Wow has this been a long year! So much has changed and I feel like I have learned so much more this year than any other year before. 

“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.”

Agency  

Agency is the sense of control that you have over yourself, your sense of independence and ability to have responsibility over your actions. I chose to focus on this subject because to me it feels like one of the most important characteristics to have and work on. I feel that I exc el at some parts of having Agency but I also struggle in some parts. In this section I feel that I am consistent in taking responsibility for my own learning and actions, setting goals and self assessing and accepting feedback and making revisions. What I need to work on firstly, is seeking help from my teachers when I don’t understand a topic, I usually go to my friends and peers when I need help, but it would also be beneficial to go to my teachers more often too. Secondly I need work on providing my work on time/earlier, this will give me time to make revisions if needed and hopefully will help me boost my grade from a %90 to an %100. Lastly I need to work on showing more resilience, I tend to find myself giving up when projects get hard or when I don’t understand something.

Communication and Collaboration 

I wanted to focus on this success behavior because this is the behavior that I have put the most time and effort into working on over the entire course of my high school career. But this is the year I think I have taken the biggest stride and made the most progress. In this proficiency I succeed with being a reliable team member and providing feedback for my classmates. I need to work on communication with my teachers and staying on task with my iPad. I’m not terrible with either of these things but there is definitely room for improvement.

Self Regulation 

The last proficiency I’m going to talk about is self regulation. In this proficiency I feel that I succeed in setting boundaries and having good balance between my school work, personal life and extra curricular activities. I also feel that I succeed at identifying sources of stress and being able to cope with them. Where I need to work on, is my focus, as I said in the last section, I can sometimes find myself getting distracted, especially when I’m sitting in class with my friends. Iv’e decided that if I need to get a lot of work done then next year I’m going to start finding another place to work to help eliminate any distractions.

My Top 3 projects of the year

I based these of not which ones I necessarily enjoyed the most but the ones where I learned the most and feel like I grew my skills the most from. 

Romeo? Romeo! 

This is by far one of the projects that I expected to go the worst for me, because I knew that we would be doing some form of acting which is something that I dislike to do and I consider myself extremely bad at. Despite that this ended up being a project I enjoyed doing even if I found it difficult at first. The products that we ended up with were way above my expectations and I’m proud to have presented the video we created.

Cray Cray Yay Yay

This project we went to Seattle for and created a PechaKucha that we presented to our parents. My PechaKucha was on Music of Seattle. This project was something I felt very uncomfortable with and made me feel very stressed because public speaking is something that I struggle a lot with. The reason that I put it up here is because I learned so incredibly much about public speaking over this entire project. It has made other speaking projects feel so much easier to do because I’ve learned the process in which I personally need to get prepared to feel comfortable and do the best to my abilities. 

Back to the future 

This project taught me so much about myself, It made me think about my skills, weaknesses, my habits and my personality. It really taught me about my learning habits and what I need to grow on as a person. This project also helped me start to feel empowered in my skills and gave me more confidence in both my school life and home life. 

Honorable Mentions: Pea’s in a Podcast 

Success’s 

Communication 

The growth of my communication skills has been a big success for me. I feel so much more comfortable doing group projects now and I feel that I have significantly improved on doing my part and even more in groups. Before I used to feel so uncomfortable taking any form of a leadership role but now I feel able to if needed and Im going to try to work on that more next year. 

Understanding myself 

This year we have done so many projects where we have to delve into our personal characteristics, habits and personalities. We’ve had three projects that fully focus on us. New Year New me, Back to the Future and Who Are You Gonna Be? These projects are one of the main reasons that I decided to join PLP because I wanted to focus on not only what I was learning in class throughout school but also what I was learning about myself throughout school, because High school is the times when we grow the most as people.I have not only learned about my flaws and fails as a person but I have learned what makes me great and unique, which sometimes all of us need to be reminded of. 

Failures 

Being aware of how we fail is such a difficult thing for so many people, but it’s also so important to think about. When we think about our failures is gives us a chance to change and improve. So I’m going to talk about some of my biggest F.A.I.L.’s this year (First attempt in learning). 

Punctuality

Being on time is personally what I think my biggest fail this year is. I struggled handing in assignments on time and I found myself procrastinating a lot this year, especially getting closer to the breaks when I was becoming burnt out. I need to get better at balancing my down time with my work time, because I found myself working very hard and succeeding at lot at the beginning of the year and after breaks but as the year on my work and preparation would go down on a decline. Next year Im going to work on my overall consistency over large periods of time. 

Thanks for listening to my TPol and I can’t wait for a great next year!! See you in Grade 11!!

This project gave me the time and resources I need to get to really know myself on a deeper level. Through out this project I’ve learned so many qualities about myself that have helped me grow my overall confidence in day to day life. Understanding things like my personality type and main features has helped me plan out a future that I can fully see myself happily living in. I’ve realized the importance of growing your skills and working on your weaknesses when you younger and still have many chances to make mistakes and grow from them at every corner in your life.

During this self discovery path I did many activities and learned so much about myself. I narrowed down my goals and creating a set of paths that I am going to follow to complete my dreams both close (like getting my drivers license, saving up money for further education) and far (like becoming a biomedical engineer and traveling the world). Writing down my goals and getting to physically see them has helped me see what I need to focus one in my life. I want to start working which is why I’m glad that we created a resumè for this project, I got to create something that I am going to use in the real world.

If you have ever heard of a show called Shark Tank then you may recognize the activity we did. Each of us had to present a pitch to a panel of people (1 or 2 community members) but unlike shark tank we presented ourselves as potential candidates for an organization or workplace, during a 7 minute pitch. While preparing this pitch I found myself diving even deeper into my hobbies and interests and how they affect me as a person. I started off my pitch with a brief introduction of myself and then went on to talk about my main selling points. Making this pitch taught me a lot about how I work under high pressure situations.

 This was a project that stressed me out a lot because I struggle with public speaking so I spent a lot of time preparing my speech. I wrote myself cue cards and repeated my speech over and over in my head, but when the time came I still was terrified. I was convinced that I was going to mess up. The moment I got in front of the panel and I started speaking I felt the fear melt away. I knew my material well enough that I could just speak.

Pitch

I got a lot of good feedback from my panel member. I learned about how I need to present myself (good posture, nice clothes, look presentable) and I need to speak clearly. It’s important to find a good balance between having no confidence and having too much confidence, be able to talk about your weakness along with your strengths. I tried to do this by saying how I was going to improve upon my weaknesses and how the job could help me grow. Overall this experience has really helped me grow my confidence especially in professional settings and in front of potential employers.

The driving question of the project was “What strategies can I use to maintain balance in my life and support my own well-being?”

There are many strategies that I can and do use to balance my life between school assignments, extracurricular activities and leisure time. The first strategy I use is to create a to do list  in things, instead of just writing the task down, I split it into several steps that make it easier to complete over a period of time. For example, if I had an essay and it was due in 6 days, I dedicate 1 day for each paragraph of the essay and on the last day I would edit it all. This has proven very helpful for completing my homework to the best of my abilities because I give myself more time to complete work to perfection or as close to it as I can. Things is another app that has proven to be one of my favourite apps time and time again. It helps me remember assignments and makes it easier to plan out my time well. This project we focused on clearing our backlog, and we learned how to be more organized in our lives and we became our new selves for the start of the school year . 

The first thing we did was reflect on Grade 9. We reflected on the good, bad, shrug and ugly. In the black I have all the educational/school things that happened and in the red I have all the stuff from my personal life. I felt that a lot of things actually went well last year and reflecting on it made that feeling tangible.

During this project we researched on how to increase happiness in our life, we watched a Ted Talk called “The Happiness Advantage” I will link the video Here. This video taught me about how Happiness is internal and not the product of external gratification. You need to be able to be proud of your accomplishments to truly be happy, instead of constantly pushing yourself and forgetting how much you have already accomplished. Being truly happy and content with your life helps you focus better while working and it allows for you to create your best work. 

The main part of this project was about organizing both our, real life and our digital life. The first thing I did was organize my calendar. I created time blocks for all my classes, and I added upcoming events, I also colour coordinated the events, purple for school, blue for extracurricular activities and pink for specific assignments. 

 I reorganized my things app and worked on getting into a habit of always updating my things when I got new assignments. In my things app I added different sections, Homelife, Maker, Humanities, Art and Spanish. In each of sections I can put my to-dos for that subject and then quickly be able to access them. 

My next task was to organize my iPad files. I organized all my documents into different folders. I made folders for many of my app documents like pages, numbers and keynote. I also made folders for my old projects, personal photos and important documents. 

I had noticed that a lot of my notifications had been building up, especially in my Mail app. I went through all my notifications and cleared out all my junk mail.

I realized that my problem with all the notifications is that I get a lot of junk mail, so to solve this problem I used the V.I.P option that the mail offers. Now I can check all my important mail as soon as possible and when I have extra time I can go through the rest. 

I also needed to clear my mental backlog. This basically means that I need to clear my mental stress from work, life and school. Some tactics I came up with were…

1. Before I go to sleep, I’m going to write my goals for tomorrow in a note pad.

2.Before I leave to go to school, I’m going to take five minutes to meditate/relax to help   my brain focus when in class.

3.Plan for every Sunday night to have a period of time in the evening for “Self-Care”. In this period. I can do whatever I want without being stressed. Some examples of self-care are having a bath, exercise, meditate or watch a movie.

4.Ask for help when I need it. Sometimes we can’t handle everything ourselves and that can be stressful, so it is important to have a back-up plan and be willing to ask for help.  So, if I need more time for school, I may need to ask for help in other areas of my life.

All these systems are good for a temporary fix, but I wanted these systems to be something permanent. So, I came up with multiple ideas on how I could continue these habits for the rest of my high-school career. Every night at from 6:15-6:30, I’m going to take time to organize my things, emails and messages, and I’m going to make sure I’m up to date on all my assignments.I also have a plan of continuing my progress growth by journaling on Mondays,Wednesday and Fridays throughout the year so when it’s time to reflect on the year I have detailed journal entires of my growth. This will make projects like the Mpols and Tpols significantly easier.

You might be wondering what “Progress growth journaling” is. Well for the entirety of this project we have been keeping a journal, each day of the week is a different topic. 

Mondays- Meditation (We would do class meditation and then write our thoughts about it)

Tuesdays- Act of Kindness (We would have a task every Tuesday to do something kind in our neighbourhood, after we completed it we would reflect on how it made us feel)

Wednesdays- Exercise (We would do a class workout/walk and we would reflect on how it changed our emotions and affected our day)

Thursday- Journaling (We were given a random topic every Thursday and we would have to write about it)

Friday- Acts of gratitude (We would reflect on our days; I would write about what made me thankful and what made me happy that day) 

After this entire project I have decided that there are certain systems that I want to keep using and some that I do not. I want to keep using the things app because that worked extremely well for me, it helped me remember my assignments and I felt way more organized. Another tactic that I want to keep is updating my calendar. This helped me stay on top of events especially when I had a busy week. The one tactic that I want to get rid of is journaling every weekday, I still want to keep a journal that I write in once or twice a week but not every single day. 

This project has helped me with my organization and agency. I have been able to take better care into my learning and have been better at not procrastinating my work. I do struggle with remembering my work and I want to work on my time management, this project has given me a start on this journey and hopeful if I can keep these habits up I will be able to prosper.