Critical Reflection on Peer and Tutor Feedback

I believe each of us is unique. Besides attempting to follow the “perfect models” shown during the lesson, we should prosper with uniqueness of ourselves to create our varieties in life. “Variety is the spice of life” as mentioned by my lecturer, Brad, has highlighted the especially important role of variety played in communication modules. The uniqueness can be achieved by the obtaining feedbacks from tutors and peers instead. This is especially true for my oral presentation.

According to Brad, Haiqing, and Fan, (2015), the meaningless gestures, random body movements, tense facial expression and fast speaking speed of me, due to my nervousness, were also some of the critical distraction for them to have a satisfying experience during my presentation. Although I tried to utilise the power of gestures to guide the audiences through the presentation, the effect of stage fear caused me to mess up my gestures. Moreover, my meaningless movements as the common sign of my nervousness might have misled the audiences during the presentation. Most seriously, my tense face might have deprived my audiences of having a pleasant experience from the presentation. Furthermore, the lack of fluency and accuracy of my words as well as the lack of clarity of my sentences due to the inadequate preparation created a challenge for my audiences to understand my points as fed back by Fan (2015).

Fortunately, it is never too late to learn my mistakes now since I need to have a lot of presentations to sell your ideas in study and work as mentioned by my lecturer. Since the inadequate preparation for the presentation reflects “practicing makes perfect”, I should contribute more effort in practicing. This does not mean compromising my time on other modules. Instead, I should practice smartly by distributing more time of the given limited time for practicing formally in front of groupmates and friends to gather their views and feedbacks. From the feedback of my presentation, I understand that the reason of my audiences for failing to get the best experiences of my presentation is not that I was not charming or my ideas were not brilliant. I believe eye contacts and facial expressions played a part in people’s perception of my performance. According to Farnam (2015), eye contact is important to show the honesty, charms and intelligence of a person. On the other hand, as the goal of “self-presentation”, facial expression is utilized by humans to increase the accuracy what they want to show (Schmidt & Cohn, 2001). As a result, I should always remind myself to treat my audiences like engaging with my friends by maintaining eye contacts and facial impressions that can coordinate with my information during the practices of the my presentation until such engagements can be performed subconsciously. Talking about the “freight or flight”, controlling my nervousness and calming myself down are the keys. Measures including reaching the venue of my presentation 10 minutes earlier, setting up the visualizers and laptop as early as possible must be adapted to give myself more time to calm down before the presentation starts in the future. Besides taking measures on the day of presentation, I should also have more practices so that I can get used to the embarrassment and the process of presentations, which is suggested by Calm Clinic, (n.d.). Most fundamentally, sleeping well the day before the presentation must be ensured. Furthermore, I should believe in myself in being able to give the audiences the best experiences so that I can do what I can imagine to do to succeed in the presentation (Taylor, 2011). Believing yourself is similar to doing the “superman” pose before the presentation as encouraged by Brad,which can enable yourself to at least perform with less interference of nervousness. Moreover, group practicing should be carried out more frequently. Such practices can allow other members of the group to understand each other’s slides better and most essentially, enhance teamwork.

Notwithstanding the huge improvement I can do for the future presentation, I should retain some of the strength of showing my enthusiasm and passion with informative slides and deep understanding as praised by Fan (2015) and Goh (2015). Fuelled by the approval of my lecturer and peers, I was able to raise my enthusiasm and passion from the joy of studying the module for the presentation. Excelled with the help and feedback of my lecturer and peers, I was able to work hard with my team to make the presentation informative for the audiences. Hence, I should keep what I learnt from my lecturer and keep my joy, enthusiasm and hard work for every single presentation in the future. 

On the other hand, I am determined to utilise the power of the peer and tutor feedback in field not only on the field of presentations. Feedback is always useful in knowing one's self in many ways. A higher amount of feedback obtained is like a statistic of one's self in the eyes of the public. Therefore, I am able to be more careful on my own work and life to achieve a better quality, based on the previous feedback. I am able to ask myself why I should ask some many questions during interviews. 
--------"Are these interview questions relevant to what I need?"

Fig.1 - Best demonstration of my art of messiness in secondary school

I am able to question myself the presentability of my work.
--------"Does it look messy to my boss?" These are some true examples based on the feedbacks of people on my irrelevant answer for questions, the messiness of my work. Furthermore, the feedback process done in the module allows me to place more attention on others' words and more respects to others' opinions. After all, people are to give you feedbacks for sake of you to improve yourself. As a result, I am more proactive to think about others' opinions with greater focus on the positive outcomes based on the opinions, rather than being stubborn and facing the failures as a result. For instance, I am able to think critically why my fencing coach scolds me when I am too lazy or tired to warm myself up before engaging in fencing. Instead of feeling the coach disliking me, I should understand my coach is trying to reduce the risk of injury of me during the match. You may not think rationally if you are controlled by your negative emotion rather than you controlling your emotion.

Besides feeling grateful for having opportunities to improve myself with the feedbacks from my tutor and peers, I should continue to make use of the power of the feedbacking system to achieve many more goals in my life. Let me improve myself in the journey of life through learning from the feedbacks, unlearning the wrong practices done and relearning my strengt appreciated by others!

References

Calm Clinic. (n.d.). How to overcome nervousness. Retrieved December 3, 2015 from http://www.calmclinic.com/anxiety/overcoming-nervousness

Fan, R. (2015). SIE2016/PEV2011 _ Oral presentation evaluation form. Singapore Institute of Technology. Retrieved December 3, 2015 from https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TcIEJWC4aquDfPnhdeMRlj-uHruL8iWH2EB4xy7xd_g/edit

Farnam, A. A. (2015). Do blind people make facial expressions like sighted people? Quora. Retrieved December 3, 2015 from https://www.quora.com/Do-blind-people-make-facial-expressions-like-sighted-people

Goh, P. Y. (2015). SIE2016/PEV2011 _ Oral presentation evaluation form. Singapore Institute of Technology. Retrieved December 3, 2015 from https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WIsMwOnM-vVEXG9GgD7Mbw7VetxcIibf0Lqy5OuIY4M/edit?usp=drive_web

Panic Disorder, (n.d.). What is the fight or flight syndrome? Retrieved December 3, 2015 from http://www.panicrecoverycenter.com/fight.html

Schmidt, K. L. & Cohn, J. F. (2001). Human facial expressions as adaptations: evolutionary questions in facial expression research. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Suppl 33, 3-24. Retrieved December 3, 2015 from http://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.2001

Taylor, M. (2011). 6 ways to destroy nervousness. PickTheBrain. Retrieved December 3, 2015 from http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/6-ways-to-destroy-nervousness/