My GT Experience

Hi there! This week my post will be on my reflections for the group training which just passed not long ago.
 
I will first look at the actual presentation on the day itself. Well, honestly, I was really nervous for the presentation. I am sure the power poses did help a little, but that is just how much it can boost your confidence. There are other determining factors like the amount of preparation that you had. Our team was very collaborative, and we did make a constant effort to meet up to finalise everything and rehearse whenever we have a common timeslot. For this, I am really grateful to have such awesome members in the team! Good job guys!

However, I must say, time is really not always on our side and we did not get to meet often, so during these meetings, we had to prioritise the agenda for the meeting. We did rehearse on my own, and I attempted to talk to myself in my room, which I think helped a lot. But maybe I could have prepared and rehearsed earlier, instead of procrastinating and pushing it to the last minute. The group training was also the first time where I did not draft a script for my presentation, and thankfully that did helped me sound less like I memorised my content.
 
Zooming into the delivery of my presentation, I felt that my pace might have been a little fast. Also, the feedback for me was there was a little bit of data dumping for my part. I guess I could have further filtered the content that I was presenting, but honestly I did not feel that allocating more content to my teammates before or after me would have been a better alternative since we had broken the content down into different sections, and if I were to further break down my section into smaller parts, I feel that it may disrupt the train of thought of the students. This was why we chose this strategy and allocation of content amongst ourselves. On the other hand, I think I did make a conscious effort to have eye contact with everyone in the class! (:D) So in terms of delivery, things that I can work on would be having a more concise content, being clearer in my content, having more natural and less confined hand gestures, pace of delivery and pronunication of certain words.
 
As my team felt that the focus of the group training should be on us, articulating our ideas, we placed much less emphasis on our slides and did not include other audiovisuals. However, we did make a constant effort to ensure that there are no errors on our slides and that there are examples given for the different sections.
 
In conclusion I think it would have been better if I had prepared more and there is definitely room for improvement for my content and delivery!

Outline for Report Writing C

This post will be on the general outline that I have drafted out for report writing C on oral communication skills. I will start off with the PPQ that I have.

Statement of problem: NUS graduates and undergraduates face problems articulating their thoughts verbally, especially in comparison with our fellow peers from SMU.

Statement of purpose:
Focus on the different aspects of oral communications that needs to be improved on.
The purpose of this proposed curriculum change is to let students better master their oral communication skills, and not let it hinder their progress in life in general.

Key question:
Currently are there courses that help students develop their oral communication skills?
Which are the modules that facilitate oral communication skills?
What are the specific areas  of oral communication that we can look into?
How can the new curriculum be implemented?

General outline:
Introduction
- Background information using data provided
- Other data sources
- Scope: Which aspects of oral communication? Proposed curriculum change?
- PPQ
- Rough organization of report content

Findings
- Use the effect and cause & functional approach

Recommendations
- Proposed curriculum change
- Improvement to current teaching methods and new teaching methods to introduce

Overall conclusion
- Need to improve on oral communication skills
- Implementation of proposed curriculum

This is it! All the best! :)