My World at Matthew Moss

I think that "changing and learning" has to be one of the most important ELLI (effective lifelong learning inventory) skills because it basically means learning through experimentation and nowadays more people are learning from trial and error.

You will know when you are using this skill because you can see your work improve and you learn more as your mind grows. As you develop, you can talk about more complicated stuff and you celebrate your learning and are proud of who you are. For example, one time my class were given the task of drawing a picture of a cartoon character. We then critiqued each other's and pointed out helpful things to improve them. Now, knowing that you've made mistakes, you want to make improvements to do an even better picture. You can clearly see your learning changing and improving.

I know that my class have been using the changing and learning ELLI skill in other situations besides My World. For example, in PE we played table tennis one day and 97% of us didn't know the rules! Our PE teacher gave us a brief demonstration and sent us away to play again. Now, 87% were playing better but still not good enough while the other 13% knew what they were doing. Our teacher gathered us around again and told us that we needed to really work on our game and explained more things about table tennis. After that, 98% of the class understood absolutely everything; we could clearly see our skills developing and this shows changing and learning!

Another example of changing and learning is when I play badminton. I was already quite good at badminton but I didn't focus as much as I should have on the rules, which made me lose quite a bit. I then told myself "I will be the best" and I studied the entire structure of the sport and now I'm an even better player.

Changing and learning can develop in many different ways and things are never usually perfect; there is always room for improvement.

Next week one of my classmates will write about the "strategic awareness" ELLI dimension.

By Rohail Hamza, year 7.