Year 2: Week 26

The Week of the Group Presentation...

If you have been reading my blog for any length of time, you'll have read about my love hate relationship with presentations, I say love hate, it's more of a hate hate relationship... but it's a work in progress, on trying to develop the skills I need to be able to undertake them. 

This week marked our last group work within the course, with an assessed presentation within our occupational design module. It's hard to believe how far our group work skills have come from Welcome Week back at the beginning of last year.  Earlier this week I came across my script from that said presentation back in Year 1: Week 1 and yes it was a welcome activity so not academic but thinking about the group work process - throughout the course our group working in learning sets and classroom groups has changed and shaped how I approach a group presentation. It's so much more than just doing separate parts and bringing it together at the last minute... 

I know it's completely different in the sense that we haven't ever had an assessed group presentation and that dimension, of course impacted on the approach, there was more personal risk at stake than just presenting back a topic to the class. However those skills in sharing back enabled us as a group to develop our knowledge more deeply and broadly than we would have been able to as one individual. 

By the time we presented today, we knew each others parts well enough, that if someone had been ill, someone else could quite easily have stepped in. We all had enough knowledge on all the aspects we were discussing, that we would be able to answer questions on another persons area in a coherent way which is massive progress. It also on a personal level meant when i thought i have messed up the others in my group could really realistically show me the facts and help me to think more positively about the situation. As a group I'm proud of us and what we managed to do both within our intervention and within the presentation. Now just to the 2 month wait to find out whether we passed or failed.... 

For more insight into my journey to become an occupational therapist; follow me on twitter: @OTontheTracks