View of speaking up in class

After completing your class participation assignment, what is your view of speaking up in class? Did you learn anything from this assignment ~ has it changed your mindset or behaviour in any way? Do you think speaking up in class is important? Why or why not? If you think it is important, why do you think our Malaysian education system does not encourage speaking up?

Few years back during foundation:


Few years later after foundation:
<no video found because I got no time to make a video anymore>

But if I gonna make a video later, the title of the video will be: YTLE - Why I can do public speaking

Before completing my class participation assignment, whenever I listened to a lecture or presentation, I always keep my questions or opinions for myself. People do not know my thought and I don't know what people is thinking. I do not know what is my performance when doing presentation. But after completing my class participation assignment, I was able to more focus and apply active listening when listening to lecture or presentation. When I got my own opinion or questions, I will voice out to let people know what am I thinking or what is my doubt about this topic. During the class participation assignment, classmate started to understand more about each others and figure out the way how classmate think about the related presentation topic. I started to know more about myself, know about the weakness when I am presenting a topic, and figure out how to improve my critical thinking skill.

I think that speaking up in class is very important for education. In the future, there are many areas that required us to speak in front of many people. The working area required us to speak clearly about what we thinking in our mind. Critical thinking is not just about what is going on in our mind, but also how we deliver our idea to others. This kind of communication cannot be learnt from books or lecture, but must train from real life experience. Speaking up in class is one of the way to train our public speaking skill. The earlier we train our self to speak in front of people, the more efficient we deliver our message in the future.

I do learned alot of things from this class participation assignment. First of all, I learned how to apply active listening during others presentation. Active listening not only required us to hear the message from the speaker, but also interpret the message and analyze the idea that they want to tell us. Secondly, I learned how to speak up doing the Q&A session. Before this class, most of the class do not really give us motivation to ask questions. But in this class, since Q&A session play a main part to gain score in this subject, I am encouraged to speak up during the Q&A session. This train my speaking skills and help me to reduce my anxiety when voice out my opinion. Thirdly, class participation assignment encourage students to interact with each other. From this assignment, students able to interact with each other and discuss the topic that we are interested with. This not only help us to understand more about the topic, but also reveal our critical thinking skills as we might try to protect our stand and argue back to others. Not only that, class participation assignment help us to learn more about the advance technology that we might not learn before. The overall topic for presentations for this term is related to advance technology. Since class participation assignment required us to focus on every presentation, this help us to gain more knowledge about advance technology and reveal our imagination about future technology.

This assignment actually changed my mind set in several way. First of all, about the topic of the presentation, there are many topic that I dont really think about in the past, such as AI in courts or the legal system, Cultured meat or lab grown meat, 3D food printing and Robot bee pollinator. This change my mind set about there are many limitation about technology. The truth is, there is no limitation for technology, the only limitation is our imagination. If we able to explore more on our imagination, we will found that future technology is full of possibility. Secondly, people always said that introvert always is the most creative and critical thinking people. After the class participation assignment, I seriously doubt this statement. I cant tell if introvert able to think more in their own mind compare to extrovert, however if introvert do not speak out their mind, no one know what are they thinking. All the idea and opinion will just vanish with time in their own mind, at last the critical idea will not transfer from one to another. Then, what is the point of critical thinking? It is very important for us to speak up our own idea and opinion because it is the way people know what you are thinking. Thirdly, this class change my opinion about myself, especially my self esteem. In my though, in order for a person to improve him or her self, that person must first trust him or her self. If you think yourself have the ability to make things right, you will try your best to make things right. Therefore, I try to tell myself to not fear to make mistake, improvement always come with mistake. Mistake that we made now will be the experience in the future. Therefore, improve the self esteem, do not scare to reveal self potential, and self-improve every time make a mistake, these are the things i will tell myself whenever i lost my mind during study, after i attend this assignment.

Malaysia education do not really focus on speaking in class.I believe this is due to our social culture. Most of the Malaysian believe that elders have more experience that children, therefore children must always listen to elders. This mind-set is brought into our education system. When teacher is speaking, students are not encourage to speak. Not only because teacher do not want to be disturbed while teaching, but also because some of the teacher do not think that students can provide better idea than teacher, therefore there is no need for teacher listen to the opinion of students. Malaysia education system lack of higher order thinking syllabus, this cause most of the students only receive the knowledge without the ability to interpret it. Moreover, some of the teachers do not know how to apply higher order thinking skills in teaching, they are just follow the syllabus and marking schemes when teaching. This cause the students do not have chance to voice out their opinion and improve their communication and critical thinking skill.