Date: Nov. 14, 2008
Time: 2 hours
This post is late.. I know. But anyway, this event was a breakfast featuring two interesting speakers: Michael Rebell (TC) and Clancy Blair (NYU). Both speakers focused on different aspects of the ever-present question: What challenges do students bring with them into the classroom and what needs to be done to ensure that all students are ready for school when they first enter the classroom?
Clancy Blair is a professor in the applied psychology department at NYU - to me, he was the most interesting and thought-provoking. He brought in his research focusing on the stress levels that students come to school with and how this affects them in many different ways. As teachers, we must remember that our students are often entering the classroom with a whole set of experiences and expectations that we know nothing about. It would be extremely harmful to our students if we expected all of them to come to school as "blank slates". We should know very well by now from all of our student teaching placements, NYU classes, and just life in general that people - kids and adults - have baggage. It is very important that this is not seen as a negative thing that we as teachers have to "deal with", because it is actually quite neat! All students enter our classrooms with tons of unique experiences - some good, some bad - that influence who they are as individuals! We get to be exposed to these different experiences, see how children cope with and digest them, and then figure out how to help that child improve as an individual versus another child who has a whole different set of experiences.
This breakfast really made me think about this issue: the fact that students enter the classroom with different stress levels due in part to their different experiences. By thinking about it, I realized how exciting and challenging this really is!
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