Reflective Account

Reflective Account – Poster Presentation.
This reflective account is regarding my involvement within a group to produce an academic poster presentation.
My feeling when we were initially told we had to do a presentation was; please no! and my heart immediately sank! This was one main worry I had when I was accepted into university but I knew I had to overcome this fear.
A few sessions ago, we all decide which groups were going to work together. I was pleased with who I was working with as we all seemed to share the same views and we all contributed ideas on what we should produce our poster on. We discussed several topics and then narrowed them down to: * free University places for all * free nursery places * Inequalities in higher education
Deborah, one of the girls in the group mentioned her friend was studying a Masters degree within education. A topic within this was Scandinavian education with a link to high suicide rate of students, this became of interest to the group. With all the ideas running around in our heads it made us consider Scandinavian Education. As we all had different roles with our jobs in education, we then narrowed it down to our particular expertise. My role was to research secondary education as I work in a secondary school as a Teaching Assistant. Other topics being researched were early years by Louise as she worked with the younger children, Behaviour within schools by Deborah as she worked in a PRU and Results which was researched by Sarah. The group as a whole decided to research this topic along with the others we narrowed down for when we next meet and see if we had any ideas to offer.
When it came to researching and reflecting on our chosen topics, we felt there was too much information to consider and it became difficult to gather information especially for myself and Deborah. The difficulties I came across were the differences of children’s age when they enter into education. Children in Scandinavia do not enter into education until they are seven and they leave at 16. As Louise was covering the early stages of education I would have interfered with her research and probably repeated many points. Deborah also mentioned she was not able to find much information regarding the behaviour within schools.
After discussing the negatives and positives of the chosen topic, there was a common theme of Finland throughout. We all agreed and decided to pursue Finnish Education as our presentation. When it came to finally being in agreement of this topic, we took key points from the research we gathered and drafted out a poster. I wanted to do really well on this as it was our first presentation and I had taken a lot of time to research and meet with the group regularly, as did everyone.
Two weeks ago, Aaron who is also on our course did not have a group to join so we asked did he want to come and contribute to ours. He pointed out that he was confident in producing a poster on power point which was a relief for me really as it is not one of my strong points. It was like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. We talked through our chosen presentation with Aaron and informed him what information we would like to put on the poster. I feel it was important for Aaron to know the background and the information we had researched. It would help him to understand what he was going to produce the poster on and why we had chose the topic we did.
The next step in the production of the poster was to distribute key points from the presentation and elaborate on them. Keys points included * Investments (Aaron) * Standard of teaching (Louise) * School timings (Deborah) * Class sizes (Myself) * Autonomy (Sarah) * Free school meals (All) * Students ranked by top performers (All)
As you can see from the points above we all have a chosen topic to discuss and elaborate on throughout the presentation. Where I have put (All) next to a key point we will all have an input and contribute to this area. This is to ensure we all have equal participation throughout. As the poster presentation is not for another two weeks I still have time to perfect my short speech and ensure it is done to the best of my ability.

I am feeling quite anxious at the thought of having to speak out even though I have done presentations before. I need to work a little more on my confidence and not be afraid of what others may think. I must remember to speak clearly and not to speak too fast as this will stumble the flow of my speech and is what I tend to do in these situations. This is how I deem it anyway! Each and every person is probably feeling some sort of anxiety as it is only natural for us to feel this way. I believe the group as a whole has worked extremely hard together and all donated something constructive to the presentation. I and the entire group have met on several occasions, in our own time and before lectures to discuss and produce our poster which I feel is commitment. I just hope that all our hard work we have put in to produce this poster is reflected in the feedback. Whether the feedback is positive or on points we need to improve for the next time we can only learn from what we do. We shall wait and see!