Welcome to my blog post on my mPol. This post will provide an honest evaluation of who I am as a PLP student. It will include my progress, my strengths, and my opportunities for growth.
“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.”
In my journey to become a successful PLP student I have made many improvements such as being more engaged, being a better teammate, and having better writing skills.
I wanted to become a responsible learner this year. Although I have completed all important projects, I have not been consistent in meeting all deadlines and coming prepared every day. Thankfully, I procrastinate less this year, so I usually get work done. Even it it means cramming before the deadline. When I am desperate thats when I can really focus and work well.
This year, I noticed was that I was a lot more engaged. That means I am paying attention, not spacing out, engaging in group activities and discussions, making good use of my class time, being interested in the content we are learning, and most importantly, I am motivated in trying to create work I can be proud of. I even ask and answering questions in class. Being more engaged,I have found it a lot easier to keep up with what we are. Because I am engaged I can notice small details or ideas that help me understand the topic on a deeper level. This deeper understanding of the content combined with my critical thinking skills has allowed me to complete projects better.
One thing I am good at is create insightful connections, look at the bigger picture, and understand the content. However, I am not always able to show my insights, because my work lacks detail or refinement. Looking at some of my feedback from the past year, I see that I always missing one or two elements that hold my work back from reaching the next level. Making sure that I follow the success criteria will be essential if I want to be a successful PLP student.
Another important skill I developed this year is being able to effectively communicate to the audience through my work. No matter how good your thoughts and ideas are in your head, if they arent these communicated effectively you can’t show others your understanding. There are many parts to this skill, one of which being writing, communication through words. My writing has undoubtedly improved over the past year, I find it much easier to convey my thoughts through words. Learning about sentence structures and paragraphs really helped make my writing more clear and organized.
I have made big improvements on being a successful team member. While I still have ways to go, I have significantly gotten better at collaborating with my team. I am able to take initiative and find ways to make a significant contribution to my team without my team members asking. During a group project on creating a metaphor machine to represent a revolution, I was in charge of writing the script. I finished the script early on and didn’t really know how to help my group. They were all building some part of the machine, and I didn’t want to just start a connection without knowing how it could be connected. So I helped around the machine, painted stuff, decorated, and helped create a flag. But, I saw that my group was a little behind and that there were many parts of the machine that needed to be created, so I tried to ask my team members what they needed help building. I didn’t really get a response because everybody was really busy. At some point, I realised that it wasn’t always my team members job to assign me work and guide me. So, I offered to build the ping-pong connection.I talked with one of my classmassand discussed what I could build and how it would connect with the machine. At first, I couldn’t attach the pots and pans onto the cardboard box, but with some help from my teammates, we managed to create a good solution.
Another collaboration skill I have developed is effectively sharing my ideas and giving good feedback during projects or even just group discussions. I learned that sometimes simply “splitting the work” doesn’t always work because it’s not a very good way for all team members to share their ideas. As part of my DI project, we had to write the script for our play. To me, the script was the hardest part of our group’s DI experience. We were forced to rewrite and change many things towards the end because we didn’t effectively collaborate on our script. Fortunately, we had a meeting where we looked over the script together, all shared our ideas, and created a script we all thought was good. We could have saved a lot of time if we had just effectively worked together on the script in the first place (Collaboration is important!!)
Heading into the final strech of the year I need to step it up and improve my work habits by using tools such as the calender and things. I want to get better at time management and being more responsible. I know that my quality of my work is improving and I want things to keep progressing. I just have to focus on adding more detail into my work and acting quicker on revisions. I will continue being engaged in whatever we are learning(I am enjoying learning about the Russian revolution so far!!) and continue to build on my critical thinking skills. PLP has taught me so much I need to know as a learner. Wether its creatively using different tools on my i-pad or building something fun with my group members PLP has been quite enjoyable.I know that as a get into higher grades the standards reaching new heights but I am ready. I am excited to learn and grow together with my classmates and I hope to end things off on a high note!!
Here is some a sample of my work to show what I learning: