Reflection on Nutrition Presentation

As part of my Canine and Equine Nutrition module, I was required to produce a video presentation in a group advertising a dog feed. I usually find group work somewhat difficult and I think that using the Gibbs (1988) reflective cycle in this reflection will help me to analyse the situation and help me structure a plan to improve in the future.

We chemically analysed the feed and decided to market it as a weight control kibble, with different members of the group being allocated different roles. My responsibilities were to carry out the calculations to determine our feed’s nutritional content, to edit together the video and to cover the topic of fats within the presentation, so this is what I did.

The editing of the presentation turned out to be far more time consuming than I had expected. The group decided as a whole to create a PowerPoint Presentation rather than a video, which I was not in favour of as I am far more comfortable using video-editing software than PowerPoint. This meant I had to dedicate many extra hours to editing the content which caused me to become very stressed and anxious as I did not feel I was producing work to the best of my ability.

While some aspects of the presentation certainly did go well – our joke at the start of the video made everyone laugh and grabbed their attention – there were several embarrassing errors in answering the questions. Prior to presenting our video, we agreed to each answer the questions relevant to the work we had done. There were no questions about my part of the presentation, but I found myself having to step in to answer questions that my peers were unable to answer adequately. My answers were not as good as they could have been as they were not on “my” topic. A glaring mistake on our packaging, which involved claims on the front of the package which could not be backed up, were quickly picked up on by our lecturers.

In hindsight, though the packaging was not one of my responsibilities, I should have looked over it and made suggestions for corrections to the group members responsible for it. Truthfully, I did not look at it properly until the morning of the presentation. In future, I will take more care to look over everyone’s work, not just my own.

In order to improve in future, I think it could be helpful for me to take more control of the situation. Decisions I left to others ultimately made my work harder and meant I had less time to contribute to helping others in the group with their sections which I think will affect the group grade. I also think I should be more open with my group about any issues I am having with the work, rather than cooping myself up on my own to complete it, where I inevitably end up stressed and frustrated.