Critical Reflection

 Module Learning

Through this Critical Thinking & Communication skills module, I have gained many insights and it was a great learning experience. At the start of this module, I set myself two goals: to be a better presenter and writer. 

I managed to learn many skills that developed and refined my critical thinking and communication skills. I got to grasp the many different frameworks, such as the Paul-Elder Framework for Critical Thinking, Rodgers’ Reflective Cycle, The Pyramid Principle, Monroe’s Motivated Sequence for Effective Presentation and many others. With all these frameworks and skills, I slowly built my communication and critical thinking skills.

For presentation-wise, one thing that had a significant impact on me is the learning of Monroe’s Motivated Sequence. Learning the 5 steps of the sequence helped me develop the awareness and skills needed to plan, prepare for and deliver effective presentations. All these skills and knowledge that I have learnt made me a better presenter as I managed to outline and address the solution and gave a straightforward conclusion during my oral presentation. 

For critical thinking, learning the Paul-Elder Framework guided me in improving the quality of my thinking as I learnt to improve my reasoning. When it comes to written assignments, I learnt to understand the problem and try to put myself in different perspectives, analyse what is given, gather relevant information and evaluate and think through solutions. This made an impact when it comes to writing my Summary Reader Response assignment as I can make use of different resources and come up with supporting ideas for a topic. Even though I am able to write slightly better than before, I still feel that I have plenty of room for improvement as I still tend to make grammar and language usage errors from time to time. 

Project Learning

For my research project, I worked in a team of 4 and our project focuses on enhancing a current delivery robot available in Singapore that is able to provide doorstep delivery and improves user experience. 

The number of presentation skills I learnt through this oral presentation was immaculate, as there were many things that I learnt in my past education that I realised were incorrect. Certain things I learnt are, the proper passing phrase when handing the presentation to the next person, how to position ourselves properly during a presentation, using rhetorical questions to engage the audience and the importance of body language. With the help of Monroe’s Motivated Sequence, I also know how to properly organize a presentation and what key contents to be included in the slides of a presentation. 

As it is a team project, teamwork skills played a huge part. Since everyone on the team has their strengths and weaknesses and we all have multiple perspectives, by using our individual strengths, we delegate different contents and tasks and we helped one another to check on the contents. For presentation-wise, we ran through many dry rounds together and gave each other feedback on the things we should take note of so that we would all not make the same mistakes during the actual assessment. 

This experience definitely changed my view of learning as previously, I liked to follow and learn things by strictly following a structure. Through this, I learnt to be more flexible and view things from many different perspectives and keep in mind the number of outcomes that could have occurred. All these critical thinking and communication skills are very useful and they would benefit me in the future as such skills are also acquired once I stepped into the working force.