Troy LaPore Presentation

 This post will be the seventh in my Field Experience Reflections series; if you want to read the six others you can find them by clicking on the three vertical lines in the left-hand corner of your screen, and then clicking the page entitled Field Experience Reflections, or you can just click this link. In case you need a refresher on what exactly this series of post entails here is the required context:  I will be using these posts to reflect on my field experience by taking the concepts I learned about in special guest presentations and then thinking about how I might apply them to my own teaching. Alright, now that that little introduction is out of the way, let’s get to the reflecting portion of tonight’s entertainment.

As some of you (might) remember, in the second post in this series, I had mentioned that my class was invited to watch a guest lecturer, Kathryn Rich, speak in another class of my professor’s because we had previously read an article of hers. Similarly, we were invited to watch a different guest lecturer, Troy LaPore, speak in yet another class of my professor’s. Although this time, the invitation was extended not because we had read an article of his, but rather because his topic relates to our class. Troy LaPore is a fourth and fifth grade teacher in the Peekskill school district whose presentation explained the ways his classroom fosters a learning environment that promotes autonomous and self-regulated learning. To the causal reader this might not seem particularly applicable to a course entitled “Teaching with Technology,” but a recurrent theme throughout the semester, and which I mention in this post, has been that teaching with technology is never only about the technology, or the tool, that you use, it is about how and in what way you use or implement that technology/tool. In this case, LaPore highlights how a class’ learning environment is, according to Dron’s definition, a technology that, when used effectively, can encourage student engagement and motivation. ^[1] Even without these connections to my course I would have enjoyed being able to watch LaPore’s presentation because it was filled to the brim with interesting, new, and thought-provoking information and advice.

From the get-go, LaPore highlighted the importance of creating routines and procedures that you, the teacher, can work with and manage because (generally) if it works for you it will work for the students as well. I appreciated that LaPore acknowledged that the procedures and routines that he uses were honed over the course of about five years because I sometimes forget that—as LaPore mentions later—it will take a bunch of trial and error before I find the perfect setup. LaPore also highlighted throughout his presentation that it is easier to have students work at their own pace and self-regulate once you know both the kind of learner that they are and, perhaps more importantly, the kind of person that they are. On the one hand, to me that seems quite obvious; after all, it’s not like we suddenly pop into existence as full human beings with our own likes, dislikes, and opinions once we exit the public education system. On the other hand, I know that, unfortunately, plenty of people do judge students based on superficial identifiers whether that’s their socioeconomic status, gender, race, disability, or test scores, thereby making LaPore’s insistence that effective teaching is easiest/possible when you ignore all of that an extremely important part of this presentation. Similarly, while I already knew or thought that we should never call something “easy” and that the strategies for teaching students with disabilities and emergent bilingual learners (EBL) work well for all students, I appreciated hearing him reinforce these points. ^[2]

LaPore, and my professor’s, discussion on learning environments was very enlightening because I feel that while I know what that concept is in a broad sense, they both gave me a more detailed idea of it. ^[3] My professor began the recording by recounting his class’ previous discussion of learning environments and how it is not a linear concept, but rather a complex phenomenon that shapes what goes on within it. LaPore built on that idea by remarking that it is more effective to allow students to have freedom until they lose it and, in that vein, when you start setting up routines on the first day of school it is easier for students to follow them throughout the year because that is all that they know. The learning environment is a communal thing meaning that as long as you, the teacher, set it up then the students will work with you. My professor’s comments in relation to this topic were a bit of an eye-opener for me because I had not previously thought about learning environments in this way: he stated that with learning environments, there is no such thing as treading water or existing in stasis. Either learning is occurring, and students are moving forward, or it’s not and students are move backward. Another way to put that is that environments are productive or non-productive, never in between. That really hit it home to me both the power of the learning environment as well as the importance of actively trying to foster one, even if it takes you a couple of tries to get it right.

One last part of LaPore’s presentation that I’ll mention, although I could go on for a while, is the fact that students need to struggle because people need to fail and know what they did wrong before they can move on and do something right. Obviously, you can’t let the student get so disheartened that they give up or get overly frustrated, but they also need to push themselves in order to grow. I would like to think that I would also push my students in the classroom because everything that LaPore was saying about this I agreed with. However, when LaPore was talking about examples from his own classroom I thought about what I might do if I had been the teacher and it made me realize that letting the students struggle can be hard to do. I think it’s important that I recognize now that this might be a weakness of mine, but I also liked hearing about those specific instances in the classroom because I think it helped me clarify my thoughts in a way that a more theoretical stance might not have. ^[4] Moreover, LaPore’s belief that unless the students are drowning or about to drown, the content does not need to be modified, there just needs to be more support from the teacher was an interesting perspective. I was going to say that most of my education classes mention modifying curriculum for students, but don’t equally emphasize that sometimes all students need is extra support, but then I remembered that that’s what scaffolding is, heh. Perhaps that still suggests that my education classes don’t discuss scaffolding enough. Regardless, as I wrote above, LaPore’s presentation was very insightful and I learned a lot about creating a learning environment that fosters self-regulation and lets students move at their own pace.

Onto the last section, how might I use this in my classroom? I’m not sure if I currently know how I might use this in the future. I say that mostly due to what I know is expected of the secondary English curriculum. LaPore breaks his math class into groups and the structure of his class generally goes as follows: a do-now that’s a precursor for the mini-lesson, said mini lesson, and then independent work (or, depending on the group, supported/guided practice). I’m not entirely sure how I would translate this to an English class when we need to read novels. What I mean is, I can see myself utilizing the groups for projects either about the literature we read or about other topics that end up fortifying ELA skills, but I’m not sure how I would use them when we are reading, say, Macbeth. ^[5] Perhaps I’m thinking about this too literally, and I could just use the techniques LaPore talks about when group work is applicable. Yet, I’m totally satisfied with that because I really like the idea of self-regulated and self-paced learning. I feel like maybe there is something I’m missing that would help solve my conundrum, but of course it’s escaping me right now.

Part of the problem, I think, is that when I think about teaching ELA, I think of learning as a truly social process—if we’re talking about tough topics vis a vie literature (e.g. the ethical and moral implications of writing narratives in Heart of Darkness or in 1984 or in Dracula, etc) there is only so much we can glean from the text by ourselves because we are trapped by our own experiences and perspectives. There’s a thing in ELA instruction called window texts vs mirror texts, and they mean what you probably think they do: window texts allow you insight into a person’s experience that you would otherwise never be aware of while mirror texts show us visions of ourselves whether that be us as individuals or us as communities and cultures. ^[6] If we read window texts by ourselves there’s only so much growth that can be accomplished, in my opinion, because unless the book is a nonfiction treatise on the issues it tries to deal with, then the person could easily finish the reading without ever having fully questioned their own beliefs or thoughts. If we read mirror texts by ourselves there’s also only so much growth that can be accomplished because we cannot see both how it provides a window for others or how it might leave some people in our community out even as it includes us. What I mean is, no one text can be perfect, but assuming that our experience with something is the one and only experience can be just as harmful to other people as ignoring that the experience happened in the first place. ^[7] Apparently, I have a lot of thoughts about this, but also no concrete answers. Bringing it back to the original point, I would like to use what LaPore talks about in my future classroom, but I’m not entirely sure how.

As always, thanks for reading!

 

 ^[1] Dron as in Jon Dron, another guest lecturer that I wrote about. The link in the previous sentence already brings you to that post, but here it is again just in case.

 ^[2] For those who were not there or did not watch the recording, LaPore suggests we say that something is “simple” or “fair” instead of easy. Moreover, I use EBL because it highlights the strengths of students in this group while also explicitly valuing their native language and culture. I learned the phrase from the new book by Carla España and Luz Yadire Herrera entitled En Comunidad: Lessons for Centering the Voices and Experiences of Bilingual Latinx Students.

 ^[3] Alright I have no idea if that sentence totally makes sense, but I’m getting close to the wire, so I need to just write this and then edit later. Once again, apologies to my professor for having to rush this a bit.

 ^[4] I say this primarily because I am a preservice teacher which means that I don’t have any of my own classroom experience to transplant the theoretical onto.

 ^[5] Because I’m actually quite proud of it, I am going to self-promote a tiny bit and say that in my middle school curriculum and methodology class last semester I worked in a group with a pre-service math teacher and two preservice social studies teachers to create an interdisciplinary unit. That interdisciplinary unit focused on the criminal justice system and we each created two lessons that centered around this topic as a way to teach our content-specific skills. The unit culminated in students working to create a TED Talk-esque video about what part of the criminal justice system would they reform, why, and how they would reform it. I could totally see using self-paced groups for that entire unit.

 ^[6] To briefly explain that further, a window text helps you gain empathy and understanding for an existence, community, or culture that you have no personal connection or experience to (think: White people reading about the culture, history, and lives of People of Color, e.g. Black Americans). A mirror text could reflect a characteristic of you as an individual or it could reflect your own community and culture (think: representation matters, it’s the books about Jewish kids for the Jewish kids or the books about Chinese American kids for the Chinese American kids so that they can see themselves).

 ^[7] As in, I suffer from Depression. My form of Depression is going to be the same as some people’s and different from other people’s. If, however, I were to say that only my form of Depression is correct and a bunch of other people agreed with me, than those with different experiences feel invalidated, or like maybe they’re faking it, or that they just aren’t tough enough, etc, and then that’s a whole group of people who aren’t being helped. I hope that made sense. If it didn’t please let me know in the comments.