“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.”
Why do I feel ready to go into the next grade?
It’s June, almost summer, and the school year is about to be over. It feels like the year went by really fast, but here I am at the end of grade 11 with many challenging, unique, and exciting projects behind me. Some of these projects were definitely successful, but the lessons I learned in some of the less successful ones prepared me just as well for the next year. This post is really about the valuable things I’ve learned that I can take with me into grade 12.
At the beginning of the year I set goals for what I wanted this year to look like for me. I wanted to create work that I was proud of which communicated my critical thinking and creative ideas. I wanted to challenge myself and extend my work from what it has been in the past.
The first reason I can think of for why I’m ready for next year is that I definitely have grown as a student and a person this year. If I did all of this year’s projects for a second time, I would do all of them (even the ones I’m really proud of) completely differently from the first time, only because I know so much more than I did at the beginning of the year. Evidence of this can be found within my projects, so lets take a closer look at some of them…
Communication and Research: Spring Exhibition
The project for the spring exhibition is still fresh in my mind, and I can think of so many things from it that I’m really happy about. There’s a couple specific things that exemplify how I wanted my learning to look like this year, and continue to next year.
Talking to all the people that come to the exhibitions is something that’s been intimidating to me in the past, as someone who isn’t the most talkative. However every time we have an exhibition, I understand more how much I can learn from those conversations. This proved to be very true at the spring exhibition where I was showing people my portraits of community impact maker, Gordon Smith. I found myself not just talking to people about the project, but actually having interesting conversations with people who had met Gordon Smith, or had some sort of connection to what he did. I did a lot of research for this project, and took advantage of Craft more than I ever have this year.
I credit a lot of why my conversations were so great, to this research I did. I talked with one person about Gordon Smith’s house and it’s architecture, information I never included in my final product but knew about from my extensive research. Gaining so much from just communicating with people at an exhibition was something I couldn’t imagine in grade 9, 10, or even the beginning of this year. This shows I’ve grown in the communicating core competency.
Another reason I think I was happy with this project was that I chose a topic I was passionate about, and communicated it through something I love too. Painting the portraits didn’t feel like homework even though it was, because I love to paint. Gordon Smith impacted me as well as the community, which really kept me interested in this project and made it easy to talk about it at the exhibition. In class we’ve been talking about incorporating our interests and personalities into our work, I think this is a good example of this and I’m excited to do this more in projects next year.
Asking Questions & Revising
This year’s schedule brought tutorial time, which ended up being a good time to ask for feedback, work on stuff, and show that you wanted to create extending work. Throughout the year I would sometimes take this opportunity to go in early when I was unsure if I was meeting goals for my learning, needed to revise my work, or simply had a question about a project. One time I went in to revise a writing assignment about Shakespeare’s Macbeth. I’m glad I took the time to revise this, not just because I got a better grade on it, but because I proved to myself that I could better communicate the ideas I had for the assignment.
At the beginning of the year, I spent less time asking questions and asking for feedback in tutorial or in class. One project I could have done better on if I asked for more feedback was on persuasive writing. In “change my mind” I tried to persuade my sister to delete TikTok but was unsuccessful, but if I had asked more about what I could change or improve, I could have been more persuasive.
Over the course of the year, the more I communicated with my teachers about my work and my goals, the better my work was. I know that if I want to succeed next year, I will need to do this as well.
Macbeth- A Team Effort
When I think of an example of team work and collaboration from this year, I immediately think of our Macbeth Movie project. It was a big project where all of us worked together to create one thing.
Working as a team was a challenge for the class as a whole, I noticed some people feeling responsible for way to much work on the movie and other people feeling like they didn’t have enough to do. Especially since we had to apply for the role we wanted, this project gave us the responsibility to figure out for ourselves how we could play a part in making the movie. I made sure I was participating by thinking about how my skills fit into the project, and even taking the creative risk of agreeing to play an acting role in the film. I think this project strengthened my collaborating skills for similar projects that we will do next year.
Socratic Seminars
Socratic seminars are class wide discussions about different texts. The purpose of these were to come to conclusions about the text that would be useful for the work in our projects. There were several of these this year, some about a book and some about movies. Socratic Seminars are something I was less familiar or comfortable with than other things. For me, the pressure to say something in the discussion makes it actually harder to do that. I was aware of this throughout the year, so I tried to be very prepared and familiar with the text before the seminars. One seminar that I felt very prepared for was one about the movie “Amadeus”.
I had taken notes that I tried to build on at home after writing them in class. In this seminar I also was surprised that one of my literature notes from earlier in the year was useful. I had a note about the enlightenment period because my research about Macbeth led me to that topic (I know those topics don’t seem connected but somehow they were), so I felt extra prepared to participate when one of the discussion prompts was about this topic. When I felt less prepared for a Socratic Seminar was during one for the movie “Gandhi”. I think my research an notes didn’t go as deep as I wanted them to, and I didn’t have a sophisticated understanding of the movie. After that particular discussion, in class we talked about what Socratic Seminars would look like next year. Although these aren’t my favourites, it feels like an exciting challenge to do better in seminars next year, and see how I can grow these skills.
Next Year!
So by presenting you this post, I’m explaining why I feel like I’m ready for next year. Based on the work I’ve done, I really do feel like I have grown and am ready for the next grade. However, the fact that this is my last TPoL before an FPoL, and that next year I’m going into grade 12, still feels unreal.
I see a very big change in my communication skills over this year. I see myself finally figuring out craft, and how to use it to connect my ideas and make amazing projects. I see skills I could have payed a bit more attention to and look forward to sharpening next year. I see how I have worked with other people this year using the skills I have. This year, I wanted to create work that I was proud of which communicated my critical thinking and creative ideas, and I wanted to challenge myself. I think there are many moments from the year where I have done this, I’ve had a successful year and I look forward to seeing what I can accomplish in grade 12!