In the past, I was an exceedingly shy and reclusive individual, until one day I decided to pursue my master’s degree. Most of our class activities and discussions are predominantly student-led. I wish to withdraw from my program due to fears regarding student-led activity. Nonetheless, I saw that confronting my concerns could catalyze personal development. Rather than conceding defeat, I challenged myself to engage, recognizing that each incremental step would bolster my confidence.
But this fear challenged me to overcome; I prepared myself by reading a lot on my topic, and I rehearsed repeatedly until I mastered my lecture to make it more confident in front. Here comes the best part: the question-and-answer portion. I started to panic until one of my classmates asked me a question, and I didn’t know what to answer. I had mastered my delivery by reading some related journals, but I hadn’t encountered her questions. Luckily enough, my professor stepped up and addressed the question. But she has me ask follow-up questions about the same thing I didn’t know the answer to, and I feel embarrassed. It indicates that I don’t know my topic; situations measure us on how prepared we are in terms of the content of our topic, which I haven’t prepared.
The teaching-learning strategies that have been used are student-led strategies. I guess it doesn’t work well for me because I failed myself in that situation but learned my lesson from that failure, and I started loving such strategies. For me, the best strategy is active learning, It enables me to think critically, applies my analysis, and allows me to patch things into the real-world application, and it gives more knowledge retention because of the effort to extract information out of that context, and with these strategies, all ideas are valid; there's no right and wrong. This type of strategy encourages me to delve deeper into the subject matter, particularly in collaborative activities where I share the same enthusiasm. It's fun and creates a conducive learning approach.