Tagged: mPOL

Last mPOL :(

Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert of my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.

Last year I looked back at my combined experience in high-school, and decided that I would live by the theme of having no regrets for my very last year. That is why I decided to play a higher level of soccer this year, aim to go to provincials for track & field again, applied to six universities, applied to thirteen scholarships so far and took on the role as producer in our film production. 

A big example of living by no regrets and going out of my comfort zone has been in our horror project, in which I took on one of the biggest and most sleep-depriving roles. Although it was challenging, I was grateful to be given the role and was able to learn a lot from it. Working with eighteen other people can be challenging which means that communication is key in order for things to run smoothly. I chose our
director knowing I’d work very well with her. In fact, our communication was top notch and we were always on the same page. However, where I failed was making false assumptions. Assuming that the other members of my class would check the schedule I told them all about and updated every day to know what they had to do and where they had to be, as well as have the drive to do them. If I were to do it again, I would’ve been even more clear by conducting meetings in the mornings and afternoons during production to make sure everyone was on the same page and had something to do. 

 

I also learned the nuances of being a good leader. On the upside, I realized that I have a natural ability to be organized. My organization in this project permitted us to have all the materials we needed up at loon lake, kept us on track by making sure we knew what had to be filmed and what could be filmed back at home, gave everyone roles that were crucial to helping make our production run smoothly and kept post-production on track with drafts and finally finishing our film. However, reflecting back I would have done things differently by being more assertive at certain times earlier in the process. I later fixed this mistake by being more assertive in post-production. 

When it came to public speaking, I learned a lot about myself. I learned that my need to be organized and prepared also translates to my ability to perform while presenting. In situations where I don’t feel prepared I become red-faced and nervous. Maybe overtime, as I continue to put myself in situations where I have to public speak I might get better at “winging it”, but today, my confidence in public speaking only resides in situations where i feel prepared. When I was asked to present my last year’s mPOL to all the PLP grade 10s and 12s, my face went red and remained that way throughout the entire presentation. Even though I wrote it, it was a whole year ago, and plus I didn’t have the time to prepare. However, at our PGP book exhibition last week, I wasn’t nervous at all and my presentation ran smoothly with every single person I encountered. Even though it was something that mattered a lot more, the fact that I was prepared and had all of the background knowledge I did made all the difference. Having read the book, done extensive research on it and on the authors, I knew exactly what I was talking about and felt confident in my words. This is something that I’ll certainly take on to my next projects by assuring that I’m very well prepared. This same thing applied to when I gained a boost in confidence speaking in Socratic Seminars, I simply began taking better notes and doing more research to back up the points I had. 

Finally, my writing skills have never been as good as they are now. My writing has improved immensely especially these past couple months due to writing admission essays to universities and scholarships. This has not only been because I’ve simply been a lot writing more than usual, but because I’ve been forced to write in my own way and use my own voice. Even when I faced uncertainties in my writing in projects, I’ve always gone to tutorial times to make sure my points and themes were what the teacher was looking for. 

To conclude, I’m happy about my performance in every project, even though there are things I may have wanted to change. For the remainder of this year I’d like to continue living by “having no regrets” and going out of my comfort zone, whether that means to take on more big roles in projects, take opportunities to speak in front of the class, take an acting role if it comes up or apply to be valedictorian. Going out of my comfort zone so far has improved my self-confidence and overall performance in projects which I’d like to keep up.

It’s That Time of The Year Again – mPOLs 2022

“Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.”

Hi there, welcome back. Today’s blog post is about a yearly tradition amongst PLP, mPOLs. Although we skipped last year due to Covid-19, I am ready to reflect on my growth as a learner so far this year and what I can do to improve myself as a student before the end of the school year. 

My Learning Plan

Something new from these last couple years is what’s called a Learning Plan. Near the beginning of the year, we filled out a statement of learning intent, plans to accomplish goals and choosing “Profiles” representing different levels of certain Core Competencies that we hope to have achieved by the end of the year. At this year’s mPOL, I will be discussing some of these competencies and wether I think I have improved so far in them or not, as well as discussing aspects of learning such as, revision, teamwork, responsibility, and production of high quality work in my Humanities class. 

One thing I’ve been working on this year so far is Communicating. More specifically, speaking in front of others in a confident and engaging way. Speaking in-front of people has always been a bit of a struggle for me, especially these last couple years, which is why I find it as something very important to be striving to improve on. By the end of this year, I want to have become much more comfortable and confident when communicating in-front of peers, classmates or anyone in general.

Presenting my “Playlist of My Life”

So far this school year, I believe I’ve shown improvement in this competency already. I felt much more comfortable when speaking in front of my peers about my “Playlist of My Life”. Not to mention, I knew my presentation by heart and hardly needed to look at my notes, as well as managing to keep my audience engaged. This was also the case when it came to presenting the idea behind my conceptual art piece at the winter exhibition. On the other hand, an area for improvement when it came to this competency was our class Socratic Seminars. Although I have improved much on my analysis skills which would give me more confidence when it comes to my ideas that I would share, it would still be quite challenging to me as it involves sharing personal opinions in-front of my classmates. Yet, the only way to improve in this area is to go out of my comfort zone as much as I can, which will be then again be pretty challenging, but something I’m definitely willing to do. 

The next thing that I’ve been working on this year is Collaborating. This means that I can not only confidently work with others, but can also take on a leadership role, and do a good job doing it. – ie. being open to new ideas and possibilities, as well as understanding that there is no “right” way to do things. Furthermore, one goal that I’d like to accomplish by the end of this school year is to further improve my leadership skills and to take on leadership roles more often. 

Picture from our Political Party Ad

Now for this competency as well, I have shown aspects in which I showed leadership – the politics project and winter exhibition. However, it’s not the level in which I want to be. What I’d like to do is to create an even deeper understanding of my strengths and flaws in order to build an authentic leadership style that fits best with me – in order to be the best leader I can be. This also means demonstrating qualities such as flexibility, open-mindedness and creativity. 

My Agenda

As I’ve been talking about competencies that I’ve shown and would like to continue improving in, I’d now like to talk about something I’d like to “celebrate” – and that is keeping very organized and making sure I stay motivated and disciplined. This could also be connected to the “Personal Awareness and Responsibility” competency. In the past year, I have figured out what I want my future to look like, which I think has made it slightly easier to keep up the motivation to stay organized and determined – especially since I want to go into the medical field, so this is a crucial trait to have in med school. I think this has always been a trait that I’ve been very good at, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t had times I’ve struggled with it. I’ve had weeks in which I’ve felt very disorganized, which lead me to feeling more stressed than I would’ve been.

When it came to completing my four final analyses for my “Playlist of My Life”, staying motivated and organized was essential. I had four days to complete them all, with things such as soccer and work to also keep in mind. Now this was something everyone in the class was assigned to do, but it was an accomplishment for me. I usually spend way too much time than necessary while working on assignments that involve writing, as I excessively re-read them many times to make them as good as I can possibly make them. I still think this is something important to do, but not to the same extent. That weekend, I was able to find the right balance, and with that I learned to be much more efficient with my time when it came to writing assignments . 

Part of my Zettlekasten

Now that I’ve already answered the driving question “How have I demonstrated growth as a learner so far this year?”, I’m going to answer the next one – “How can I sharpen my Learning Plan to ensure I will reach my learning targets by the end of this school year?”. In summary, I hope to reach the levels of “Communicating” and “Collaborating” in which I set in my Learning Plan at the beginning of the year, and stated in this presentation. I will however strive to take my organization and determination to the next level by bumping up 1-2 “profiles” – where I’ll be able to take responsibility for making ethical decisions and become even more self-aware of my own strengths and flaws (which also ties into improving my leadership skills). In addition to staying organized and efficient, I’d like to take more time into using my Zettlekasten, as it will be beneficial to future writing assignments. 

mPOLs!

So far, this year, it has been pretty great. PLP has really influenced my worldview. I now have many skills that I have learned to develop thanks to this program. Quote from Ally: “Only in PLP ladies and gentlemen”. PLP is a sort of program that we learn inside and outside of the classroom, for example, we have gone on some pretty amazing field trips to enhance our learning in ways I’ve never thought of before.  Here is a link to my reflection on our Oregon field school.

So, you may be asking, what is an mPOL? Well, an mPOL is a mid-year presentation of learning. Yes, that may be a little too fancy for you, so let me do one better. Have you ever heard of a student led conference? Well, in case you haven’t, it says it in the name, it’s basically like a parent-teacher conference except that it’s the student that does most of the talking..and that’s in charge of it. It’s between you, your teachers and your parents. The student is the one that presents what they have learned. Wait, no, no, in my case, you present the best examples of the opportunities you had to progress as a learner.

I really enjoy the difference of how we learn here in PLP, it may require more homework and hard work (haha, you see what I did there), which makes it more of a challenge. Lucky for me, I enjoy a good challenge. 

So let’s just get on into it. First, I will start with Humanities (English Language arts + Social studies), it was pretty hard to choose one thing that we did since I think that all of them were a pretty big challenge for me, but, I decided to choose the advertising unit. You can see my blog posts about advertising here and here. 

I think that visiting Pound & Grain was pretty inspiring but on the other hand, you would think that that would be enough motivation. I feel that I could’ve pushed my creativity farther with the look of the ads that I made (especially the first one, the deep cove ad). If I were to redo it again, the look of it would be way more eye appealing. This showed that I need to feel more motivated/inspired  when coming up with those sort of ideas. So, looking at tons professional ads made from big companies and finding out what technique and appeals I could use in my ads. Ever since this project, I have had my eye on it for some possibilities of what to do in the future, although, I may want to stay with my life long dream of becoming a veterinarian. In conclusion of this subject, I have learned that advertising requires imagination and creativity in order to make successful ads. 

Now for science, to end our unit about tectonic plates, we were each assigned to make a children’s book that would educate kids about tectonic plates and other things related to the subject such as volcanoes and earthquakes. I kind of left mine to the last minute, which was obviously not a good thing to do. At the end, it wasn’t all that bad. The storyline was represented pretty well but, I feel like I could have made my information on the plates a little more clear or in smaller sentences, especially for the purpose of our audience that the book is supposed to be written for. That taught me a lesson to never leave things to the last minute again because, I will definitely regret it and it won’t turn out as awesome as I’d like it to be. 

 

Let’s move on to math, something that I don’t really enjoy doing in this wonderful subject is, fractions. For one of our units, we did operations on fractions. Because of me disliking this certain unit, it took me longer to do the assignments/hand ins because I would rather talk to my friends or just do something else that would lead me to procrastinate. One thing that I am going to work on is that even if I don’t like something, I need to finish all of it first, then I could do other homework that I have, because that’s what the class is for. I need to work the same way I do in all my other classes. Because, homework that is not done at school is done at home and I do not have that much time after school because of all my activities. 

Now let’s talk about Maker. The thing that I enjoyed most doing was my blog. Since I am half French and went to a French school, I think that there is a drastic difference between my writing at the beginning of the year and now. At the beginning of the year, one of my goals was to start writing more in order to get better at it. So, my idea was to start a journal, at the start, I didn’t write in it much because I always forgot. Now, a sneak peak to the next subject, I time-blocked when I was going to do this every night or so. In my blog, we also did a student blogging challenge. Where, every week we have a certain subject and certain tasks to complete. Which means that the quote “Practice and practice then, you’ll get there” or something along those lines is indeed true. Because, I tried pretty hard to get my writing from horrible and not understandable to decent and more understandable which is a pretty big difference if you ask me.

For the last thing that I am going to talk about today is PGP. PGP stands for “Personal Growth Plan” basically, it helps you become a better student. In PGP, we learned how to do things like time blocking and goal tracking. We have been given a book to read that helps you with those things called “What do you Really want”, including a journal which would mean that we would have to write on paper… DUH..DUH..DUUUUHHH! I have decided that I am going to time block at least once a week to plan out the following week, maybe month (if I have time). The one big bad work habit that I have is procrastinating. For example, when I’m at home doing homework, I get a notification, then I check it thinking “only for a few minutes” or “just this one notification”… but 30 minutes or so later… I’m still on it. I have been trying to work with that, turning off my notifications, deleting my social media’s, etc. 

To conclude, in this past couple months, I have learned so much, from the field schools to just in the classroom in general. Just like I said at the beginning, this year has been great and I think that I have really improved over the past couple months, the difference is crazy. I have one last question to end it all today since I’d like to improve as a learner, how can I limit myself from distractions as well as procrastinating less in order to work more productively and ethically in and outside of the classroom?