Ella Cappillino- Marist LPP Padlet Final by

Introduction

ellacappillino1 — 2023-12-11 21:57:46 UTC

The Liberty Partnership Program (LPP) at Marist provides the MATA508 students the opportunity to work with Poughkeepsie middle and high school students during their after school program. This experience provides the perspective teacher candidates at Marist the chance to develop their teaching skills through the academic tutoring that takes place during the program. While the program does place emphasis on this academic tutoring, the Marist LPP also encourages the teaching candidates to become mentors for the students. As a Marist LPP mentor, socializing and developing real relationships with the students who participate in the program is not only essential, but also a rewarding privilege to be apart of.

Insight #1

ellacappillino1 — 2023-12-11 22:29:24 UTC

One insight I have gathered after my semester participating in the Marist LPP is how important it is to be an advocate for your students. While at the Poughkeepsie High School, I was working with a student who had expressed to me that she her grades in her science course were low and needed help completing class assignments and homework in order to improve her grades. When I began helping her, I realized that her assignment packet we were working on coincided with online class resources and materials that we would be able to find in the google classroom for the course. When I asked the student where her lap top was, she told me the school had yet to issue them their laptop for the year, and at this point in was nearing the end of the first month back to school. When I asked her why they hadn't gotten their laptop, they told me that the form they needed to have filled out was online, but they didn't have access to a computer to obtain the form. At that point, I decided to ask the LPP program director for help in this situation, who immediately got someone from the school's administration to come speak to us at the LPP program. After I explained why the student had not submitted their form for a laptop but why she really needed it as soon as possible, they gave her a copy of the form and her laptop that same day. The following week at LPP, the student let me know that the laptop was already helping them make adjustments in their science course grade. If I hadn't spoken up on behalf of this student and advocated for them to have a laptop, who knows how long into the school they would have gone without a laptop and how bad their grades could've gotten.

Insight #2

ellacappillino1 — 2023-12-11 22:45:31 UTC

Another insight I gathered from my time at LPP this semester was how to be patient with students. As teaching candidates, it is important to understand that middle and high school is a very socially developmental period for adolescent students, and we must be able to keep ourselves calm, cool and collected when working with them. An experience I had with this was with a student who I spoke with at almost all of my LPP sessions. This student began the semester calling me things like "stupid" for not being good at board games Monopoly or card games like Uno. In the beginning of the semester, this student's negative outbursts directed at me made me want to avoid them. I thought the student maybe found me to be annoying, and I was having a hard time biting my tongue at times when the students comments were too inappropriate. Although I felt this way, this student, week after week, would come to LPP and immediately sit next to me and asked to play a game. I began to pick up on the fact that they felt like they were helping me learn the game, they just taught with a "tough love" approach. What I am trying to say is that the Marist LPP taught me the importance of patience as a teacher with their students, as it will only positively contribute to the development of healthy student-teacher relationships.

Nuggets of Advice

ellacappillino1 — 2023-12-11 23:35:20 UTC

My first nugget of advice to the Fall 2024 MATA508 students is to keep an open mind. The first few sessions may feel a little awkward because you don't know any of the students yet, which may make it feel like the sessions are a waste of time and not a valuable source of fieldwork experience. Just know that you are not alone when feeling this, as even the students feel this initial awkwardness, and will be a little hesitant to ask for help or to begin conversations with the mentors as well. My advice to clear this obstacle quickly would be to start with ice breaker activities. This could be a simple question prompt such as, "What is your favorite TV show/ Movie and why?," or even a community building exercise, such as the ones we have participated in throughout the semester in MATA508. This is a way to find common ground with the students, which will help ease the initial awkwardness felt when the LPP mentors and students first begin working with one another.

My second nugget of advice would be to mingle around to as many students as you can while at the LPP sessions. There will be days when students do not have homework, and are simply attending for the social aspect that LPP offers. At first, this will seem great as playing games and talking to the students is one of the easier and more fun aspects of LPP, but these games being played on repeat for 2 hours, week after week will get boring fast. Once I started going around to new students I hadn't worked with before, I was asked for more help relating to academic tutoring. While this may seem like a harder task than just simply playing board and card games, it actually made the time at the sessions go by super fast. I sometimes even found myself wishing I had more time with the students I was helping. I realized that the academic tutoring aspect is really why we are there, and it made the LPP sessions feel more rewarding as well.

ellacappillino1 — 2023-12-11 23:37:05 UTC