tPOL 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.”

With the school year coming to an end, it’s time for this. A lot of learning has happened ever since mPOLs. We’ve gone through another three projects and we’ve recently just had our PLP spring exhibition. Now that I’m transitioning into PLP 12 in the next school year, I’ll present to you my reflection on the work I’ve done and how I’ve grown.

The driving question for tPOLs is…

“Why do you feel you are ready to advance to the next grade level”?

The goal of this presentation is to try and answer this question by telling you a story of my growth, what I’ve learned, and how I can improve. I’m going to go through each of the three projects we’ve done since the last mPOL and discuss my strengths and weaknesses in each of them. In the end, I’m going to bring up my learning plan and look at how I met my goals this year and how I can improve them for the next school year.

Hide Your Fires

This project was about why Shakespeare is still relevant to us and also learning about the Cold War. Our goal with this project was to create a compelling vision of “Macbeth” set in the 1950s. We read through Shakespeare’s play Macbeth and learned about events during the Cold War to help us craft the story for our short film.

I felt that through this project, I was the strongest in working with my group on the editing for the film. I was working alongside Anders and Alex on the editing for the film. It required a lot of communication, coordination, and dedication to get this done. We had to communicate with other groups to help get our job done and to overcome problems that we ran into.

Something that I need to work on is my Zettelkastens. I need to work on turning my fleeting notes and literature notes into permanent notes. There were many lectures that we had in class where I took down fleeting notes but never did anything else with them. A goal of my learning plan is to continue to get better at writing Zettelkastens as it’s something that will help me next year in PLP.

Change My Mind!

With the project Change My Mind, we were learning how we could use our voice to effect change. Our goal for this project was to change someone’s mind through a medium of text. I loved that with this project we were able to choose whoever we wanted to persuade and we could write about whatever we wanted. Getting to write about stuff you are interested in makes the project a lot more enjoyable and fun to do. This project required a lot of research and we had to conduct some interviews. In the end, we got to show our persuasive writing to the person we were trying to persuade to see if we changed their mind.

I felt that my greatest growth in this project was through my writing. Writing about something that I’m interested in and wanted to learn more about making my writing better. Along with that, the interview that I conducted helped me with gathering information to further improve my writing. This writing piece was a very good example of using evidence to support my claims and at the end of the project, I was able to persuade my friend.

Similar to the last project, I realized that I should have used Zettelkastens to help save all of the research that I did. It would have been good to turn my fleeting notes on NFTs that I used to help me write my persuasive writing into permanent notes.

Cray, Cray, Yay! Yay!

Our latest project was all about what makes someone a community impact maker. We had to find someone who we thought was a community impact maker and present them at the exhibition. We had to have some sort of connection to the community impact maker we chose. To accompany that, we had to create a portrait of our impact maker. We were to present our learning at the exhibition.

I thought that I completed lots of great work during this project. For our exhibition, I created my art piece of Michael Conway Baker using photoshop. I conducted an interview with him which helped me better understand his impact on the community and how music inspires him. I got to work with Anders, Matthew, and Asha to create an introduction video for the PLP exhibition.

What I need to work on for the future is participating in Socratic seminars. I didn’t say anything or contribute to any of the Socratic seminars that I was a part of. Although I was prepared for them beforehand by taking notes and doing research on some of the films we watched, I didn’t feel comfortable saying anything. It’s a skill that I’ll have to continue to work on for the next school year.

Learning Plan

Currently, I feel that I have improved with my learning plan goals since mPOLs. In some of the projects we’ve done, communication and working with others have been a big part of the project. Without good communication, the final result would not have been what it was with both our PLP Macbeth short film and our introduction video to the exhibition. The next step is Socratic seminars where I still have to work on contributions to a large group discussion.

Along with that, I still need to work on improving on Zettelkastens. I’ve improved in writing literature notes but I need to start getting better at turning questions that I have into permanent notes.

Any Questions?