They’re back! You may be wondering what in the world I am talking about. I’m talking about only the single most important thing in PLP history! That’s right, its student led conferences. I am prepared to share with you examples of work that I have completed this year which all reflect back to my driving question, “How am I going to progress as a learner before the end of the school year?”
I have four main PLP classes which are maker, humanities, math and science. The very first example will be a project that took place in my maker class. When referring back to past projects that I have done in this particular class, the decision of which one to talk about was not hard. I picked the Star Wars exhibition project because it was, in my opinion, the most interesting. I got to show off my creativity and love for art when hand painting my backdrop, and creating my three sculptures out of clay. It was also quite interesting to learn all about the realm of Star Wars. Keeping this in mind, there is always room for improvement. I know that even in a project like this that I enjoyed so much, I could still improve upon several things such as the décor of my station, of which could’ve been a bit more detailed, and the quality of clay that I chose; one that didn’t crack and fall apart so easily. Also, I would leave myself more time to edit and revise the written portion of my display.
Another big part of the process of making this good project great, was working with the eighth grade PLP kids in order to decorate the room and plan out the night of the exhibition. Through working with the grade eights, I realized that teamwork is really vital to the success of our projects. In order to have a team run smoothly, you have to be able to compromise when it comes to ideas, make your team members feel heard and appreciated, and definatly make sure that the whole team is in the loop about anything and everything, in regards to decisions made or even who’s bringing what.
Additionally, throughout the process of planning and building this project, I learned some valuable skills, not only about group work, but also about time management and the wonders of planning ahead. I feel that improving my pre-planning skills is an important part of helping me progress as a learner throughout the school year.
My next example is a project that was a mixture of humanities and math. This was my metaphor machines project. Although not all aspects of this project reflected my best work, I had learned from both, my successes and my challenges during the process. For the most part, I was pleasantly surprised with the direction of this project, and it reflected e skills that I had already learned, such as how to work successfully with my team members, and most importantly, how to remain calm under pressure.
In this project, however, the most improvement could have been made in the final video. While keeping in mind that this was a group project and I didn’t have complete control over the making of the video, I still know that I could’ve taken more time to revise and edit the video to fix some of the glaring mistakes (obvious to me, even if others couldn’t see them).
One skill, in particular, that that this project demonstrates that I could benefit from working on improving, is my time management. I often feel that this has a lot to do with my mindset. When a project seems initially complicated, I sometimes convince myself that it’s a lot harder than it would be if I just split up my work, and took it a little bit at a time. I feel that the first step to overcoming this challenge is to stop overthinking things, start my projects earlier, portion out my work more evenly throughout the amount of time that was given for the project and in a way that ensures I get it done on time.
The last example a project that, much like the metaphor machines project, was for mixture of two classes, humanities and science. I found this project to be on the more difficult side. Although the research and script were fun to do, the process of creating the final video was quite overwhelming for me. This was for two reasons, I had many bad experiences in the past with the filming app that we were supposed to use, and again, I had difficulty portioning out my work time. Another helping factor to my stress during this project was the fact that I decided instead of filming regularly like most others did, I would draw out and animate my video. Note to self, it’s not as easy as you think. Although I had a great deal of struggle trying to complete this project, the learning that took place made up for that. I had learned not only about the land, climate, and wildlife of all different regions of Canada, bit I also learned a great deal on all the different matter cycles and their importance.
In this year, I have pin pointed weaknesses and developed ways to overcome them, but have also exploited my strengths and learned how to use them to my advantage. I now have a plan to overcome my time management in three parts. I will look at each major project within one to two days, ask questions if I need any clarification on anything, then not only break down the work into portions, but put it on a calendar so that there is something physically there to motivate me. I feel like this plan will help me further progress as a learner, and will be something that will not only benefit me this year, but will become a habit that will sticks with me all the way from high school, to university, and beyond.
