“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.”

This is the pledge that we are required to state at the beginning of our presentation. It serves as an introduction to what we will be presenting during our MPOL. These conferences are specifically designed to allow us to reflect on our learning, while also providing our parents and teachers with an update on our progress. Over the past year, I’ve grown a lot as a PLP learner, but also as a person. This is a program that lets us take responsibility of our own learning, really allows us to thrive. I’ve learned a lot about myself and others, as well as gained a bunch of new skills that I can apply not just to school, but to the rest of my life. In this presentation, I will show what exactly I’ve been learning in PLP, and that I’m ready foor whatever gets thrown at me next. Lets get into it!

Throughout the course of the year, we’ve done numerous projects that have all been designed to give us new skills and opportunities to collaborate with others. A great example of this is a project called metaphor machines. This project, like many others, was a huge challenge of our group’s resources and mental capacity, and really made us use our critical thinking skills to come up with new ideas and strategies to get our machine to work. 

This project revolved around giving a new form to the idea of a revolution. We used a number of different mediums to understand our revolution, the final product being a Rube Goldberg Machine. Creating it took weeks of planning, testing, adjusting, and decorating. Our first keystone was an infographic of our revolution. Our group was assigned the Meiji Revolution from Japan, which was full of awesome battles and technological advances. It took place during the 1800s, and was focused on bettering the economy and governmental system. Preparing for the final product was difficult, as there were so many moving parts, but we spent a ton of extra time outside of school making sure that everything would work. I don’t think that I’ve never worked with a group that dedicated on a PLP project, and it showed in our final result. This gave us an opportunity to create and present an amazing machine that I’m still proud of to this day, despite the hardship and numerous trials it took to get there. 

A second influential project that we did this year was Let’s Get Riel. This was a Humanities project in which we learned all about the influential Canadian figure Louis Riel. Riel was a Métis leader, as well as a scholar and a resolute. His story is an important yet tragic example of someone being sacrificed for the greater good. 

I think that through this project we learned how history is written by the winners, and how it’s important to look at other sides of a story. This is important to understand not just in school, but also in life. He was the founder of Manitoba, and was a man who wasn’t afraid to stand up for his people. However, in the eyes of the settlers, he was seen as a dangerous rebel who needed to be taken down. 

We learned a valuable lesson from this project about how differently something or someone can be seen depending on who’s doing the person perceiving them. This lesson is applicable in other projects, as well as for other aspects of life. 

Finally, the most difficult endeavor of PLP in the past semester by far, Destination Imagination. This wasn’t a project so much as a competition. I wanted to include DI because I have learned the most by far from this than any project this semester. I was thrust into a mismatched group of people that I didn’t get to choose, and had to make it work and create a catapult, as well as a story and performance to go with it. This all had to be done according to a long list of rules with a ton of regulations. Although we managed to get through it and finish out performance with few mistakes, it really was a challenge.

This was by far the most challenging thing I had done all year due to the difficult nature of working in groups. However, I learned so much about storytelling, engineering, and learning to take responsibility for your own actions, as well as the actions of others. There was no one in a leadership role specifically, which made it very difficult, so at the end I kind of stepped up to fill that. 

We had about four months to work on this, which gave us a disadvantage to other schools who had started sooner. However, we were determined to do our best, and worked relentlessly. Our story was about a man named Dan and his dog Cuddles, who got hired to NASA even though they weren’t qualified. The final script was difficult to make, but was something that I can say I’m proud of in the end.

 To summarize, PLP is pretty difficult. It’s full of challenging group projects, tedious assignments, and new challenges. But, like I always like to say, where there’s a will, there’s a way. I went into this program with high expectations, and I feel like they’ve been exceeded. It’s now been a year and an half since I first joined PLP, but I still remember my first day. Even though there will always be new challenges to take on when it comes to high school, I feel more ready to face them now that I have experience with this program.

As I was writing this, I noticed how much I’ve improved in this post as opposed to the one I did last year. I feel like this program has allowed me to grow as a learner, but also as a person. This is important to me because I always strive to do my best, and I feel like with this PLP, I can do that now, and in the future.

Thank you for reading, and have a great day!