​Anjali Phadke's P​ortfolio

Here at the Dayton Regional STEM School (DRSS), growing is an inevitable ideal waiting to happen for every single student. To start off, every single teacher has to prepare us for college. One category of skills needed for every college student is Presentation Skills. Because the culture of DRSS is Project Based Learning, most of the time, these projects include presenting the project itself or the final product. Presenting is a part of life at DRSS and I am so glad that the school and the teachers have helped me master that skill. But, by Presentation Skills I don’t mean things like posture or speaking. By Presentation Skills I mean the content is presented well. Presentations are tough if the content is not what a person is used to, and I am glad to say that through the evidence from classes: Biology, Wellness, World History and DEP Chinese, my growth for the 2015-2016 year is in Presenting Difficult Content.

To start off, I would like to talk about the projects in which I have presented. First off is the Genocide Project for World History. Genocides are a tough topic to talk about. In most cases, women are raped, children are killed, and everyone is hurt. The point of this project was awareness. There are some genocides that people know about, like the Holocaust, but what about the Congo Genocide? What about the Armenian Genocide? What about the Rwandan Genocide? Why aren’t these conflicts talked about and educated on? That was the point of this project. We as students needed to bring awareness to conflicts that our fellow colleagues wouldn’t hear about normally. Each group chose a Genocide, created an 8-10 slide presentation, and presented the PowerPoint to fellow classmates. For this presentation, my group chose the Bangladeshi Genocide.

So, where did the growth come in for this project? Well, whenever I give presentations, the presentation is always about a happy/concerning topic like biology or healthy living. But during this project, I had to present about a genocide in which people of my own religion were persecuted, and killed. So, when I came across this as a topic, I immediately knew I wanted to learn about it. The specific evidence comes from the presentation itself. The content I used on the slide shows that not only did I learn about this genocide, I understood the problems that came about after this genocide, and why it was being downplayed, “For the longest time, Hindus and Muslims had rocky waters because of the Partition of Pakistan. Hindus in East Pakistan were stripped of their rights, any uprising they made silenced by the monsters that were the Pakistani Government at that time. That is why there are a lot of Bengali individuals from Bangladesh that are Muslim. Most of the Hindu Bengalis were killed off.” Another example is on one of the last slides in the PPT, “In closing, to the hundreds of thousands or even millions of Bengali Hindus, intellectuals, minorities, men, women, and children that were tortured and killed, education is the first step of recognizing a genocide. It is up to us to show Pakistan, and any other country that may still downplay or just straight out deny this genocide, that 200,000-3,000,000 lives were killed. They were massacred, beaten, raped, disfigured and any other form imaginable. All for wanting freedom, their own land to be free.” I actually grew during this project because I had to present about a topic that really broke my heart, further showing me that I will have to present about topics like this in the future, and practicing like this now will definitely help me in the future.

What about other projects? Well Biology and Wellness went hand in hand during the Healthy Living Project! First of all, let me explain the project first. We first started this project by talking about the driving question, “How we can reduce the risk of Obesity in the DRSS community?”. We then went into deep research about macromolecules such as lipids/fats, carbohydrates, and proteins. After this, we chose one nutrient, (we chose vegetables) and started brainstorming ideas for the event based on the data that we saw. When we chose our event, we created a proposal for the event. It was a PowerPoint that explained the nutrient, why we needed it, the barriers that our event would help, final arguments, data, our budget for any food, etc. We presented this in front of our teachers so they could either approve or deny the proposal. After this we started preparing for our main event. Because our event was a game, with paper cutouts, a paper board game, paper handouts, and paper take home items, there was a lot of work on the computer as well as cutting. Our group divvied up the work so that we could accomplish what we needed to. For example I worked on the recipe cards and the food. After creating all of the items we needed we printed them out, cut them, and prepared everything we needed to for our event! During the event, we educated the audience, let them play the game, and then gave them food to taste.

Where does the growth come from? Well, throughout this whole project, our teacher was really stressing the importance of “interactive event.” Yes, there was the education aspect of the event, but the interactive aspect was the most important. So, after our group chose vegetables (because not 1 person ate the right amount of vegetables), we had the idea of “Veggie Tables” from the beginning! We would start by educating the audience (parents mostly) about vegetables, why they were important, why we needed them, and the amounts you needed per week. After this, we would have a game, where there was a big chart with days of the week on the top and the category of vegetables on the side. There is one person’s intake of vegetables for the week, and the object of the game, using the cutouts, was to tweak the amount so that the person had the right amount of vegetables they needed for the week. My strength came from doing this whole event for the first time. In my experience at STEM, I have never actually had a presentation that was interactive with the audience. The closest thing I have come to this is having a presentation where the whole group took turns looking at my work. The evidence of this strength is the content presented and the presentation itself. Because I have never really accomplished an interactive event before, all I really have evidence of is the after. All in all, I grew simply because I was pushed into the deep end with no prior experience of how to swim. When we were educating the audience, we took some slides from our original proposal presentation, and changed/tweaked those so we could educate the audience instead of propose the event. This shows the development of the strength because it shows the before and the after of our event. Since the actual directions of the game were present on the education slide, the presentation proves as evidence. The actual chart with the cutouts, and the take home items are artifacts as well because those items are the items that made our event interactive. From proposal, to education, to interactive event, all of these items show that I did in fact grow in the ability to present an interactive event.

What about my last piece of evidence? As a starter, before we could actually start this project, we had to learn the classroom expressions first in Chinese Class. Our teacher gave us the rubric for the project which included a sample script that we could model our scripts on. She also showed us a sample video so that we could see what props and such we needed to include. After that, we were set to create our scripts. Each group chose a lesson (each lesson focuses on one aspect, like classroom expressions, making dates, time etc.) and based the vocabulary off of that lesson. The script was created so that one person could be the teacher and one person could be the student. It was an interactive script because we had to use the white board to write characters as well as the book itself during the presentations. We were to create a final script that we would give to our teacher to grade. She graded our scripts and fixed errors so that we could memorize that script for the final presentations. After practicing for a long time, our teacher made us randomly pick numbers that decided when we would present our skits. She also made us pick whether we would be a student or a teacher. After that we presented!

Where does the final piece of growth come in? Our drafts of the script as well as the final video show the development of my presentation skills. Our drafts of the overall script show how I overcame the challenge because they show how we went from a lower level to a higher level of vocabulary in a couple of drafts. Also, the video of the skit shows that we did in fact memorize our scripts. First of all, we asked our teacher to translate phrases that we did not learn in Chinese yet. For example, one of them was 给我一个例句. This sentence means “give me an example”. We didn’t learn example before, so my teacher told us. I also used my book for some of the vocabulary we hadn’t learned yet. For example, 我喜欢上网, which means “I like to surf the internet” is from the book (because I was blanking on what surf the internet was in Chinese). Also, instead of just saying thank you and good job, we added long questions for the teacher and student to ask like, 今天是几月几号 and 宿舍是什么意思 (what day is today and what does dormitory mean). This added a higher level of vocabulary to our script. We solved the problem of memorizing the script by first reading the characters over and over again and then we tried to say all the lines in the script by ourselves because we didn’t know whether we were getting the teacher or student part. After that, we practiced at home and we presented the skit. I turned out to be the teacher and we got an A on the project! All of this helped my presentation skills because I was able to buckle down and create the script, which allowed us to prepare, which helped my presentation.

All in all, this year, I have grown in a lot of classes, but these three projects really show my growth in Presentation Skills the best I am so glad that I had the chance to go to this school and really learn how to improve my skills!