Hi everyone, welcome back to the coolest blog of my class. School right now is a bit of a crunch time and so I’m trying to write a handful of posts at the same time. One of the projects that we’re wrapping up right now is called Believe in Good. This project is about how to become the most effective version of yourself, to be more efficient and effective in life. Using a book called The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which shows us 7 habits and a bunch of examples of to use them. Here’s a kind of walk-through on how about using the 7 habits
The Habits
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, written by Steven Covey is an award winning novel about self betterment, I want to say? It’s kind of just a guide on how to be a “highly effective person”. This guide is broken down into 7 steps/habits:
- Be proactive
- Begin with the end in mind
- Put first things first
- Think win-win
- Seek first to understand and than to be understood
- Synergize
- Sharpen the Saw
Integrating these habits to an extent can help one become superior to all others. Kinda. Doing some activities to get in these habits can help you be a better person to yourself, the people around you and the world. We read this book periodically throughout the project and for each section, we created an “assessment choice board activity” which is a teachers way of telling us to show what we’ve learned in an interesting way.
This was where we got to let our creativity shine through. We could represent what we learned from the book in anyway that we wanted to. Although I was a little confused at the beginning on what the parameters were, I soon realized that there were none, and that opened up all the doors. Here are my representations of the sections of this book:
Private victory:
Public victory:
Renewal:
The base of the project
The Driving Question for this project is: How can I be my most effective self?
My answer to this question is start by figuring how to look after myself. In order to help others and the environment around me, I need to be in a position to do so. After focusing on the four main parts of self-care (body, mind, emotional, spiritual), I can move on to actually understanding the needs of the environment around me. After understanding what needs to be done around me and because I took the time to understand what needed to be done, I can move on to coming up with a strategy to help. By following this simple yet effective routine, I can be sure that I am on the path to become my most effective self.
Somewhere in the middle of this project we did a really cool combination assignment where we made a personal mission statement. A personal mission statement is basically a text that defines who you are as a person and identifies your purpose (in life, school, work, ect). We combined our mission statement with a diagram of a table, furnished with some people that motivate you, or who you look up to. These people could be fictional, no fictional, dead or alive. This diagram was meant to show what you want to achieve and who could help you reach that goal.
The Final product/s?
The majority of this projects “work” were these “choice board’ activities. For our final product, we’re presenting a set of three of these choice boards in a “gallery” of sorts. We’re doing three category’s, Kinishtetic, Visual and Audio. We can make anything to represent a couple of the habits with these three categories. This “gallery” hasn’t happened yet, but here’s what I plan to present.
Kinaesthetic:
A set of figurines, some school supplies and a book, iPad and earbuds.
Visual:
Audio:
In total, I found this project really cool and a fun way to look at self improvement. I loved the creative freedom of the choice board activities and the layout of the project plan. The book is also super cool. It isn’t really my style of book or project, but the teen version of the book and the freedom of the project made me able to enjoyably participate in everything. Thanks Steven Covey, signing off until the next post tomorrow night.