Reflection on Oral Presentation

For our final presentation on our proposal, I was tasked to present the part on the result analysis of our research. Knowing this part of our presentation will be little dry, I did my best to include a few relevant and engaging visuals in order to keep the audiences attention.

Before the actual day of the presentation, my group members and I met up to practice our different parts. What we took away from that rehearsal was that we needed to be more precise and focused in order to cut down the time we took to present our individual parts of the proposal as almost all of us overshot the time limit.

From the feedback I received on the previous Peer Teaching presentation, I found out that I was looking at the slides too much and was not facing the audience while delivering my presentation. As such, for this presentation, I was doing my best consciously not to rely too much on the Powerpoint slide as well as my script.

For the actual presentation, I felt a little more confident than the previous presentations, as my weaknesses were pointed out to me and I was going to attempt not to repeat those same mistakes again. Part of preparing for this presentation was to know my material well. During the presentation, I did my best to deliver our analysis well and from the facial expressions and body language of the audience, I felt that they understood what I was trying to bring across and so, I felt that I had done my part. However I did feel that I could have injected more humour into my presentation, as I really like to make people laugh.

During the feedback, Dr Radhika, explained how memorising the script by heart was not really a good thing and that was one of the most important things I took away. I did realise that I was trying to recall certain parts of my script during the presentation and this was evident from my body language. Furthermore, because I was trying to recall the contents of my script, I was not able to use more of non-verbal cues and gestures and it might have made my presentation a little robotic.

On the whole, I feel that I have made a stark improvement from the mock peer teaching. This is mostly due to the honest feedback from the rest of the class and Dr Radhika, which have allowed me to know where my weaknesses lie and how to overcome them.