mPol 2025

thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my learning, I am also accountable for my learning. You can expect me to give an honest and accurate evaluation of my learning, and we will discuss strengths and areas for growth. Thank you in advance for your feedback and time.

The above is my attempt at typing out the mPOL declaration from memory, something that I made sure not to check since last year’s tPOL. Now, here’s the actual declaration:

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.”.

Honestly, I’ll take it. It’s not perfect, but what is?

Anyways, let’s get into this, I’m about to prove my learning, and I’m going to prove it well. How? this graphic:

Why a bar? while, this bar represents my progress towards the goals I set at the beginning of the year. I’d estimate it’s about 80% full, as there are a lot of things I see as actively better but a few things that are the same.

How have I shown growth as a learner so far this year?

When I was doing my VMV for my pre-pol, there were three main things I wanted to focus on. First, I wanted to be more prepared and organized, so I could better get on top of my work ¹. Secondly, I wanted to try and be a strong leader in group work and become a more effective communicator. Last, but not least, I wanted to try and work on what I did to be an effective and impactful learner outside of my classes.² These three areas roughly align into the success behaviours of:

1. Preparation
2. Communication & Collaboration
3. 3

Even though I didn’t Identify these in the “Values” part of my VMV, they still are present in the writing itself. I went through and annotated my VMV to include my perceptions of how I’ve progressed through all of this, in relation to the original text.

So, let’s elaborate a bit. First, Preparation. This year, one of my biggest priorities was being more organized with my work, as last year I had identified there was a good degree of challenge getting work done if I don’t know what to do where to find what I’m working on, or when it’s due. ³

I’d never been much into Things, but luckily my newfound interest in having a to-do list coincided almost perfectly with craft’s overhaul of their to-do system, which was perfect for me! First, I had all my to-do’s in an easy to reach location. I have craft on all my devices, so I’m never more than a few clicks away from seeing what I have to do. Another benefit of using craft is that once I’m at my tasks, I’m also where my work is.

Craft organizes tasks based on what page they’re on, which fit’s really well with another strategy I’ve been using to keep organized: Masterpages. I started messing around with these back in grade 9, but this year I really committed to using this as my main organizational system. It’s really simple honestly, I have a folder per class, and one document per project.⁴ Within the docs, I just have different sections for each stage or category of a project ( usually around 5 sections, like: notes, assignment, blog, etc… ), and of course, a tasks section.

Like task management, here’s another thing I should have been doing since grade 8: Actually blocking out my classes in calendar

Now, moving towards collaboration, Last year for my mPOL, I created a set of “guidelines” for effective team work, and while I didn’t really get a chance to test them that year, there’ve been some opportunities for team work this year, so how did I do with my goals? For this section, I’ll be using Ology of apology and DI as my examples, as they cover a lot of scenarios. One thing I made sure to do in all my group work this year, was to create channels for people to easily share work and ideas. When discussion for planning and such was happening, I tried to get input from everyone, and not shut people down. I also tried to make sure everyone knew what to do, so nobody was ever working on nothing.[^5]

Ology of apology

• Created team planning page
• Got ideas from everyone during discussion
• Tried to manage group’s time, divvying work

Destination Imagination

• Created organization and planning system
• Prompted discussion
• Tried to direct team attention towards most important topics during work

For my last section, I’ll talk about two things. First, is coding club. During the first few months coding club was going pretty well, and although we took a bit of a break during DI season, I still think we have a good footprint. This isn’t directly related to PLP classes, but I would like to continue to grow and improve the club. Next, Is my TAing. Despite being somewhat intermittent, It’s been great to help with all sorts of stuff, from helping with the grade 8’s to bulk-downloading amazon books. [^6]

Last but not least, is opportunities for growth. First off, while I’m much more organized which has made prioritizing work a fair bit easier, I still need to get better at starting things at a good time, and spreading out my work a bit more proportionally. I’ve had a few too many things handed in past the due date than I’d like recently, and for a lot of them I just forget to submit them because some other thing comes up. I also think that I could benefit from creating some more complete habits around doing work, maybe I re-read atomic habits. Other than that, there’re are the usual culprits of perfectionism, procrastination, and all that, but overall I just need to keep gradually getting better. Overall I think i’m doing alright, but there’s always room for growth.

Anyways, that’s my mPOL for 2025. I tried to keep it short, but slightly failed. Thank you for your time.