A Teacher's Guide to Training Superheroes | Claire Olivier | TEDxAlLuqtaED

foreign [Music] this is George Clooney the heartthrob and this is George Clooney the awkward teen this is Ariana Grande and this is Ariana Grande the middle school version so now that you've seen the raw materials that us teachers will be working with welcome into a grade six drama class that I taught a few years ago back in the UK all the children were sitting in little

don't know Miss he said I wasn't thinking he said I just felt like it he said and actually from a neurological point of view that makes perfect sense according to Stanford Medical teenagers think differently to adults and children in fact they don't really think at all they feel and that's because the amadala the center of emotions is hyper sensitive in this age group and that's not

to mention hormones or the fact that their bodies are changing uncontrollably from day to day David Elkin puts it in a nutshell by saying that teens are primarily concerned with themselves concerned I would say obsessed is far more accurate and because they're still kind of kids they have this magical thinking where they believe that everybody thinks the same way they do and this leads to something

called the imaginary audience where they believe that everyone is watching them now remember it's not what you think and it's not what you know it's what you feel oh do you remember when you were that age do you remember how much you wanted to fit in and do you remember how absolutely terrified you were of doing something that was uncool now imagine spending nine hours a

day in front of filtered images and non-stop judgments well according to the dove campaign four out of five girls say that they compare themselves to others on social media and that they will take an average of 14 images before they select one that they see as possible for a selfie more alarmingly eighty percent of 13 year olds dislike their natural image that much that they will

choose the filters with the highest possible coverage to disguise the way they look now eighty percent of parents polls say that they have the sex chat with their children only 30 percent have the body image chat now I can show my children Ariana Grande and I can tell them that that is normal to look that way at their age and it won't make the slightest difference

because remember it's not what you think and it's not what you know it's how you feel and how they feel is that they will never look like that and how they feel is that everyone is watching them and how they feel is that everyone thinks that they are not good enough so it's not surprising that since 2011 there has been a terrifying search in mental illness

in young people who have access to social media in 2021 emergency department visits for suicide attempts in girls aged 12. to 17. went up by 51 in comparison to 2019 in the USA alone and you can search any other country and it's similar many experts are calling this the second pandemic now you might say that's the USA and you might say that's girls but I got

my grade aids to have a look on statista and they said to me Miss the countries with the highest Tick-Tock penetration in January 2023 with the UAE and Saudi Arabia and 66 of their users are male and their filters are worse than the girls so now imagine that you have autism or ADHD or dyslexia or much higher in the male population or anger management difficulties remember

what we said about being cool well now for no fault of your own you are the very opposite of cool you freak out and you scare the other kids you lose things you forget things and you let everybody down you blurt out dumb things and you let the group down if you had asthma or you had diabetes people would understand but the minute you've got scn

you should just try harder what's wrong with you just grow up things are even more tragic when your needs are there because of childhood trauma which can literally shrink a child's brain meanwhile teachers work with limited data some of us literally live in fear of every single health and safety thing from the teeniest peanut to the smallest asthma trigger this is not discrimination but the problem

is that some of us stop at the deficits this is called the deficit approach to inclusion and it looks something like this Joey Condon there are sharp objects and Joey has autism finished khalas now sometimes this is laziness and sometimes it's a lack of training and sometimes it's fear after all these kids can fail so easily but what if they fell forward and what if they

don't fail at all and what if they do better than the other children Angela Novac Amado reported on a program to include disabled adults in a community service project in Minnesota and she said Freud has said that love and work are the Cornerstone of our humanness now work here does not mean something that you paid to do but that sense that we are doing something meaningful

something that gives our life purpose something that makes a difference for others how many people with disabilities get to meaningfully know and say they really needed me this approach is called the reciprocal approach to inclusion it means that a student's weaknesses actually become the very things that the other students need the most unfortunately students with scn are more than twice as likely as the other students

to end up in prison so I think that prison is a good place to start to see how the reciprocal model can actually make a difference Pendleton Correctional Facility houses dangerous humans but it also houses people who have just given up on life they have never learned to manage their problems in a non-violent way meanwhile the nearby shelter has cats that are incredibly violent too they

will be euthanized if they cannot be rehabilitated bad cats bad people until you put them together Mrs Stringer the shelter manager said I have had offenders tell me it was the first time they can remember they were allowing themselves to care for something to love something the inmates receiving pets start education programs they tidy their rooms they shower they learn to control the anger they start

thinking of parole so that they can adopt their cats and care for them in one study violent incidents dropped by a whopping 300 percent initially the Stringer was incredibly reluctant to let violent offenders anywhere near animals that had already been abused she now employs 20 former offenders on a full-time basis Jordan oh puts it perfectly the cats and the inmates both Bound by Prison Walls and

troubled pasts mend each other day by day sadly for many of our students school is a cage they have given up like so many of these prisoners they just know that no matter what they do they are just gonna get it wrong meet Norman The Gnome who lives under the carpets in the Pre-K classroom Norman sends the children messages gifts seeds drawings and little puzzles to

solve naturally they write back well Norman is actually a group of at-risk children in secondary since the children became Normans their attendance has improved in fact they even come to school early so that the little ones don't see Norman sneaking under the carpet to put the gifts inside one of my Normans used to melt down very explosively and I would run out when I heard him

and scream and I'd have seeds or potato a potato and I would yell Norman what are you doing this potato is dying you need to plant it right now before it dies you see the same sensory stimulation that was destroying this poor child was also calmed down by gardening no one grew potatoes like this little boy grew potatoes once he calmed down we could discuss his

triggers get him back into the lesson catch up his learning previously it would have been a write-off he would have been so upset we would have had to send him home dad would have needed to take time of work come and fetch him now he had a good deed he caught up his learning he had a good day and all because the little kids needed him

when 200 animals at the Qatar Animal Welfare Society needed help our sixth grade global social leaders stepped up with written posters and homemade toys they were featured in The Peninsula newspaper and they influenced the grade 10s to join them you can see the high quality of student work from both genders and it's also impossible to see which children have Sen and which students don't the animals

needed them we saw this once again with our partnership with education above all an organization that educates over 10 million children across the world but spends no money on Advertising as all funds go directly to the beneficiaries our children do not have a lot of money but they speak multiple languages by designing promotional materials in Hindi polish French German and Spanish they were able to reach

an additional 4 300 people in our community now some of these people some of our children were reluctant writers and they were absolutely terrified of writing to real audience but they stepped up because the children needed them some of our scn children suffer from procrastination and I think some of you especially the teachers in the room know that screen time how many of you struggle with

screen time as being a big issue when you've got young people and students okay could we leverage our screen time as a strength well we did this with our students we had a group of 12 to 15 year old boys and many of them had scn needs they actually monetized their own Roblox platform and they used their Roblox platform to raise funds for the world food

program their evidence were recognized by the global social leaders and the Lego Foundation and they were one of five schools across the world to win a scholarship program which they used to design a humanitarian open Team Street mapping program which saved lives in Madagascar and the Philippines as well as other countries in the world so once again their hyperactivity and their addiction to screens in this

case actually saved lives again they're also partnered with education above all to raise a hundred thousand Qatari Riel by playing football because other children needed them so just another example of where being needed allowed children to turn a weakness into a strength so the great sixes discovered that we were discriminating against certain people in our communities because they were illiterate and uneducated and when they brought

that to our attention we obviously thought we have to do something about that so our students decided to say sorry by planting vegetables and herbs for the people who are discriminating against only we were doing it wrong and these uneducated people not only taught the founders of our medical Garden how to grow our plants more productively they also taught us how to grow moringa which actually

has seven times more vitamin C than oranges the Pre-K students who by the way are also illiterate saved our lemons from the bugs because they were short enough to see underneath the leaves where the bugs were hiding so no longer did we sort of like oh they need us we needed them the business Times of India says it best the greatest need of man is to

be needed even if a single person needs you it gives you significance a child needs you as a mother that's enough to live for a man needs you as a wife and that's enough to live for a friend needs you without you there somebody will miss you somebody will feel lonely that's enough for you to feel meaningful so who needs you right now who needs you

to show them that the world will be an emptier place without them that they have a purpose and a place in this messy thing called life who needs to hear those life-changing words I need you thank you [Applause]