Reflective writing is a tool utilized in nursing education to help you process a clinical event through critical thinking and recognize how you can grow from your thoughts on the event. To guide you in this assignment, you will follow the 5 stages of Gibb’s model for the reflective writing as noted below. Your Instructor will utilize a consistent scale for grading. The expectation is for you to critically reflect on a clinical event that occurred, and to process this event in your role as a developing RN using these stages.
The overall goal is for you to: 1) grow in your role as a future nurse by reflection and 2.) to assist you in developing skill in writing a document by mastering flow, grammar, content, references. You may use the questions in each stage below as a guide – you will not need to answer all the questions if you were able to document your reflection utilizing critical thinking and in a comprehensible way and were able to meet the criteria in the grading scale.
This assignment is required to pass the course in all cohorts except OB & Leadership.
1) Description – describe the situation in detail. When/where did this happen? How were you involved? Who else was there? What happened? What did you do? What did other people do? What was the result of this situation?
2) Feelings: write about what you thought & felt during the experience. What did you feel be-fore this situation took place? What did you feel while this situation was occurring? What do you think others were feeling? What did you feel after? What do you think now? Any thoughts on how others perceive the situation now?
3) Evaluation (also entitled “analysis ” in some sources): an objective look. Comments on what was positive about the situation. What felt negative? What went well? What did not go well? What did you do to contribute (either positive or negative)?
4) Conclusions: how could this situation have been a more positive experience for everyone? If faced with the same situation, what would you have done differently? How did you learn (what skills do you need to learn so that you can handle this type of situation better?
5) Action: possible actions that you can take to deal with this situation & how to achieve this.
Examples of a clinical event that you can use; you may have been in a patient’s room when they had an adverse change in their clinical status. A Rapid Response and then a Code Blue had to be called. You may use something that happened to you or a family member if you are not yet in a physical clinical site. You may choose to use a case study as well.
This writing project will use the stages and questions above to guide you in reflecting what you experienced, felt, how you grew from this event, and what you need to do as an action plan for your growth
