“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 TPOL. 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, and 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 for whatever gets thrown at me next. Lets get into it!
Resilience
Throughout this past year, we’ve worked on a number of different projects that bore new skills and chances to collaborate with classmates. One example of this was “Rise of the Frankenstuffies.” In this project, we created fictional characters that were quite unique in origin. This project took a lot of resilience and time management to achieve, as it was a multi tiered feat. We began by physically constructing our stuffy, and giving it a history and personality. I’d never sewn a stuffed animal before, so this was an opportunity to gain new skills. Next, we wrote a short story, which would be turned into a video later. Mine was about about a failed lab experiment who works with a group of activists to save his friend from the evil scientists.
The construction of the video for this project was difficult not only in the amount of time it took, but also because the animation tools we had access to were janky and tedious. Despite all of this, I feel like my resilience is the reason I was able to complete this project. I definitely learned a lot through this process, mostly that you can’t leave everything last minute and expect it to work out.
Citizenship
The second project that I’d like to touch on was our unit on World War One. This was our most recent project, and easily my favourite one of this semester. Throughout this project we learned all about the events of the First World War, as well as how it’s shaped our country and it’s citizens. Because of this, I feel that it relates most to the citizenship competency. By learning about the history of our country, we learn more about ourselves. One of the main motivations for soldiers is a feeling of Connection to their country, also known as nationalism. We did an entire project on this topic, which you can find on my blog.
The actual creation of the comic was difficult not because of a lack of ideas, but because of a lack of time. We were essentially given a week to create all of the art for and construct our final comic before our exhibition. We had already created our storyboards at this point, but with a twenty panel minimum, we were really rushed for time. I had to spend essentially all of my free time working on this, and although I was able to create a truly spectacular result, I believe that this was a time management issue that was not a fault of mine. I learned from this project that even if you manage your time properly, you still have to make sacrifices to combat unforeseen conditions that are out of your control. Still, I believe that my dedication to this project gave me a sense of citizenship due to my relation to my peers’ struggles. I feel like this shared experience helped to bring us closer together as a class.
Outside of school time management
Lastly, I would like to talk about Destination Imaginaiton, and how time management was our key to success. You probably already know what DI is. A big fancy competition with performances and challenges to face. However, this event has an incredible amount of unseen effort and time was spent producing our final product. My group was focused on engineering, and we were tasked with building a catapult, and encorporating it into a story. Because DI stretched beyond the time we had in class, we ended up spending a lot of our free time on the project. Because we hadn’t managed our time properly, we struggled with our first DI competition.
After the disaster that was our first attempt in learning, or FAIL, we decided to regroup and recreate our project. We were more organized our second time around, and the pressure to do well was greater. I took initiative in bringing our group together outside of school time. It was a bit like herding cats, but I believe that we were able to achieve a stronger result after putting more time into our work.
To wrap up, I would like to talk about my overall growth this year. Grade nine was full of all kinds of new experiences, people, and projects. Like any year, it had it’s ups and downs, but I feel like I’ve come out of it a changed person. It’s scary to me to believe that in a few short months I will be re entering this school as a grade ten, but so is the way of the world. I believe that I still have a lot to learn, and a lot of new experiences to gain. Thank you for listening, and have a wonderful day!