ad-free
Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-09-13
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew_A4_nBugQ
IRA my dad vigorously shaking me awake every single day in elementary school the funny thing is getting me to school on time was the last thing the Adams mine after getting ready in the morning rush went to taking a shower ice approach the breakfast table I find cruelly ripped out newspaper article one that he sifted through the New York times hours of fortified and a pen
breakfast was spent reading the top articles and underlining all the typical words I couldn't even pronounce the car ride to school was time to practice making sentences with his newly found words and if I could make a proper sentence my dad would stop the car a few blocks away from school as I could actually use the words appropriately as frustrated as my half way self members
is daily ritual being the insights I got from this morning reads never failed to show up at random points in my life in my classes and all my assignments and they really help me too well as I grew older I search to take more responsibility of my own education and for me this meant reading articles my own volition grading alive re of articles that I thought
were really fast and filling up notebooks with vocabulary words that challenge me I think the most comforting thing about forging my own education like this was being able to do so at the comfort my own desk here's a picture I just got home that my dad actually since yesterday no my parents always complains about how messy chaotic and organizes I can close my eyes right now
as we were everything I need to study properly is on that text books handouts pens calculators anything that desk in every way represents my perfect learning environment one in which learning is easy and readily available now I challenge you all to pick your picture yourself in a classroom there are few chairs and desks but not enough to fit everyone in the class your pencil pencil is
an inch long because he'd been using it for a month now the walls are a dull gray in fact they aren't even really walls are made out of recycled plastic water bottles at RTV insulated so the floor you're sitting on is bitterly cold this was a scene that I walked into one of his in the wisdom school insanitary what Amala not too long ago and I
was taken aback at the lack of educational infrastructure that it found there I picture myself sitting in that classroom there's no way I can learn material as effectively there as I could in the sanctity of my own home this stark contrast between what I found in places like cemetery one of Allah and my own home is what drove my brother and I to found and constantly
work to develop our own organization global project hope the organization was founded when you're both in high school with the mission of ameliorating educational disparities now the first phase of products that we took on were authoring and publishing children's books based on stories that our grandparents you to tell us and the idea was really simple we can find a meaningful story insert some complicated vocabulary into
it and make it into a children's book perhaps you can help students achieve greater vocabulary and for awhile we distributed these books in and around our community in places in need of educational resource eventually with the help of our teachers we were able to translate them into him the French and Spanish to expand our outreach to more global community one such community as they are you
brought up was it wasn't school insanity of autumn on I will the project hope team took a trip there almost two years ago as part an outreach program and throughout the duration of our trip we help support the school's educational infrastructure by doing things like distributing both Spanish and English copies of our books as well as introducing the school to different technologies like laptops projectors and
US bees no lawyer in town we also paid a visit to local health clinic that was responsible for providing basic health needs to the town's residents things like wound healing in providing medications however that clinic was wildly and equipped there've been a few rusted beds pent up in a claustrophobic room and nurses didn't even have proper equipment to to draw blood the nearest hospital was four
hours away clearly health was everything short of a right in San Antonio and getting sick when leaving your daily duties like going to school for a really long time and therein lies the next chapter a global auto well as an organization we realize how effective education is in causing changes in students lives we know that this isn't the complete story health and education of a profound
duality if not healthy you can't pursue proper education and if you're not educated you're more likely to make a healthy life choices this realization has driven and propelled our latest flagship effort to redefine the way health education is conducted which is the crux of my talk today in my home state of New York mandatory health education is man this hate mandated at a state level as
it absolutely should be our sometimes can cause problems elementary school teachers were of little to no experience with health education are often forced to teach health with little guidance and even in schools with designated help teachers the problem persists in a survey our organization conducted of New York City schools we found several cases were held teachers were fired over the past year for not really having
done much my brother my son to change this if health is so vital to individual development it should be taught effectively with structure and direction so two years ago my brother and I made tailored our own health education curriculum we called healthy wealthy and wise the main component of this curriculum is a work but that we both authored that has several modules including nutrition bullying sleep
hygiene and exercise all of which are incredibly relevant for developing elementary school students fortunately we rate we were able to put the script into the tests in the Freeport school district which is near my home now in running this curriculum my brother and I use the workbook material to teach students and also conducted activities related to the workbooks materials out with the students in the class
and to evaluate the effectiveness of our program we conducted a pre and post curriculum survey and the results were really inspiring our health education curriculum help students increase our knowledge in all areas by twenty two percent on average after only eight days of full instruction and moreover the postscript them survey was given almost a month after instruction and started to students actually remember these lessons for
a long period of time but what makes this different than what teachers are used to wider curriculum work typical elementary school health education is rooted in rote memorization so telling us soon to memorize a fact like Hey remember it's you have put about schools today an educational spears romanization is known as drilling in killing by telling students at a high volume of information in rapid succession
you stifle their motivation to learn and with little motivation since dump all the information we learned in class as soon as they exit the door essentially by telling students to memorize information you're educating them out of their ability to reason because there is no mental stimulation there's no mental exertion we have a word latitude definition and hosting to live their life by that definition I think
what's most concerning about rote memorization is at a high level of reasoning capacity is what makes us all uniquely human so why is it that we're teaching our students not use their reasoning capabilities now by contrast our curriculum employs three main methods to helping grand ideas into memory the first of which is problem based learning no problem based learning Stinson on part of facts but questions
and nothing but questions in fact all problems in problem based learning are open ended and students aren't aren't encouraged to engage in conversations amongst each other to come up with an adequate solution in fact problem based learning first originated in med schools and for good reason medicine is a constantly evolving field our knowledge of the body and medications changed from an almost day to day basis
so for a physician is way more imperative to develop a high level of problem solving that's memorize outdated textbook details similarly as we grow older our understanding of health and healthy behaviors changes from elementary to middle to high schools are to witness a whole host of new situations elementary school with the playground billing and a middle school see the dawn of cyberbullying so it's clear that
problem based learning whereby we can impart a healthy mindset %HESITATION and issues to tackle a whole range of search scenarios is the bomb ideal model for health education curriculum but how do we achieve this in our curriculum here's a snippet from the teacher's manual of our health education curriculum and on the left hand side you'll see a page for the workbook and with the work of
destruction is when one character whose name is Justin and throughout the workbook we care we put Justin and a whole bunch different health related scenarios and this particular page Justin has witnessed bullying is cafeteria and is walking past and is acting as a bystander the corresponding page in the teacher's manual has questions again nothing but questions related to for instance what does it mean to be
a bystander there are statistics and they're no facts that need to be building killed only conversations to be had and ideas to be shared now I know what you're thinking what happens if there is any discussing the wrong idea what happens if collectively students agree that being a bystander is absolutely okay and I think this is great because it leads right as the second pillar health
education curriculum which is discussing wrong answers many times our curriculum students will discuss long answer wrong answers for a long period of time but through the questions we have in our health education out teacher's manual instructors can shape the conversation soon have so they reach the right answer eventually seemingly all on their own and when they do the idea sticks with them even more because they're
motivated to learn are actively engage in the process I think in many ways this relates very much what my dad had me do the car oftentimes I would be able to make sentences are the words that I just found and I would struggle but I would eventually get it right and the more I struggled to make the sentence the more the words stuck with me very
and now to explain the third pillar our health education curriculum and I think a slight tangent and just ask all of you how if you have heard of the band Van Halen yeah a lot of you as soon so then hell is an iconic band largely appreciated for the riveting live performances many of which involve dangerous pyrotechnics laser light shows and fog machine work now before
Van Halen would go to a venue to perform they provide the stage manager with a huge manual of safety precautions to take when setting up all the props and hidden in that manual was one because saying that Ben Helen wanted a bowl of Eminem's in their dressing room and I bowled Eminem's couldn't have any brown Eminem's so what's with this with an erotic to hit the
color brown no effect is brown I'm an employee was fairly genius this event held in how the time themselves to go around and check whether all the props are set up safely but by checking whether or not the brown and have been removed from the bowl they got a good sense of how detailed or into the stage managers were and they could trust the process that
effectively if they walk into a room and I saw that the brown Eminem's where there they wouldn't even put on a show on a similar token our organization can't trust that the curriculum we developed is actually teaching students the knowledge that he needs to without testing for brown Eminem's or testing to see whether students are picking up on the nuances of each and every subject and
for this reason after we conduct a workbook lesson we always on the following day conduct an activity related to the previous day's lesson what we see is that students are actively engaged in this material in conducting these projects and are collectively able to recall much of the information from the previous day I even won a few scenes forget some of the information to collaborate discussions are
able to fill in each other's gaps in knowledge I think what's most fascinating better health education curriculum it's three prongs problem based learning discussing wrong answers and conducting activities is that all of our sound even on a biological level learning occurs in the brain when neurons exhibit plasticity and plus this is when your eyes increase in the number of connections I have to each other and
according to the heavy in model for learning which is the leading model for learning that your scientists have today if we increase the frequency with which near us talk to each other we increase the efficiency which with with which they can talk to each other in the future now we put these two ideas together we can understand how an idea when tackle from multiple different angles
multiple different modalities can be very effectively ingrained into memory very effectively encoded into the brain and also effectively recalled later on so no this information let's go back and look at roe memorization and remembers ace were forming associations between things like words and definitions the neural connections singular is very very weak by contrast in our curriculum were forming associations between ideas and experiences and his experiences
can be that one time soon got a question wrong the class that one time he felt about emotional one listen to scare story or that activity that he conducted the sheer amount of her all communication is very very large making encoding and recall all the more easy so indeed our organization has a still an educational tool that really does work and we can't wait to expand
it to schools outside of New York in the near future but what's a broader goal here what's the implication of all this outside of the project we've already conducted there are some ideas in this world they're very difficult to convey this past summer my brother and I took a trip to India where we shattered a nutritionist who's giving a lecture on attrition to childhood cancer survivors
that's how the cancer survivors have an incredibly suppressed immune system so a very acute dietary and hygienic restriction this nutritionist however was unable to convey effectively what these restrictions were so happy to lecture half of the audience just got up and left it is in situations like these where education is available but not effective that the techniques from our curriculum need to be employed and that's
