Welcome!
It’s mPOL time of year again — and this time is for the last time: my last mPOL before I graduate. In this post I will be writing about my growth as a learner so far this year. I will then be presenting this post to my parents and a teacher in what we in PLP call an mPOL – Midyear Presentation of Learning – while I talk about my growth as a leaner and how I can sharpen my VMV (Vision, Mission & Values) so I can meet my learning targets by the end of the school year.
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What I’ll Cover
- My VMV (Vision, Mission, and Values)
- The challenges I’ve experienced in my learning this year
- The successes I’ve experienced in my learning this year
- My goals moving forward
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My Vision, Mission & Values
- Seeking Help: Can improve on this by spending more time reflecting on emotional well-being
- Resilience: This year has been pretty challenging academically, and I’ve been doing well overall at staying on track.
- Goals & Self-Assessing: I had not thought about my VMV since I made it since I’ve had so much else to keep track of, but focusing on this could help ensure I get the most out of my last four months at Seycove before I graduate.
- Enthusiasm: I started writing down the “why it matters” on some assignments, but then forgot to continue with all of them, however I do think that the ones I did write it on helped me.
- Contributions: I have done this through my preparation for various Socratic seminars.
- Helpfulness: I have done this through observing when peers are struggling and assisting, be that through lending a charger or helping to get a shareable Pages link.
- Balance: While I’ve been overall accomplishing much of my goals for this, I would like to find a bit more time to spend with friends, since it has been inconsistent for the most part.
- Self Care: I have been enjoying walks in nature with my friends or mom and puppy.
- Self Care: I have not had any spare time to research new stress-managment practices, and in complete honesty can’t see myself having any time between now and the end of the school year.
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Challenges
What is an example of a set back, or difficulty, you have experienced this year in your learning? What have you learned from this experience?
- Creating our horror short film, Shattered, had a lot of challenges involved with it.
- Expected challenges surrounding planning (kill scenes, editing techniques, script disagreements, etc).
- The main unexpected challenge was that every shot seemed to require ten minutes of arguing and everyone quickly got annoyed with each other.
- The locations were not exactly what we had pictured in reality, which required shifting plans last minute.
Although it was stressful to learn new skills and work through collaboration challenges under time pressure, I gained both practical production skills, as well as team work and time management skills.
- Production skills gained include video editing, shoot planning and shot lists.
- Team work skills gained include knowing when to talk and when to take a step back, being open to different perspectives, and thinking on the spot to change plans.
- Time management skills included estimating the duration of shoots.
One of the keys to persevering through the challenges was my goal that I had articulated to my peers and family at the outset of the project: to create the most professional, cinematic film ever made by a PLP class. - Because of this goal I was able to stay motivated despite the stress and setbacks.
- I also enjoy editing, so I was willing to put in extra hours to assist my peers and achieve the standards I envisioned for the film.
- All of this work paid off: I am very proud of the professional quality of the short film we created.
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Successes
What successes have you experienced this year in your learning? Provide an example for one of these and the steps you took to ensure this success.
Learning about a topic that I previously knew very little about: feminism.- I’m really proud of my feminism essay, which I put a lot of research and revision into.
- To ensure the successes of this essay I got several rounds of feedback from peers and parents, did research across a wide range of sources, and incorporated learning from other projects.
My dystopic art also explored this topic, and made bold statements about the control of beliefs over women’s rights.- Throughout all my work this year, getting feedback and opinions from others, like my peers, has been key to refining my work to be as impactful as possible.
- I feel like I have had a successful year overall thus far, and have been able to effectively balance task priority with other aspects of my life.
- This includes weighing how important certain classes are to me in order to prioritize other classes more since I only have so much time and energy to give.
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Goals for Rest of Year
- Work to improve areas of growth in my VMV
- Finish my final months of high school strong
Thank you!
Any questions?