You know, I’m starting to think that we’ve had as many student conferences as there have been name changes for these conferences.
Anyways, it’s that time again for PLP’s take on student led conferences except once again,—PLOT TWIST— the name changed. As of right now, we will be showing our Mid-Year Presentations of Learning or MPoL for short.

And yes, with great name changes comes great responsibility as this year, our presentations will be more different than any other presentation we’ve done in PLP so far.
Just like the TPoLs, we’re going to be answering a driving question which for this year, is “How are you going to progress as a learner before the end of the school year?”
We’ll be reflecting on our work habits and the opportunities we’ve had to learn this year to help answer the driving question, so without further adieu, here it is!

MAKER:

You Have A Story, You Have A Story, Everyone Has A Story!

Since grade eight, it’s been a common theme for me to talk about my struggles with public speaking but this year, I realized there was something else that I wasn’t so amazing at… Interviews. As this is The Year of the Podcast, I knew my day of reckoning would come for interviews and it finally did with the coming of this year’s winter exhibition. This isn’t the kind of situation where I’ve done something like that before so I came into this whole project with next to no experience. My outcome was pretty good even though it could have been better but what I want to talk about something else. I learned how to listen. This is probably one of the most important skills I could have learned in the exhibition as it’s something that can be applied in any aspect of life to make me successful and for that, I’m happy to have learned about it.

HUMANITIES:

This project was very interesting for me as I actually learned a lot about what it takes to work in a group. Obviously, spending enough time in PLP gives anyone the ability to work in a group well but I learned how to do it better. As this was a lengthy project with a lot of revision-work, I had lots of time to learn about the dynamics of a group and how to get the most out of all of us. Although it’s a given in group work, I really learned to value communication and coordination along with understanding roles. The ability to talk is the ability to voice opinions, concerns, and information effectively. To be able to coordinate is to be able to work with each other even without being there in real life and meeting deadlines consistently. To understand roles is to use each other’s strengths and weaknesses as well as possible to come up with a great end-product. Knowing this will be the key to future projects.

MATH:

This year has been a pretty frustrating year for me in math as I’ve been struggling quite a bit with the work we do. I’m not the best auditory learner so when it comes to math, I have to work with different styles to actually learn what is being taught. I definitely like working visually and physically so a project that involves building and using the mathematical terms we learn in class is definitely more comfortable for me. That’s why when we did our Trigonometry Solar Panel project, I learned that I can continue to learn math in more of a visual sense. I started looking at online math videos where there’s visual representations of what’s being taught and I learned that there’s always an alternative way of learning things if I’m struggling with a certain style of learning.

SCIENCE:

This is a similar story to my experience in math as I also found that I’ve been struggling a bit more with science as well. In this case, I was finding that visual aids weren’t helping me all that much in science compared to math so I knew I had to find a better solution for myself. What I learned during the process of our science podcast where we talked about genetics was that writing information down and saying it out loud makes for a deadly combination for learning lots of information quickly. Even though my partner did the majority of research for the podcast, I found that just through writing it down and speaking it out loud during my recordings, I was able to remember almost everything I talked about in the podcast.

Finally, we also had to prepare a question. I focused a lot on being a leader this year along with previous years so I ask you, the audience,

“How can I continue to grow as a leader and what are some things that I can do to help my teams to achieve our goals?”

While that sinks in, I just want to end my MPoL with a little summary of my thoughts on what I learned…

There are always ways to improve as a learner it’s just about taking the time and patience to grow. I think the biggest thing to take away from this is that there’s no cap to how great someone can become as long as they’re willing to put the work into it. Being able to understand what I can do to grow as well is a great way to help myself progress as a learner before the end of the year and sooner or later, I’m going to be looking back at how much further I’ve gone as a person through the growth and learning I’ve done or will be doing in the near future.
After all, what’s the point of my failures if I don’t know how to learn from them?