Hey everyone! Welcome back another PLP MPOL!
If you’re new to my blog, you may not know exactly what an MPOL is. An MPOL is a Mid-Year Presentation Of Learning. Pretty much it’s a student-led parent teacher conference. If you need more information about MPOLs, you can check-out the blog post below.
This MPOL is going to be focused on what I can do to improve my learning before the end of the school year. To do so, I asked myself three key questions:
- What does my work reveal about my personality?
- What work habits have I been least proud of, which do I need to improve?
- What goals would I like to set for myself for the rest of the year?
What does my work reveal about my personality?
Before starting my MPOL, I went through my past blog posts to find work to reference. While I was doing this, I came to a startling realization: almost all my posts were structured the exact same way. If you look at my Hugely Helpful Handford post you will see an example of the structure I use for all my posts. Each blog post begins off with an introduction, followed by a paragraph or two of information, sometimes there are photos or videos, and then the post ends with a conclusion. Unfortunately, this results in my blog posts looking and sounding a bit repetitive. I also think it makes the post less entertaining. I believe that I have adopted this approach, to structuring my blogs, because it is most comfortable and familiar for me. I naturally lean towards going with a structure I know and am familiar with, rather than changing it up each time I write a new blog post. As a result, I have decided to incorporate some new tools into my blog posts and the tool I am going to focus on is multi media. I am going to work to incorporate more multi media into my blog posts. This will force me to structure my posts differently and, in return, I think I will create posts that have more impact.
What work habits have I been least proud of, which do I need to work on?
In addition to doing a better job of proofing my work (an on-going goal of mine since grade 8), I’m actually trying to build a new work habit from scratch: time blocking. The truth is, I haven’t been time blocking as much as I should be. Currently, I do time block some projects but only to the bare minimum. All I do right now is write down what needs to be done and in what order it needs to be done in. This is the approach I took in my History In Five Handfords Pollution Project. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t actually let me get a sense of how much time a project might take. All it does is let me know what I need to do and it what order I should do it. This approach does not help me figure out when I should do it and how much time it will take me to get it done. Not practicing good time blocking also enables time vampires (unnecessary things that take up time) to steal my valuable minutes. So my second goal is to time block my upcoming or ongoing work and to do this on Sundays.
What good habits will I continue to work on and strengthen?
So far in this blog I have focused on habits I need to improve and habits I need to adopt in order to progress me learning. But there are also some habits I need to keep and continue to strengthen. One example of this is my enthusiasm. Enthusiasm helps push me to share ideas, contribute to discussions, and go deeper into my learning on a subject. One of the units where I showed the most enthusiasm this year was The Crucible. The Crucible is a four-act play set during the Salem witch trials of the 1600’s. I found this play to be really interesting and engaging. Because of this, I was very enthusiastic while we were discussing the play during our class time and it led to a more in-depth discussion about the play. So my third goal this year is to keep this enthusiasm and apply it to my future projects.
In conclusion, there are many things I can do to help progress my learning over the rest of the year: incorporate new tools in the writing of my blogs (like multi media), keep working on my proof-reading and make a commitment to weekly time blocking. I will also continue some of my good habits like having energy and enthusiasm for each of our units of study. With all this and more I’m looking forward to a great rest of the year.