escalate at the threshold of concern rather than certainty, using SBAR" is.
Reflecting only on successes
An incident that went well gives you nothing to analyse. Choose the one that still bothers you.
Frequently asked questions
Can I write a reflective essay in the first person?
Yes — and you generally must. "I" is the subject of the assignment. Writing it impersonally is a common way of avoiding the reflection being asked for, and markers read it that way.
What is Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle?
A six-stage model — description, feelings, evaluation, analysis, conclusion, action plan — widely used in nursing, education and social work. If your rubric names it, following the stages explicitly and signposting them is the easiest way to secure the structural marks.
How much of a reflective essay should be description?
Around 10–15%. It is the section students spend most on and the section that earns least. The analysis, where theory explains why the incident unfolded as it did, is where most rubrics put the marks.
Other essay types
- How to Write an Argumentative Essay
- How to Write a Narrative Essay
- How to Write a Personal Essay
- How to Write an Analytical Essay
Essay outline templates · How long is an essay? · What is an essay?