on
mPOL 2024: not for a lack of effort
mPOL 2024
Welcome back to what is, statistically speaking, one of the least read posts of the year: the mPOL post. [1. This does not mean any less effort was put into this; my fingers can attest to that.]
“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 school year has been incredibly busy so far, yet it feels like it was only a week ago that I did my first mPOL. [2. And just yesterday that I did my tPOL.] However, I’ve already embarked on two field studies, completed countless projects (probably around 10 across all classes), and participated in two exhibitions since then. With everything that I have experienced, I have learned so much, both in and out of the classroom, and grown in many ways. Of course, there have also been areas of challenge, as in all of life. That’s what this post is for: to address the good, the bad, and the rubber ducky.
Let’s start at the beginning of the school year. In typical PLP fashion, we once again created learning plans. During this process, I chose some areas of challenge in my work that I had identified last year to focus my goals for the upcoming year on. Those areas being:
- Self-regulation
- One specific goal I set was to take breaks more often while working. While I still don’t take nearly as many breaks as I should, I have been taking a lot more, and using tools like Pomodoro timers, which I learned about in science, to try and not overwork myself.
- Agency
- In agency, another goal I set was to create realistic and achievable goals for my work, following the principles of making SMART goals I learned in the summer.
- This has helped me stress a bit less about my work, and actually be kinda sorta almost proud of my work.
While I have made a fair bit of progress with these competencies, the new year has brought to light another challenge. I do have solutions.
Teamwork (Communication and Collaboration): Out of all the projects this year in Humanities, Science, and Maker, almost all of them have had group work play a large role, from full-on group projects to simple discussion groups. My experiences with these projects have been mixed; while some group projects have been overwhelmingly positive experiences that left me proud of my team’s work, others have been more negative. These experiences have been influenced by a variety of factors, so here are some of the outstanding projects (in chronological order because it’s convenient both for me writing this post, and for the overall narrative).
A wonderful example of a very positive group project was Thrill Us! We had a chance to come up with our story for a short thriller and pick our own groups. This project went very well as my group divvied up the work pretty evenly, and everyone was both engaged and invested in the film we were creating. We were all very organized and supportive, which made my job as an editor much easier and allowed me to try new things and expand my skills. Overall, I think what made this project such a positive experience was the communication and investment in the project.
The next project was a bit of a mixed bag. Overall, this was a good project for a few reasons. First, while we weren’t allowed to pick our own groups, we were grouped based on which revolution we had chosen to work on, which meant that everyone had some level of investment in the project. Once again, we were fairly organized, with work split up very evenly, and communication was almost constant, which also helped a lot. Individually, I found it fairly easy to communicate my ideas for the machine, and we all made it through the exhibition without hating each other, which is a plus. Despite everything that went well, there still were some challenges in getting everything done on time, and I may have been trying to do too much, which made this project slightly stressful for me. However, it turned out alright, and I think we did,,, so I’d categorize this project as neutral good, not amazing, but not horrible either.
Now, finally, we have the big one, what might have been one of the most stressful projects in my PLP experience, DI.
DI has just completed, and I’m still exhausted from it. It was like an amalgamation of everything that had been a struggle in group work for previous projects. DI started fairly well, with everyone contributing a fair bit to the ideation process, attending meetings, and we were making good progress. However, after Maker ended and we had to organize our own meetings, things got a fair bit harder. Even though I was attempting to organize meetings and get people to do work, I often went a long time without hearing replies, and I was the only one working on our solution for a few weeks. Around this time, we also lost both of the grade 10s in our group [5. due to things outside of their control, no blame], which reduced our team to about 4 people, meaning I had to rewrite the script. In the days leading up to DI, my group once again started working, and we did manage to win 1st place in both regional and provincials for our category, but this was a very stressful experience that conflicted heavily with other schoolwork.
After looking through all of the group projects I have done so far this year (and a few from last year), this is what I believe my challenges with group work, and possible solutions, are.
First, one of the things I noticed that makes or breaks a group project is communication (obviously). I have already attempted to communicate with groups to some degree, but I think I could still communicate more in some scenarios. I also want to try and encourage teammates to communicate their ideas as well, check Basecamp/messages, etc.
Next, groups. Often groups are out of my control, so there isn’t much I can do then, but when I do get a chance to choose my group, I want to try and keep in mind not just who I want to work with, but who I will work well with. An example of a group of my friends not working well is in Science, where we had to make a mock news report. It took a while to get organized, and even when we did, we made slow progress, once again with a slightly uneven workload balance.
Third, I notice that often I find myself doing a lot of the work. This is sometimes due to teammates not communicating, but more often, I end up with a lot of ideas for what the end result should be, and it is sometimes difficult to communicate those ideas. This leads to me having to do everything because nobody else really knows what to do. For example, during the metaphor machines project, I created this video to showcase my idea for the design of the machine, which helped my team know what needed to be built, without me having to directly tell them.
Taking these three main issues into consideration, I have come up with the following revisions to the Communication and Collaboration section of my learning plan.
In group work, I will attempt to facilitate and encourage communication between group members. I will also try to clearly communicate my ideas, in whatever way is necessary to enable people to be able to understand them fully, so that they can easily modify and implement them. When developing ideas, I will “take a step back” and allow teammates to contribute equally to the creative process.
When choosing groups for a project, I will consider not only who I want to work with but also who I would work well with.
Teamwork is a large part of both PLP and life, and I hope that with these changes to my learning plan, I can make it a less stressful process.
This year has introduced me to many new skills, and I have tried to integrate my skills into my schoolwork.
One clear example of a skill I have learned and developed this year is filmmaking. Just as the still image dominated our projects last year, the moving image now does the same. I have posted 11 videos to my school YouTube channel so far and created many more for other small parts of projects.
Due to how much I have practiced this skill, I am now much more confident in my filmmaking skills and much faster overall. This has allowed me to integrate more advanced tools and techniques into my films, and made me much more confident in trying new ideas.
For example, the first video I made was the “What inspires me” video. It is a bit plain, but I still think it’s fairly good. However, it was incredibly time-consuming and difficult, and definitely was lacking some things (like music). Now, my most recent video is for the Frankenstuffies project, where in a bit over a week, I created a fully 3D animated short film. Now, there are still many things I would have liked to improve about it, but the bottom line that that I am constantly trying to push my skills. Even in a short-term project, such as the video created on the snow day, I feel much more confident and proud of my work. I have now started to use the skills I have learned in out-of-school projects.
Another example of a skill I learned that transferred very well comes from the Let’s Get Riel project. Although this was a short project, we did a fair bit and learned all about the history of Louis Riel, but more importantly, we learned how to write well. (joke) As I said in my blog post for that project, “While writing, the skills I learned on this project were incredibly useful.” and that is very true, not only for the project but that blog post, and the bits of this blog post I wasn’t sleep-deprived while The The The writing skills from “Let’s Get Riel” have been one of the most useful skills I have learned this year, even more so than filmmaking (shocking, right?), as I can apply it almost everywhere. It makes my life so much easier. I still want to try and use them even more heavily so that they become as much a part of my subconscious as how to do a chroma key in DaVinci Resolve. The Let’s Get Riel project was one of my favorite projects as the skills we learned are incredibly useful, and the final product was interesting to create. I am still pretty proud of my multi-paragraph composition [7. This feels really weird to say].
I don’t think I can talk about useful skills I learned through PLP without mentioning the goal tracker we made over the summer break. I’ve used the skills I learned for creating SMART goals for all sorts of projects, to make sure I actually have a semi-realistic scope. (doesn’t always work) Alongside that, the goal I created for starting a coding club was actually so helpful with keeping me motivated as me and Matteo filled out forms, tried to figure out meeting dates, and plan meetings. I honestly don’t think the coding club would exist without it, so I am very glad I followed through on the goal.
I integrate my own interests into my work in many ways, from blog posts to projects, to things as small as my workflows.
One of my main interests is coding, which I find very fun. I mention this in my Thrill Us video that “I also like to code and that’s where [many] of my ideas go towards.” I like coding because I solve problems, and one problem that I’ve had for a while is WordPress, namely the lack of customization and the fact that plugin functionality is basically disabled. To solve this problem, I came up with the idea to do it myself, which went great.
After a few months, I finally decided to go for it, and this is it!! It took some fiddling around with implementations, after settling on Jekyll with the Tale theme. It was a great exercise, and it comes with the bonus of now having a markdown version of every blog post I’ve written this year, which is cool. It also made me start using Craft to write my blog posts, and I like this WAY more, so that’s also a huge plus.
Another interest I have integrated into my work is 3D animation. I have been learning 3D modeling and animation since I joined PLP (I used it as part of my PLP application), and with all the film work this year, it the perfect opportunity to the perfect opportunity to the perfect opportunity to integrate that, and I find it really fun to be able to create something for school, using skills I’ve been developing for years.
Integrating my own interests into schoolwork, and using skills I learned in school outside of school, has been a great way for me to be more engaged with the learning, both because of what I can put into it, and what I might get out of it.
Going back to the learning plan, at the beginning of the year, I set my learning intent as this (organized based on how well I think I’ve done on each part):
I want to try and manage my time and energy more, as well as,** as well as try and reduce school-related stress. I’m going to do this by spacing out work and breaks more breaks more often** when working, as well as figuring out a mental system to keep track of all the things I need to do and what the priority of everything is. As well as that, I want to make sure my visions for projects are achievable within the timeframe for that project and that I can be proud of. I think this will help me create a better work-life balance. I also want to try asking advice when I need advice when I need advice when I need it, rather than overthinking it.
As you can see, some parts of my learning intent have been going pretty well, thanks to everything I’ve learned so far. However, other parts have still been difficult for a few different reasons.
First, while integrating my interests into projects can make them much more engaging to me as a learner, it can also lead to me being a bit perfectionist about the final product, which generally leads to me working a LOT to try and meet my own expectations. I do still think that I have been able to set more realistic expectations for myself for some projects, but for others, I get a bit too invested. I did have to realize my expectations were too high for the amount of time we had was recently, namely on Friday, right before DI. I had intended to do a lot of extra stuff for our solution, and I had created a plan that would (hopefully) allow my team to improve on almost everything that needed to be improved on, but as no one had responded to the messages I sent, or shown up to help prepare on Friday, I had to realize that I would only have time to make a simple backdrop to replace the one that had gone missing. It took a while to realize that there wasn’t really much else I could do, but I think it was a really positive learning experience, as I realized I don’t always need to do everything on my own, and that sometimes my expectations of what needs to be done may be a touch too high.
This brings me into the next point, that being teamwork. As I mentioned before, I have had some negative experiences with teamwork, which left me very stressed. This stemmed both from a lack of communication making me do a large portion of the work on my own, and not really wanting to communicate with my group that I was frustrated with them not working. (Also high expectations, classic)
Overall, I think that my goals I have set around group projects will help a lot in making team projects much smoother and more enjoyable for me. Hopefully, this will help with stress, and I will be less nervous to communicate issues to my group. Below are some changes to my learning plan to hopefully facilitate this.
I will remain invested in projects, and the learning they include but when integrating my own interests into my work, I will spend time thinking about how I can do so in a way that will allow me to keep my expectations
Finally, I want to talk about giving myself due credit. Often, when I am working on a project, I can only see the flaws in my work, which makes it very difficult to feel proud of what I’ve accomplished. However, looking back on projects during the creation of this POL, I’ve realized that some of my work is maybe not total garbage sometimes, kinda. The bottom line is that I want to be less harsh on myself, and be able to appreciate the effort I put into work (while still recognizing serious flaws, obviously). Welcome to the end of the post, here I have collected all the modifications I think I should make to my learning plan going forward.
Additions:
Going forward, these are the core competencies I will try to focus on improving.
Communication and collaboration:
In group work, I will attempt to facilitate and encourage communication between group members. I will also try to clearly communicate my ideas, in whatever way is necessary to enable people to be able to understand them fully, so that they can easily modify and implement them. When developing ideas, I will “take a step back” and allow teammates to contribute equally to the creative process. When choosing groups for a project I will consider not only who I want to work with but also who I would work well with.
Agency:
I will remain invested in projects, and the learning they include but when integrating my own interests into my work, I will spend time thinking about how I can do so in a way that will allow me to keep my expectations reasonable. If I feel as if I am attempting to do too much, I will try and ask for support either from teammates in a group project, or teachers (in the form of advice or an extension).
Revisions:
I want to try and manage my time and energy more effectively, as well as try and reduce school-related stress. I will accomplish this by spacing out work and taking breaks more often when working, as well as figuring out a mental system to keep track of all the things I need to do and what the priority of everything is and asking for support when I am trying to do too much. As well as that, I want to make sure my visions for projects are achievable within the timeframe for that project, but still something that I can be proud of (also, I want to try maybe being less critical of my work). I think all of this will help me reduce stress and create a better work-life balance. I also want to try asking for help and advice both from teammates and teachers when I need it, rather than overthinking it.
I will also take the feedback I receive during my POLs and use that for revisions. Thank you for reading/listening, and goodbye.