EdTalk Reflections

In this post please share your thoughts about the in-class discussions of the EdTalk books. 

As I said in an earlier post, my classmates and I were tasked with reading a book from a curated list from our professors in order to gain a better understanding of students we could potentially have in our classrooms. We then had to present our information in the form of a video, which is the post you might’ve seen the last time you visited here. Overall, I believe this was a great experience as I love reading and meeting new characters.

 What insights were gained from the discussions? 

I feel from my classmates’ videos I was able to grasp (to an extent since I can only imagine scenarios the author and my classmates told me) each of the nine individual main character or characters’ perspectives. This means I was able to experience a slice of being in multiple different people’s shoes, without reading all the entire stories, in a very short amount of time. This was a great way for my class to discuss with each other what is best for our students when it comes to guns, gun violence, growing up, fitting in, bad influences, chronic diseases, body-shaming, bullying, feeling like they aren’t seen or heard, and many more topics that a lot of kids experience while in school. It showed us that many of these issues lie within the student to fix especially if they’re in high school, but that we must also cultivate and push them gently into the right direction. With some things though, it is within our power as a teacher to stop or at least hinder wrong actions such as the bullying, body-shaming, not feeling like they’re being seen or heard, and other student to student issues. We could use our classroom to cultivate a sense of belonging there for everyone, and we also need to be aware of each students’ needs in order to help them thrive in school.