Baraqa Sayeda, thank you for sharing these wonderful insights. Your summaries beautifully capture the essence of the messages, from reshaping mindsets to contextualizing best practices and prioritizing early investments. We’re thrilled you found the discussions enriching 🌟
🌟These powerful ladies became the highlight of the day! 🌟 Yesterday, I had the privilege of attending the Online Panel Discussion: "Preparing Students to Shape a Better Future," as part of the EdHeroes, and these ladies made the best panelists. Firstly, I deeply respect these women for dedicating their lives to developing organizations and working towards unique visions to make a difference in society. Each speaker presented a different approach to education based on their expertise, offering insights worthy of consideration I would like to briefly summarize each panelist's discussion points that I found interesting and relevant to my context: 🔹 Wendy Kopp, CEO and Co-founder of Teach For All, highlighted the importance of mindset in reshaping the education system. She addressed the challenge of dealing with adults entrenched in outdated systems and emphasized the need for adults to learn to treat students as whole people and to view themselves as learners. Wendy's remarks on developing a sense of agency and awareness in students regarding contemporary issues and systemic injustices, so they can aspire to peace and sustainability, were particularly my favorite! 🔹Suchetha Bhat (she/her), CEO of Dream A Dream, was one of my favorite speakers, especially since her points resonated with me as we both belong to the global south context. I appreciated how she counter argued the blind adoption of presumably the best global educational practices, emphasizing the need for contextualization in regions with high adversity. Her words, "equal emphasis should be on how the best practices can be contextualized in, let's say, the global south, where things are different from the global north," were particularly impactful. She also redefined social-emotional learning as creating a caring, compassionate, and non-judgmental space that enables students to explore creatively, problem-solve, and make decisions through various mediums such as sports, arts, and storytelling 🔹 Cecilia Vaca Jones, Senior Advisor to Abu Dhabi's Early Childhood Authority, Former Executive Director of the Bernard Van Leer Foundation , I admired her approach to prioritizing early years' investment for better social returns instead of economic returns. By social return, she meant developing productive and healthier human beings who can support societal development and become more conscious and aware of their environment. I loved how she used the term "healthy synapses" to summarize the vision of early childhood development programs! There were many other valuable insights and questions raised during the discussion, particularly from the moderator, but LinkedIn limits my post length, so I will leave you with these highlights 😅 Let's continue these important conversations! 💬 #Education #Globalforum #SocialEmotionalLearning #EdHeroes #LinkedInLearning