Its come to the end of the year. Now its time to think back on everything I’ve done. I will be revisiting my mid-term goals, analyzing my achievements and fails, and looking back to see what I can improve on for next year.
“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.”
Goals
Throughout my grade 8 year, I had two main goals. To put maximum effort into all my work, and to become faster at righting down and conveying my thoughts.
lets tart with the first goal. I think I definitely improved at doing my best work, as I can see a difference from when I finished grade seven. In humanities, this is more permanent, as I will often spend quite a lot of time thinking about minor details in my final products. I usually put a lot of thought into my work for humanities.
Scimatics is a different story. Part of the goal was to put more work into my workbook pages specifical. Honestly, I didn’t do the best job with this. I often turned them in late, or incomplete, and they weren’t very good quality. My overall work for scimatics had pretty good effort though. It depended on the project. The projects I had interest in, I put a huge amount of effort into the final products. But the others, were mediocre. Next year, I’m going to need to work on this.
The second goal, I think I improved on the most. My abilities to write down my thoughts have gotten faster and faster with every project I’ve done. The amount of reflection we do in PLP is really helping me achieve this. Writing blog posts are a big part of that. If you compare my blog posts from the start of the year, to the ones now, it really shows the growth I’ve done on this skill. The first blog posts were really short, underdeveloped, and didn’t really explain my thoughts very well. My newer ones are in-depth, containing detail, and show my learning process with interest words and images.
Scimatics
My growth in scimatics is a bit interesting. The facts and concepts that I learnt in the class weren’t that big of a deal, seeming they were really simple, and mostly repeated stuff I had already learnt. The main thing that stands out about scimatics for me is the way it combines tech skills with the subject matter, and teaches stuff in interesting ways. It really helped me stimulate my brain to learn in different ways, and think outside the box. It taught me to use information in creative ways.
Something I need to work on in scimatics, is putting more effort into the non-creative based assignments, like workbook pages. I talked about this earlier in my goals. Its important that I get good at this, as it will help me with tests and assignments later on, outside the Scimatics program. Not all my assignments are going to be fun, and I should get used to buckling down and doing them with maximum effort. Part of the reason I struggle with this, is lack of motivation. When something is a bigger part of my grade, and allows me to learn, I usually put a lot more effort into it. With the scimatics workbook pages, its a lot of knowledge that I already knew, (in the case of the math workbooks) or its stuff that I don’t really need for my project.
Humanities
All of humanities has helped me grow. It makes us think deeply about myself, and the world around me, as well as teaching us about history, and other social studies importance’s. Humanities helped me become more confident in my work, and build my presentation skills. Having done quite a lot of peer critique, I learnt how to give constructive criticism, and how to take feedback and make my drafts better. Speaking of drafts, I also learnt how multiple drafts can keep improving your product. These are all great skills that I have been developing over my time in Humanities.
As far as my goals for humanities next year, I’m not to sure. There isn’t anything I struggle with besides the occasional homework assignment, but its only when I have loads of homework from all my classes. I’m going to see how the next year starts, and assess what I need to work on once I’ve settled into grade 9.
Other
There are some other skills that don’t really fit in any of the above categories, but I feel I should mention.
Teamwork
During my time in PLP, I got quite a bit better at working as a team. Collaborating has gotten significantly easier, after doing projects like DI. I’ve gotten pretty good at taking initiative when work needs to be done, and stepping up to be a leader. At the start of the year, I found it a bit hard to combine my ideas with those of my group members. Now, I can do that with ease.
Tech skills
Before PLP, I was pretty tech-savvy, as I used computers a lot. Most of the growth here happened because of the constant exposure to new apps that I needed to figure out how to use. my problem solving skills improved quite a bit.
Conclusion
This was honestly an amazing year for my learning. I built so many great skills that I will carry with me throughout my high school and post-secondary years. My goal for next year will be to always put the most effort possible into all my work. That’s all I have to say. This will conclude my Tpol, and mark my transition to grade 9. Thanks for reading!
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