How are you going to progress as a learner before the end of the school year? A question that gets asked a lot in our classroom. In order to answer this question we must take into consideration some aspects of learning:  revision, teamwork, responsibility, and production of high quality work.

I feel like this past term and a half I have demonstrated all those aspects, as well as good work ethic and habits in my PGP and Humanities courses.

A perfect demonstration of all of those learning aspects is the winter Exhibition. Click here to learn more about the process. During the exhibition I volunteered to be a DRI (directly responsible individual), this was definitely a step outside of my comfort zone and showed great leadership skills. While I was DRI my main focus was making sure everybody was happy and was working as a team (teamwork skills) because when we worked together our work habits, ideas, and results were way better than if we would have done everything on our own. When we brainstormed, the whiteboard would be filled with great ideas at the end of every class. We then took those ideas and were able to class critique them, and revise until they were almost perfect. By taking these steps we were able to produce high quality work.

A few months ago we were reading the crucible (an act) and along with the reading we had to make “creative creation” blog posts. If you want to see those click here, here and here. I was actually very proud of these posts, they showed creativity, good work ethic and high quality work. Each post I used evidence by drawing from experience, used creativity to express my point and used revisions to make sure my spelling and grammar was correct. For example, for my second post I wrote about the influence of social media and how it was very powerful. I used evidence from my life to support my point. This made my writing more powerful which resulted in producing high quality work. I also learned that more isn’t always better, I tried to make my posts short but interesting. I’m slowly learning to be more concise about what I’m trying to say, so hopefully this post won’t be as long as others.

Now that we’ve discussed Humanities, let’s move onto PGP. So we’ve started doing this thing called “time blocking”, at first I wasn’t sure about it but I actually tried it and found it quite helpful. The one week I did it, it improved my work ethic and habits. I found I was focusing more at the task at hand because I wasn’t worried about what I needed to do. I also was getting less distracted by my phone or Netflix because I had blocked time to do that. This improved the habits of mind #1 and #2 (persisting and managing impulsivity). I haven’t been able to practice my time blocking skills to much, but I’m definitely willing to attempt it again. 

My last example of learning was a FAIL (first attempt in learning), it was for my PGP course. Before the holidays we were given a book called “what do you really want?”. It was all about goal setting and how to achieve those goals. Throughout the book we had to fill out forms, make dream boards and journal about our successes and failures. I completed everything ahead of schedule, and was pretty thorough. But if I’m being totally honest I wasn’t satisfied with my work nor did I feel like I was being very truthful about the goals I wanted to set. I felt like I was thinking more about the goals I should have like where I should go to university, and reading more. I feel like this is because I wasn’t in the right mindset, or felt like I just needed to get it done so that I wouldn’t have to worry about it. Regardless, I feel like it was a FAIL which is perfectly fine because all that means is I have another experience to learn from. 

So know that you’ve read a little about the learning we’ve done, it’s time to get back to the real question at hand: How are you going to progress as a learner before the end of the school year? I can know use everything I just wrote about as evidence to answer this question.

The exhibition will help me as a future learner to gain more confidence in my leadership ability’s. I think the experience will help me understand my weaknesses and strengths so that in the future I can progress as a learner. As for the crucible creative posts, I will be using them to set a standard for my creativity. I will try and either hit that standard of creativity or attempt to surpass it, by the end of the year this will help me progress as a learner. For the time blocking, I am planning on using it this term so I can improve my organization and time management. This will let me do more things I am passionate about, or give me more time to perfect my work. Finally I will learn from my FAIL by making sure those same mistakes don’t happen again. Hopefully all those learning experiences combined will allow me to progress as a learner by the end of the year.