There is a particular kind of professional debate that gets had between BABCP supervisors who have been around long enough — which reflective practice model is "best." Driscoll's three-question structure, Gibbs's six-stage cycle, Rolfe's elaborated layered framework. The debate has the same shape every time, with the same partisans, often with the same outcome (no resolution, mild irritation, a return to whatever each participant was already doing).
The honest answer is that none of them is best in any general sense. They suit different cognitive styles, they produce different kinds of record at different time costs, and the choice that matters in practice is not which one you pick. The choice that matters is whether you use one consistently enough that it produces a record by the time anyone asks for one — which, for BABCP supervisor accreditation in particular, they will.
Driscoll (1994): the parsimonious one
John Driscoll's 1994 paper in Senior Nurse proposed what is now one of the most widely-used reflective practice structures in UK healthcare: three questions, asked in sequence.
What? — descriptively, what happened. The event, the conversation, the supervision episode. Not interpretation; description.
So what? — analytically, what does it mean. What was significant about what happened. What does it connect to in your wider practice, in the supervisee's development, in the clinical work.
Now what? — actionably, what will you do differently. What changes, in the next session, the next supervision episode, the formulation you are carrying.
The strength of Driscoll's model is its parsimony. The activation cost is genuinely low. A reflective entry in this format can be done in five to ten minutes after a supervision session and still produce a usable record. For practitioners whose default failure mode is "I'll write the reflection later, when I have time," Driscoll's three questions are the model most likely to actually generate entries.
The limitation is on the other side. The model assumes a reflector who can hold descriptive, analytical, and action levels distinctly in three short answers. Reflectors who think more naturally in stages, or who find that important material emerges only through elaborated reflection, can find Driscoll's structure too constrained — the entries feel rushed, or surface-level, or like they are gesturing at something the format does not have room to develop.
Gibbs (1988): the comprehensive one
Graham Gibbs's 1988 Learning by Doing set out a six-stage reflective cycle that has become the workhorse model in UK nursing, midwifery, and allied health education. The stages are: description, feelings, evaluation, analysis, conclusion, action plan.
Description. What happened, in factual terms.
Feelings. What you were thinking and feeling at the time, and now.
Evaluation. What was good and bad about the experience.
Analysis. What sense you can make of the situation — what was really going on.
Conclusion. What else you could have done. What you have learned.
Action plan. What you will do if a similar situation arises again.
The strength of Gibbs's cycle is its comprehensiveness. Each entry produces a substantially more complete record than a Driscoll entry, with explicit attention to the affective dimension, the evaluative dimension (separately from analysis), and the forward-looking action plan. For reflectors who think well by working through structured stages — for whom the discipline of moving through six prompts produces material that would not have surfaced in three — Gibbs is genuinely productive.
The cost is time. A Gibbs cycle entry done properly takes twenty to thirty minutes. Across a year of supervision with weekly or fortnightly entries, that is a substantial commitment, and the cost compounds across decades. Many reflectors who start with Gibbs end up either truncating it (producing a Gibbs entry that is essentially a Driscoll entry with extra headers) or quietly stopping. The "feelings" stage, in particular, is operationally useful for some reflectors and unproductive for others. Supervisors who process the affective dimension elsewhere — through their own supervision, through collegial conversation — sometimes find the structured prompt produces material that reads as rote or forced.
Rolfe, Freshwater & Jasper (2001): the analytic one
Gary Rolfe, Dawn Freshwater and Melanie Jasper's 2001 Critical Reflection in Nursing and the Helping Professions elaborated the Driscoll three-question structure into a more developed analytic framework. The same three questions (What? / So what? / Now what?) are worked at greater depth and across multiple layers of reflection: descriptive, analytic, critical.
The descriptive layer is roughly what Driscoll's "what" produces. The analytic layer interrogates the description — why did the situation arise in this way, what factors operated, what theoretical frameworks make sense of it. The critical layer asks how this connects to wider professional, ethical, and systemic considerations — what assumptions are being made, what alternative readings are available, what the entry reveals about the reflector's own position.
The strength of Rolfe's elaboration is that it produces the kind of reflective record that holds up to portfolio assembly and to assessor scrutiny. The entries are explicitly analytic, they engage with theory and evidence, and they demonstrate the layering that accreditation bodies look for when they ask for "critical reflection" rather than "reflection."
The cost is two-fold. First, time — a layered Rolfe entry takes longer than a Gibbs entry. Second, fit — the model requires the reflector to genuinely think in layered abstraction, moving from description through analysis to critical reflection without collapsing the layers. Reflectors whose natural register is concrete and pragmatic can find that the analytic and critical layers come out feeling artificial, and the resulting entries read as exercises in framework-application rather than as actual reflection.
The honest comparison
The three models, side by side:
Driscoll suits people who prefer fast, frequent, low-overhead reflection. Three questions, five to ten minutes per entry. Produces a usable record of decent depth. Limitation: ceilings out for reflectors who need more structure to develop the material.
Gibbs suits people who think well by working through structured stages and who can sustain the time cost. Six prompts, twenty to thirty minutes per entry. Produces comprehensive records, particularly strong on the affective dimension. Limitation: time cost can lead to either truncation or abandonment over time.
Rolfe suits people whose natural reflective register is already analytic and critical, and who are likely to use the model for portfolio-grade entries rather than weekly notes. Three layered questions, twenty to forty minutes per entry. Produces records that hold up to formal scrutiny. Limitation: requires layered abstract thinking that not all reflectors do well, and the time cost limits frequency.
The substantive argument, which the partisans of each model tend to skip past, is that the choice between them matters far less than the practice of using one. The supervisor who writes a brief Driscoll entry after every supervision session has a vastly better reflective record than the supervisor who plans to use Gibbs but never gets around to it. The supervisor who maintains Rolfe entries for portfolio-grade reflections once a month, alongside Driscoll entries for routine supervision notes, has the best of both worlds — but only if they actually do both rather than alternating between "I should be doing better than Driscoll" and "I haven't got time for Rolfe."
BABCP supervisor accreditation portfolio assembly rewards the supervisor who has been writing entries continuously, regardless of which model. The assessor is not, on the whole, going to mark a Driscoll-structured portfolio down relative to a Rolfe-structured one. They are going to mark down the portfolio that has gaps — months where no entries exist, supervision episodes that are unaccounted for, reflective material that surfaces in two-paragraph bursts at the end of each calendar year and is suspiciously absent in between.
The pragmatic recommendation
Pick one. Use it for three months. See whether the entries are landing for you — whether you are writing them at the cadence you intended, whether they are producing material you find useful, whether the format feels natural enough that it does not become a deferred task.
If the answer is yes, keep going. Refine the use of the model. Use it consistently for a year and you will have a reflective practice record that holds up.
If the answer is no — if the entries are sparse, or feel rote, or the format is one you keep meaning to use and not using — switch to a different one and try again. The honest signal is the entries that exist, not the entries you intended to write.
There is a tertiary option which, for some supervisors, is the right answer: use Driscoll for routine weekly entries and Rolfe for periodic portfolio-grade reflections. The Driscoll entries carry the volume; the Rolfe entries carry the analytic depth the portfolio assembly will need at the application stage. This hybrid is not a betrayal of either model — it is a recognition that the two models do different jobs, both of which are useful, and that the activation cost of using both is acceptable when each is reserved for the work it is good for.
The model that produces entries is the right model for you. Everything else is a debate worth having once, briefly, with yourself, and then settling.
What the framework cannot do
No reflective model can produce reflection. The model is scaffolding. It prompts the reflector through a sequence of questions; it does not generate the substantive engagement with the experience that makes reflection useful. A Gibbs entry written by a reflector who is not actually engaging with the material produces a six-paragraph document of zero reflective value. A Driscoll entry written by a reflector who is genuinely engaging produces three paragraphs of real worth.
The framework you choose is comparatively trivial. The infrastructure that holds the entries, prompts you when one is due, and ties each entry to the supervision episode it refers to is what determines whether you have a reflective practice or merely an intention to have one.
Supervisia's supervision pathway holds reflective entries against the supervision episode they refer to.
Templates for Driscoll, Gibbs, and Rolfe are built in — the supervisor picks the model that fits their cognitive style, the entry sits alongside the specific supervision session it relates to, and the cumulative record is portfolio-ready by the time accreditation renewal or initial application is on the horizon. The activation cost stays low. The continuity stays high. The choice of framework is the supervisor's; the infrastructure that makes the framework usable across years of practice is the bit Supervisia carries.
References
- Driscoll, J. (1994). Reflective practice for practise. Senior Nurse, 14(1), 47–50.
- Gibbs, G. (1988). Learning by Doing: A Guide to Teaching and Learning Methods. Further Education Unit, Oxford Polytechnic.
- Rolfe, G., Freshwater, D. & Jasper, M. (2001). Critical Reflection in Nursing and the Helping Professions: A User's Guide. Palgrave Macmillan.
- British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies. Criteria for Accreditation as a CBT Supervisor. BABCP, current edition.
Last updated: May 2026