Week 13: Critical Reflection Essay

When we first started this class, I had no clue what to expect in a module for communications. One of the first assignments we had under this module was to write an email describing myself and my expectations of the module. As this module comes to an end, what I've learnt from the module has become clearer. As a student, I believe that were constantly improving on ourselves. One of my personal goals that I set for myself in the beginning of the module was to voice out my thoughts with the intention of not holding back in a group setting, as one of my fears would be that a discourse would ensue. I think within my team, I was able to voice out my opinions without holding back, such as telling my teammates what I thought of their ideas, whether I disagreed or agreed with what they planned out. Through this team report, I've understood the importance of communication in regards to voicing out our opinions, and the positive and negative impacts that it can have on the report itself, as well as as my teammates. Aside from voicing out my opinions, I believe one thing that I need I can improve upon would be my presentation skills. During the mock presentation, there was a bit of a hiccup as I expected a smaller audience and felt extremely unprepared as my group did not have the time to practice. Once the mock presentation ended, we were given feedback such as not being too runoff or monotone, letting our audience know what the next presenter is saying and so on. I am typically not the type to feel comfortable with winging, and need multiple times of rehearsal if I ever have the need to present. During the actual presentation, I started of confident, but as my nerves got to me, I fumbled my words and felt less confident until the end of my presentation. At the end of our actual presentation professor Brad gave us more positive feedback, which I felt was good confidence wise as students can be too critical of ourselves.

Another thing I learnt from this module is to not be too set in stone in the roles that we are given. In class we were assigned roles including writer, leader and reporter. In a team of 4 ,1 would be the writer, 2 would be reporters and 1 team lead. I chose to be a writer as I felt it was the easiest for myself to jot or type down the minutes for our meetings. However, as we had our meetings, I found that we would take turns with our roles, with the reporters doing the writing, myself giving ideas out to the team and our team lead taking in the feedback. One more hurdle we had as a team is to decide on our topic for the team report. In a team and groups in general, it is hard to come to a conclusion and be satisfied with the outcome that we have chosen. There are disagreements that will come with individuals who have different morals and principles, and even choosing a the topic to write on proved to be difficult. One way to overcome this was to compromise at times and be firm with my beliefs when I felt it was necessary. One example I could think of where I had to compromise would be when choosing the best ideas out of the 4 of us. Despite me thinking that another group member's idea was better, our team lead and the others felt that the idea I had would be best to use a topic for report. In contrast, when our teams were doing slides for our presentation, I asked that my group mates would stick to the format that we had chosen and to try and make it as decent as possible as I feel that better slides would make for a smoother transition and give our audience an easier time understanding the product we were presenting. 

The key takeaways I have for this module is to take in and give constructive criticism, not just with presentations, but in other aspects of life as well. On the other hand, while constructive criticism is a good way to improve on ourselves, I think that we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously and take in positive feedback as well, despite making mistakes. Adding on too not taking ourselves seriously, we can apply this in group settings, where teamwork is essential and to not be too caught up in the roles that we assigned ourselves. Lastly, I think timing is key in knowing when to hold yourself back and when take a step in when it comes to group work. These four takeaways that I have mentioned are what can improve our critical thinking and communication skills, which we can apply to ourselves in and out of the classroom.