Jovan Bilkhu – Block B May 22, 2023

CORE COMPETENCY REFLECTIONS #2

Personal Awareness & Responsibility

Well-Being
• I am learning to take care of myself.
• I understand my decisions and actions can affect me.
• I use a variety of strategies to manage my personal well being.

Self-Determination
• I am personally responsible, self motivated, and can advocate for myself.
• I can express my needs and seek help when needed.

Strengths:
1. I am comfortable in my own skin. I know who I am, and I have self-control in the decisions that I make in life.
2. I am also a strong advocate for fitness and health. I believe in taking care of my body, what I put into my body and my overall
health and well-being. Eating healthy is important to me, because I know the benefits of building a strong body and the long
term effects on my health. Having this personal awareness, I can set health and well-being goals to achieve optimal health.

Areas to improve:
Self-regulation and self-motivation – I struggle with maintaining my motivation when faced with challenging tasks or setbacks. Such as
completing my assignments. I know not getting these assignments completed on time will jeopardize my grades. My parents are on my
case every day. I am implementing strategies to break down my large goals into smaller and achievable goals by getting support from my
parents and teachers. I aim to stay motivated and focused on my long-term school and career goals. I can only do this when I see a
connection between what I am learning and how it will impact my long term career goal.

Social Responsibility
Contributing to the community and caring for the environment
• I am aware of my community and environment and work independently and collaboratively for the benefit of others.
Building relationships
• I have positive peer and intergenerational relationships.
Valuing diversity
• I value diversity, defend human rights, advocate for others, and act ethically in all my interactions, including online.

Strengths:
Building relationships –
1. I have positive peer relationships. I have a strong core group of friends. I know what it takes to build solid relationships. I used
to be surrounded by groups of people who negatively influenced me and would make poor choices that I did not personally and
morally agree with. Knowing myself, I realized that I did not want to associate myself with these people any longer. I was
comfortable with removing myself from this circle of friends. I have no regrets about doing this, as now I can say that I have a
circle of friends that share the same values I have.
2. I know the importance of contributing to the community to create a safe and clean environment. My friends and I have
volunteered our time and participated in cleaning up the Parks in our community. We walked around and picked up garbage
and debris. I collaborated with the event organizers and rallied my friends from various schools in the lower mainland and
made a commitment to spending a couple of hours of our time to help clean our local parks.

Areas to improve:
Contributing to the community: Knowing the importance of volunteering, I would like to do more of this type of paying it forward when
it impacts our environment. Every effort goes a long way in keeping our community and parks clean.
Critical Thinking
Analyze and Critique
• I can analyze and make defensible judgements, draw conclusions and consider a variety of perspectives.
• I can analyze and critique my work and my learning.
Question and Investigate
• I can ask good quality questions, gather relevant information, and come up with well-developed conclusions.
Develop and Design
• I can explore and create new ways to represent my learning around a variety of problems, events, issues, and needs.
• I understand the purpose for my work and consider my audience.
• I can assess my progress.

Strengths:
1. There have been several times in my life when I have solved problems by looking at things with an open mind and the
willingness to see things from different perspectives. With this mindset, I can ask questions and analyze the information being
presented to me, knowing that everyone has a different opinion and sometimes personal agenda.
2. Being able to break down a problem and work through the root cause of the issue versus taking things personally, therefore
analyzing how the decision will impact me and others.

Areas to improve:
While I have strength in keeping an open mind and willingness to see things from a different perspective, I am sometimes challenged
with not being as adaptive as I should be. This typically occurs when I am faced with an issue in a new environment and not knowing
how to manage the situation and sometimes overthink or overlook different perspectives and rush into making conclusions or act
irrationally. Don’t believe everything you hear or think.

Creative Thinking
Novelty and Value
• I can create new and unique ideas that may provide new perspectives that influence how people think about topics.
Generating Ideas
• I can use the environment around me, including others, and my unconscious mind to generate new ideas.
Developing Ideas
• I can take my ideas evaluate, develop, and refine them and make something productive out of them.
• I can persevere, and understand that failure can be productive.

Strengths:
1. I possess a wild imagination. I am able to come up with new ideas and think outside the box. This means I possess the upper
hand by having a different perspective on relevant topics given to me, compared to others around me.
2. When brainstorming ideas on a specific topic. I can often times come up with ideas relating to that topic relatively easily and
share them with my peers, to then receive feedback.

Areas to improve:
Sometimes I tend to surround myself with people that think like me. It is good to get different perspectives from diverse people that
come up with new ideas and work towards building a connection with those that are not like me or don’t think like me. Being open to
this concept will help me in my future.

Communication Skills
Collaborate to plan, carry out, and review
• I can work with other students to plan, inquire, and solve problems.
1. Connect and engage with others
• I can listen, learn to contribute meaningfully to discussion and debate, consider
different perspectives, and build consensus.

Strengths:

1. I am easy to talk to and am able to connect easily with others, especially when sharing the same interests and passion. I am an
active listener and enjoy hearing others perspectives and opinions. I seek to understand the different ideas. Connecting with
 others, my friends in particular. I can often relate to them and my experiences or will connect better with those that
understand me.
2. I am good at defending myself or always questioning everything, more so when having debates that I am passionate about and
receiving multiple inputs from peers and family members.

Areas to improve:

I will sometimes struggle to clearly articulate and organize my thoughts and ideas. While I have a lot of great ideas, organizing my
thoughts in a way for people to understand can be a challenge. For examples my capstone project, putting all of my ideas together to
form a well structured capstone project.

Personal & Cultural Identity

Relationships and Cultural Identity
• I understand that culture is a broad concept that includes things like my geographic
region, nationality, sex/gender, age, ethnicity, sexuality, language, and religion.
• I can define myself in terms of my relationship to others and to the world.
Personal Values and Choices
• I understand what is important to me.
• I understand how what I value has and will shape my choices.

Strengths:

Relationship and Cultural Identity

1. I value diverse people and I know that everyone has different personality and thoughts. Our differences make us who we are.
2. I know what is important to me. My family values are important to me and that were instilled in me from when I was young.

Areas to improve:

Cultural Competence - I value and respect different backgrounds, cultures and beliefs. I work at learning about other cultures and
customs. I appreciate the diversity. However, being South Asian, our culture is rich in diversity. I want to learn how to speak our
language and communicate with my grandparents in Punjabi. To enhance my cultural awareness, it is important for me to appreciate
the unique background of my family, my culture and my heritage. To achieve or improve this, is to attend more multicultural events and
have more discussions with my parents and my grandparents. Maybe even attend Punjabi language classes