My Grade Nine tPOL
Hello and welcome to my grade nine tPOL. “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.” Grade 9 has been such a great year so far, and it has both felt similar to grade 8, but also distinctly different. I feel like grade eight and nine have felt different in the sense of my ability to utilize my iPads tools to create things that will assist me in my learning. My growth overall as a learner has been throughout grade eight and nine, but also uniquely defined in each grade.
This brings me to the three success behaviours I have chosen to highlight this year, which are goals & self assessing, reflection and balance. I will break these down into the negative and positive aspects of my proficiency with each one of these standards, and give evidence of this through my projects.
Success Behaviours – Reflecting
Success behaviours in PLP are not only the standards you live up to as a learner, but the core values of what it is to make the most out of learning something. We were told to do a checklist and mark our proficiency in each category of each success behaviour, and success behaviours are things like agency, engagement and preparation. These are then categorized into more specific terms like the ones I have chosen, balance, reflection, and goals & self assessing.
I chose these because I think I have grown in them distinctly in grade nine. Starting with reflection, I think my ability to reflect on something and use that powerful time of thought process to break it down and truly understand what I got from it has grown exponentially in grade nine. With projects like our Rocky Mountain High in Alberta, I have been able to utilize such opportunities like travel and make the most out of what we learned there.
Because Alberta was such a fast paced and quick way to take so much information in, the only way I was able to process, output, and remember most of it was through immediate reflection and making a blog post. It was the project that made me good at reflecting. In Alberta, I also learned another large pivotal thing that I took back with me, which is interviewing.
Going up to random people and making them be part of your project and trying to both make them understand what you are doing, and showing evidence of you learning through it is difficult. After a couple interviews, I was pretty used to it and enjoyed it even. Reflecting on all this was the only way I could keep most of the skills I learned on the trip, and the only way I can reflect again on it now.
Success Behaviours – Goals & Self Assessing
Setting goals and reminders for projects is one of the only ways you can get them done on time when you have a buisy schedule, and things can fly out the window of your mind pretty easily. This is something I still particularly struggle with, and I can overestimate and underestimate my own abilities for projects as well. My ability to self assess in the sense of being on the same page with myself for what I need to do is not great, and is something I need to continue to work on.
I’m now trying to look at every project from the perspective that I do not know as much as I think I do, and I need to allocate my time right when the project is assigned. This is so important for me because I can sometimes underestimate the difficulty of a project, and I will then use that as an excuse for procrastination.
On the flip side, I have been setting these goals, and for quite a few projects I’ve felt on top of the workload. One good example of this is the Metaphor Machines project in which we studied revolutions, and my group studied the Haitian revolution. I think my digital proficiency in creative use of my iPads tools starts to grow from this project, as we had to make things like an infographic for the project. Our job individually was to create these infographics on our group assigned revolutions in order to both showcase our learning of the revolutions and share our researched knowledge with other group members.
This was so we would be on the same page as we truly had to understand the dimensions of a revolution and specifically the Haitian revolution for our next task. Our next job was to metaphorize the Haitian revolution into a Rube Goldberg style machine, which was a task far from anything I have done before. Our groups metaphorical use of different contraptions for our machine was really good, and our knowledge of the revolution shined through.
The actual engineering of the machine was a different story. I would say that there could’ve been a lot more done for planning by my group for the exhibition, but luckily the engineering done for the machine itself was not the main part of the criteria for our project, the metaphor was. During the exhibition, as our machine was not working, I was able to quickly self assess myself and how our group was going to execute conveying the revolution properly, and we pivoted.
Our ability to define the revolution by our metaphors got greater because we had to verbally explain what was happening in the stages of the revolution in far more detail as we manually moved the machine. We were able to turn our failure into success with far more comprehension of the goal of the project through the fact that we knew the story and stages of the revolution so well. We only knew the revolution well because the other group members and I set goals through weeks to do research and figure out how to create powerful and effective metaphors for something as complex as a revolution.
Success Behaviours – Balance
Now we are on to the final success behaviour, which I have chosen to be balance because of how necessary it is in my life, and how I can crash and burn in its absence. Balance is more than just a need to find a point between your in school and out of school tasks and obligations. It is a harmony and a groove I constantly strive to achieve and a pendulum that is constantly tilting to one side, no matter how little. I feel like this grade nine year has been both a struggle and a success for me to find balance between, with more social connections with demands of time, but also a year of PLP under my belt and a more experienced idea of how to handle my buisy life.
Balance is something I will continue to work on throughout grade ten, and I have made changes in grade nine regarding balancing time that will grow in grade ten. I have allocated more time towards homework, and worked on strategies like little goals of progress throughout the week, and I try to suppress my habit of instead doing it all last minute.
I think going into grade 10 I will use apps more like Things and my calendar, because it is becoming more evident to me that without detailed and dated reminders I tend to think I have less homework than I really do. One good example of my use of balance is the Destination Imagination section we did in early spring and winter.
As you know, Destination Imagination is a competition that we did regarding basically a play of sorts, with props, and categories like art, science and technical. My group did art and as I spoke about it in the earlier mPOL this year, It was probably the most impactful and largely successful experience for me in PLP. I learned how to balance school and out of school better because of the workload that came with DI.
I did have to sacrifice some outside of school things to go to tutorial every day and do lots of work on the props, but it all payed off. If we have DI in grade 10, I will be very ready for it, and DI has also set me up for other difficulties and challenges in grade 10. DI Is probably the largest factor and reason why I will be ready for grade 10, regarding all three of these success behaviours and the entire spectrum of success behaviours.
Final Words
Now we have covered all three success behaviours that I think internalize my progress made this year most, but also my challenges that I will continue to work on. These success behaviours and others will be my main focus for next year and I can say this is how I have successfully set myself up for grade 10. I am so exited to see what other opportunities for success and growth PLP has in store for me. Thanks for watching!!
