WooHoo! Another SLC. As always I will feature work that I am proud of, work that shows my growth as a learner as well as growth mindset. I will then talk about some goals I have.
Work I am Proud Of
I’m going to start out by highlighting some work that I’m proud of from this year. This title belongs to the Winter Exhibition. You probably remember that this project was to: as a class create an emersive experience that told the story of how Canada grew as an independent nation before during and after the First World War.
The reason I am proud of this project because it came together exceedingly well in the end and gave me a chance to show critical thinking, collaboration, and a deep understanding of the subject. The added pride in this project came from it being such a presentable format. I really liked how it gave us a chance to show members of the community what we can accomplish in the PLP classroom.
Growth as a Learner
This brings me to an example of work which I feel demonstrates my growth as a learner. This piece of work is the Hanford video project, which I did in a group with Teva, Matthew S., Alanah, and Brianna. The project started in the classroom ahead of time to plan for our trip to the Hanford nuclear site so we would be ready to film on location with the Hanford workers. And anytime I have an interview to conduct it puts more pressure on me to not embarrass myself or the interviewee, which I appreciate given how much it improves my work. However, when we came back from the trip we didn’t follow our initial outline when it came to the technical side. We decided to stray from the typical format of a documentary style, and instead went for a quicker paced video that only mentions essential points necessary to the story. This means our video has no voice audio, besides interview footage from experts at the site, and is only about 4 minutes. This is compared to other groups videos which are all around 15 minutes. Our goal was
to achieve the same level of storytelling, and information, as a longer video but in a refined version that could engage a viewer for the entirety. This was a risk that we initially weren’t sure we should take because a video styled in this way magnifies your essential points so if you’re not confident in your topic it can easily expose you. We contemplated the idea for a while before deciding that we were confident enough to just commit to telling the story of discrimination at Hanford in four minutes instead of fifteen. I think we met our goal as far as storytelling because we were able to convey a rich understanding of the subject. The problems that held us back were in the technical side, with things like timing and audio. If we had of come up with the idea sooner and committed right away I think this project had the potential to be gold, but I’m not discouraged because we already took the risk of trying it a different way. This means next time we have the experience and knowledge needed to execute this type of video in future.
Growth Mindset
This term we had a project that even though we are still working it in a sense, we can say that it was not successful. This is the Macbeth Movie that we worked on as a class and I’m going to talk about why it is still a good example of a growth mindset. I believe that everyone had a growth mindset about this project at one point or another, but the underlying problem is that the success of this project relied heavily on the collaboration of the entire class, and the reason we failed was because a growth 
mindset was not unanimous. The growth mindset I showed towards this project is shown by my ability to persist despite setbacks we faced, and my ability to see effort as a path to mastery. The more immediate setbacks were small things that would be easy to give up on, but with a little more thought they were solvable and dramatically impacted the quality of work. An example of this would be a day when we didn’t have enough props to properly make the set. We only had one sheet for a tent that was supposed to be enclosed. The solution was to film from angles where you couldn’t see the openings, and when the angle had to change we would move the sheet. Other small obstacle like this among other things made for constant collaboration and brainstorming on set. I don’t think this project lacked effort from the class, but when you zoom out to see the bigger setbacks we faced like scheduling conflicts you can see that we lacked flexibility and that was in my opinion the downfall of the Macbeth Movie.
Goals
I will now share with you some goals that I have, the reason behind them, and my plan moving forward.
My first goal is to get work in on time. I know I have made it my goal in the past with little success, but this is the first year where the work has really piled up on me making it harder to catch up. What is different this time is that I realize to get my work in on time I just need to start working even if I am lacking inspiration or ideas. This term I have found that, with my blog posts especially, writing down what I already know can spark ideas about what I don’t, providing me with questions that I can develop into one solid inquiry based question. I have also started discussing the questions and topics we cover in class outside of school with students both in and outside of PLP. This provides me with another perspective while devolping my own, overall giving me more inspiration to communicate these ideas to the world via my blog.
My second goal ties into the first in that I want to find new ways to creatively demonstrate my learning on my blog. I feel like if I were to try new ways to display my work I would be more engaged and motivated to do it. I plan on achieving this goal by exploring more. I plan on exploring other blogs across the internet, as well as new apps being made in the App Store that have the potential to give me new ideas on how to express my understanding as well as my thoughts and opinions on the work I’m doing.