š Midterm Presentation of Learning 2025
POL Declaration
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.
As spring break finally approaches, the time has come for me to do my Mid-term Presentation of Learning. In grade 8 I saw the MPOLs as something I dreaded. Like it was the assessment that would determine my grade for the entire year. It was something I hoped would be done and over with quickly so that I could go home and enjoy my spring break. But over the last 2 1/2 years, I have come to embrace my Presentations of Learning, because I realized that this wasnāt supposed to be something to be nervous about. The five minutes that I have right now is so that I can talk about me, my learning progress, and a way for me to reach out to you, my teachers and parents for help if needed. So this year, I am happy to say welcome to my MPOL of 2025.
The start of this school year was a bit different from the past two years. Instead of creating a learning plan for ourselves, we established our visions, missions, and values (VMV).
My vision and mission that I set for myself was to become a more independent learner. I like to think of myself as an independent person. But as a learner, I am always leaning on someone or something to overcome my challenges. I want to be able to find my own information and be able to answer at least try to answer my own questions before I go to someone else. My first instinct, like most people when I have a problem is to ask someone else to help me fix it. I want to adjust my instincts so that my first reaction when I have a problem is to see how I can solve it on my own. This thermometer shows my progress on reaching my VMVs.Ā
As you can see, I am pretty close to reaching my goal. I think that I have demonstrated my values to help me achieve this goal. The success behaviors (my values) that I chose to use to help me achieve my VM was agency, preparation, and self-regulation. A project that comes to mind to demonstrated my use of preparation is DI. During the weeks leading up to our first DI tournament, we had a 4 day long weekend. I was able to use this time to work on our props and backgrounds. I utilized the tools that I had, only needing to get cardboard which I got a bunch of for free from IKEA. I am really proud of my creations, and the effort I put into making them. My mom probably knows this too, since I am always complaining to her and updating her on my progress. I think this shows my progress on reaching independence because I was able to create all of these props and backgrounds on my own time, using the skills and tools I had on hand. When I ran into problems while making these, I was able to keep calm and come up with a solution. Ā
A project that shows my use of self-regulation is a project that I am doing right now in Humanities; Ology of Apology. There are many things that I have had to do for this project, from making notes until my fingers started to cramp, to reading the book āObasanā even when it got so boring I wanted to claw my eyeballs out. I did a pretty good job finding my balance between school life and personal life during this project, even using āThingsā for the first time in a while to keep myself on track. I am so proud of myself for staying on task in this project, especially while reading the book. Whenever I wanted to take a break from reading chapters, I stopped myself because I knew I would never get to reading if I took a break. I used this skill to demonstrate my independence by constantly checking the road map, seeing where I needed to be in this project, and keeping myself focused.Ā
Finally, agency. This was the hardest success behavior to use to reach my independent learner goal. A project that really forced me to put my agency skills to use was also a humanities project, Swipe Right for Tragedy. Honestly this was a really fun project to do. Reading Romeo and Juliet, I didnāt have to use as much self-regulation since it wasnāt as boring to read. I used agency and took ownership of my own learning when we split up into groups to make our parody. I was our groups DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) which meant I had to keep track of our progress. I think that this project really required me to use my agency skills because we had many challenges to overcome. I was able to stay resilient through these challenges, collaborating with the other DRIs to solve our problems.Ā
A habit that has helped me improve my learning this year, is using āThingsā to keep track of my progress. I have always liked to work with a specific plan in mind, and goal to work towards. Using āThingsā to make to do lists, helps me update my learning progress and gives me the motivation to keep working. And whenever I check off a completed task I feel very accomplished and satisfied.Ā
Overall, I think that I am on the right track to achieving my VMV. I am especially excited to demonstrate my independence and use my success behaviors in Disney-world. š So far, I have done a pretty good job trying to overcome challenges on my own before going to ask for help. I think that using āThingsā really has helped me improve my learning and has sped up my process in reaching my VMV. Thank you for listening to my MPOL. I am looking forward to reaching my VMV by the end of this year. See you at my TPOLs!
Esther • March 4, 2025