It’s the end of my PLP 10 year! That of course means I get to create a TPOL (Transitional Presentation of Learning). If you are new to reading my blog, this is where I reflect on my year and tell the story of my learning. This year I definitely learned a lot about the topics discussed in my classes, but more importantly, I learned a lot about myself. In this post, I will go over these things that I have learned, discuss evidence from my year of work, and talk about my goals for PLP 11.

This year there is a bit more of a formula to my TPOL. This doesn’t mean I will compromise any personality, it just means that I will be referring back to my “Success Behaviours” more often. Success behaviours are behaviours I am expected to meet by my teachers and peers. These behaviours contribute to me being a good student. My teachers created a form for me to fill out which I could use to self evaluate myself on these skills. This is my self reflection:

As you can see I am very consistent in some categories, but less consistent in others. If I could highlight every skill, I would, but that would take way to long and be very boring. Here are some of the skills that I chose to highlight in this post:

Agency – Resilience

Agency is an important category. It is likely the most important category when it comes to being a self-sufficient learner. My agency defines my ability to take ownership over my own learning, seek help and feedback, and set goals for myself. These are all categories I believe I do well in. I like the sense of control I have over my work when creating original work but am never afraid to ask for help or feedback. I also like to set myself goals to think about during my projects.

However, these are not the only categories. The ones I wanted to talk mostly about is completing evidence and more importantly resilience. Resilience is a skill that I often have a hard time with. When something becomes difficult for me, I often find it very hard to keep pushing and I often resort to procrastination. This leads to evidence not being complete on time or to the standard I would like.

A very good example of this is my most recent project, Back to the Future. In this project we explored the steps it would take to become the person we want to be. This project also had a very large focus on how we present ourselves to the world. The main product for this project was a 7 minute pitch followed by a talk with two people experienced in hiring. This was not a problem for me and I think I did an amazing job. The problem came after.

The second part of this project was to be presented at our exhibition. The main thing we presented was ourselves. The idea was that we would chose 1 quality about ourselves that we thought was our superpower. This could be a skill, a trait, or a job we wanted to pursue. Unfortunately I am still very overwhelmed by my future and all the decisions I will have to make. This made this task incredibly difficult for me. 

We had less than a week to prepare and I spent way to much of that time trying to come up with something that I could use. Every time I thought of an idea, it became more difficult for me to decide what to. I decided to go with leadership. Even after I got an idea, it was still difficult for me to decide what I wanted to do. I decided to create a game and a poster.

Because of all of the overthinking and shutting down due to lack of resilience, I had barely any time to deliver my final product. That combined with last minute changes to my resources, and it was a disaster waiting to happen. I was very unhappy with the way my setup looked. However, I did have good writing and a very good game to go along with it that got some great engagement.

  • "Cow"

In the future, I want to work on my resilience so that I don’t shut down when I have a hard time with my work. This will allow me to be a better student in the long run.

Engagement – Enthusiasm

Enthusiasm is something I have talked about many times before. I consistently reflect on the fact that when I enjoy my learning, I create better work. On the self assessment form I put always for the enthusiasm box because I believe that I always am enthusiastic about my work. I believe that this is the driving factor behind all my most successful work. For this TPOL, I have narrowed this down to two different skills that both must work together in the creation of all of my most successful work.

  • My Passions
  • My Enjoyment
My Passions:

My most recent humanities project, Chasing the Canadian Dream, captured the idea of incorporating my passions into my work very well. This project was very open ended. We had to create a book that discussed how Canada became what it is today after WWII. There were 6 main categories, one of which was culture. I chose to not make a book about overall Canadian culture and instead make it about Canadian music. Music is something I am passionate about and I love exploring new music genres and artists. I thought this would be an amazing thing to incorporate into my book.

The book was a very big undertaking. Took a very long time and a lot of thought, but because I was learning about something I was genuinely interested in, I found it very easy to keep working until I created something I was proud of. I was really happy with the work I put into it and the product that came out and I enjoyed myself the whole time.

My Enjoyment:

The most fun I had creating a piece of work this year was my Romeo? Romeo! video I made for humanities. I created this video with two group members. One of which, Cam, is one of my really good friends and also one of the people I work the best with. We were assigned to make an adaptation for a certain part of Romeo and Juliet. We were given the worst one. We were given Romeo’s banishment. I say that this is the worst one because it is very difficult to pin down as one certain part of the play. Instead of sticking closely to to book, we took the relevant themes and created a completely new story.

This was so much fun. I really enjoy filmmaking and I liked working with a close friend to create something that we could be proud of. The entire process of filming was filled with so much laughter and excitement for the final product. What we created turned out great and was a very memorable thing to create.

Overall my level of enthusiasm is extremely important to the quality of my work. This is something I want to continue to push myself on with all of my projects so that all of my projects can be like my Canadian Music book or my Romeo and Juliet video.

Preparation – Outside School

I want to focus on improving my preparation. Preparation is very important as it is what allows me to have the tools I need to be a successful learner. However, I think I am often inconsistent in this category. There are two subcategories within this and I think I need to work on both.

In the at school category, I think I fall behind because I am often a minute or two late to some of my classes. I am usually never late enough to miss anything, but it is a bad habit that I would like to work on in the future. I am also unprepared once and a while which is a major problem when it does occur. I want to eliminate these two problems in the future.

In the outside school category, I want to talk about my PGP project from the start of grade 10, New Year, New Me! In this project, we learned all about a ton of methods we could use to help our productivity, we learned about Things, Calendar, and many other methods to keep our lives free of clutter. This would help us set goals, manage our time, and accomplish everything I wanted to. This project had some amazing tips that I loved learning about.

Unfortunately, I have not been putting this into practice as much as I would’ve liked. In the future, I would like to take everything I learned, and start incorporating these back into my life. I think that this would make me a much more organized person and I would be able to focus on my learning much easier.

Reflection

This year has taught me a lot about myself. In reflection, there are many things I need to work on. The three topics I just touched on are the most important three for me:

  • Being resilient
  • Being enthusiastic
  • Being prepared

If I focus on these three topics in grade 11, I will set myself up to be even more successful than I was this year. This year got to experiment with a lot of new ways of showcasing my work such as podcast, video, or book. I also got to learn about new topics that I hadn’t learned about before such as discrimination in BC, World War II, Romeo and Juliet, and more. I reflected on the kind of person I want to be and how I’m going to get there. I went to Seattle to learn about what it takes to change the world. All of these experiences have led to a very memorable and fun PLP 10 year. As I move forward into PLP 11, I can only hope for another year like this.