Critical Reflection

 

 

First and foremost, I would like thank Professor Brad for being a professional and an outstanding lecture for the module throughout the past 13 Weeks. It has been a pleasure learning from you and thank you for providing the chance and guidance to improve our communicating skills as a class.

At the start of the module, I set a goal for myself that I will be more precise in my public speaking skills and improve my understanding of how to be a critical thinker. It is safe to say that I had benefitted from this module as I was able to further understand what critical thinking is all about and able to apply what I had learned in a form of mini presentations.

During the module lessons, the multiple assignment that was given to us allows me to place my critically thinking skills to the test and slowly I developed more consensus approach in what I wrote down especially for the reader response assignment. The Paul Elder’s framework gave me new insight on how to analyse problems and at the same time solve them. Throughout the module, I slowly develop a positive intellectual habit as I apply the Paul Elder’s framework in each and every assignments . As we keep on practicing a positive thinking habit it slowly begun to embody our personality hence developing a positive trait for ourselves. In this case I had developed a logical and relevance trait which allows me to provide a more valuable criticism to others and also accept and process criticism for myself to improve my ability of approaching problems. Previously, the way that I approach to any problems or conversation is that I always state inaccurate facts and information just so that I can win the argument or decision to make others choose my decisions. The way we learn about communication is different from what I experienced before.  We were always taught about the general skills such as how to do report writings and research skills. This time it is different as we were taught in depth how to be more verse in writing a reader response and summaries. These are important as sometimes the idea that we want to say out loud, is practice in our daily writings and develops a habit of a conceptual thinking and enables others to understand and visualise our opinions through the use of the English language.

In the later part of the module, we were assigned to write a technical report in groups of 4. The research for the technical report was not an easy task. We had to critically think about ideas and see if it will work or make sense. We had to put ourselves in an engineer perspective and make use of our engineering principles learned from our past studies to choose the right idea. At the same time, this gave us our chance to use what we had learned about presenting skills to present our engineering idea. This enables us to practice our critical thinking skills and relate it to real life applications especially when Engineering workplaces requires problem solvers on a daily basis. Although teamwork was important, it was also important that we share and apply writing skills tip to one another throughout the development of the report. It gave me a broader perspective and avoids focusing on an idea that is only visualised by our own individual self. Our research skills too were challenged. According to the module lesson we had on researching articles, We had to cross reference between 2 sources to ensure that the research idea is accurate and use proper citations format to prevent any plagiarism infringement. From there, we were able to develop a simple hypothesis for us to work on. The module also teaches us about websites that are encouraged to be used and a more efficient manner to type down our desired research articles without having to scroll through unnecessary information. These skills helped my group to speed up our research on the idea hence giving us plenty of time to conceptualise our idea into a reality. The project felt like a proper professional workplace project as we learn how to do meeting minutes and ensure proper delegating of roles and duty to one another to avoid overlapping of duties. This creates are much structured and efficient meetings as our idea are shared in a timely and structured manner to avoid hiccups throughout the process.

 

In conclusion, the module was insightful and provided a plethora of opportunities for me to practice on my critical thinking and communication skills. With the knowledge I gain from this module, I hope to apply it and be able to provide a meaningful and productive job in the future.