It’s January, and you may know what that means- MPOL time! This is my third Presentation of Learning, and this time, I want to take my blog post in a different direction. This year, we have a new PLP course- PGP. Part of PGP is about the  Habits of Mind, which help us to become better learners. MPOLs are about telling the story of your learning, so what I want to do is tell that story through a couple of the Habits of Mind we’re focusing on in Grade 9.

 

The first Habit of Mind I’m focusing on is Thinking Flexibly.

This past term, I’ve used this Habit of Mind in a few different projects, like our Exhibition project, Chemistry Stories. During the exhibition, Amelia, Sam, Jackson, Caleb, and I transformed a room into a setting from our animated Chemistry videos. However, we had to combine our story with another group’s story. This meant that both groups had to cooperate and think flexibly about our stories and the other story. We had several characters that we had to cut from both stories, and we made lots of edits to the finished stories. 

Another example of a project that I used the Habit of Mind Thinking Flexibly in was one of the first projects we did- our video recreation. I worked with Anika, Kyle, and Jason to recreate this video, and we had to think flexibly because we all had different ideas on what we thought would look the closest to the original. I think this project seemed like it had very set rules, but there were way more options on what we wanted to do, like where we wanted to film, what costumes we wanted to use, and what angles to shoot from. This kind of deeper level applies to a lot of our projects. 

The other Habit of Mind I’d like to focus on is Taking Responsible Risks. This term, I’ve used this Habit of Mind in several projects, like our Metaphor Machines. I worked on my Metaphor Machine with Kyle, Niklas, and Amelia. To make our machine, we had to take a lot of risks, like spray painting taped portions of our machine and background to create patterns. This Habit of Mind was super helpful, because the entire concept of a Rube Goldberg Machine is risky, and ours was especially, because we had a lot of parts that were very wide, and it was very tricky to attach them to the board- we had to be very careful and calculate where everything would go. 

 

 

I used the Taking Responsible Risks Habit of Mind in a few other projects, but I think one of the ones that truly shows where I want to progress as a learner was was the Live Event Video, where the Live Event I chose was a rehearsal of a play that my dad was in- ‘The Farndale Avenue Housing Society’s Townswomens Guild Dramatic Society’s Production of ‘A Christmas Carol.” The video requirements told us that we needed to include an interview with someone there in our video. However, I didn’t think that would be quite exciting enough, so I decided to interview my dad- in character! He played the bumbling stage manager, Gordon Pugh, for a failing production of ‘A Christmas Carol.’ He talked, in his trademark Cockney accent, about a variety of things, from how excited he was to finally have a part in a play, to the other cast members. This creative turn made it a much better video in my opinion, and my goal for progressing as a learner is to learn from that, and try to find the humour and creativity of future projects.

Thanks for reading my blog post!