Presentation of Learning

Hello,

In this blog post I’ll be talking about my Presentation of Learning (PoL). In Innovation Lab at the end of the year, all students are required to do an oral and written presentation to show how the student improved throughout the year in terms of the Vision of the Graduate, which is a set of standards that all Greenwich Public Schools students strive to achieve. The oral presentation consisted of roughly 5 minutes of talking about achievements and improvement this year, followed by 5 minutes of questions by the teachers. I thought that the PoL was beneficial to review my good and bad experiences of the year, how I have improved, and what I still need to work on.

Here is a portion of my written PoL:

I have improved through the capacities of the Vision of the Graduate throughout my Sophomore year. With a total of 12 capacities to choose from, it was difficult to evaluate which capacity I had improved most in. After lots of revision, I chose the following four capacities: my response to failure and success with reflection and resilience, my critical interpretation, evaluation, and synthesis of information, my collaboration with others to produce a unified work or heightened understanding, and my personal conduction of an ethical and responsible manner. I will start with my response to failure and success with reflection and resilience.

During the first quarter of the year, I found STEM quite easy, almost elementary. I underestimated the workload of Inlab. With Inlab’s long term, hands-on project philosophy, it was easy to slack off at the beginning of the year, and very hard to catch back up with the work. About a month before Christmas break, I found myself buried in a hole of work, feeling overwhelmed and hopeless. Fortunately, the teachers of Inlab were very supportive and helped me catch up. Needless to say, I wouldn’t make that mistake again. I used this lesson of spacing out work throughout the rest of the year. As a very argumentative person, I generally do things differently, and as a result, I learn a lot of valuable lessons ‘the hard way’, meaning that I try to cut corners on projects, and then end up learning that I shouldn’t have. My favorite example of this is my 8th grade science fair, when I built an electrolysis oxyhydrogen generator, which almost killed me. The only thing that prevented the ¼ inch thick plastic generator from becoming a pipe bomb in my driveway with me standing right next to it, was a small safety mechanism called a bubbler, which bubbles the gas in a way that if it blows up, it doesn’t also ignite the main generator. This fun yet almost deadly experiment taught me to wear safety equipment, something that I generally disregarded before the mishap. Instead of following common directions, I decided to try doing things my way, which ended up almost injuring me.

…

My third capacity, which is my collaboration with others to produce a unified work or heightened understanding, was measured by how much better I was at working in groups towards the end of the year versus the beginning. Sometime during the beginning of the year, we were surveyed as a class to find out if we prefered working in groups or individually. I immediately voted that I greatly prefer to work alone, since as a control freak, I work better when I have all the responsibility. It is also superior since it makes the finished work more uniform and fluid. I can go on for hours about reasons why working individually is superior, but there is one compelling reason to me that argues that working in groups is more beneficial. This reason is that later in life, there will be many times that I will have to collaborate with others, not only to produce a unified work or heightened understanding, but to have money to put a roof over my head and feed myself. The chance to be able to practice working in groups has challenged me to go outside of the my comfort zone and make myself work in groups, so that I could prepare myself for a possible future career. By challenging myself to work in groups this year, I have improved a tremendous amount in my inclination to work with someone else, and also learning how to split the work and make sure that it still turns out well.

This is my last blog post of the year! See you all in the fall!

-Graham