Professional Learning for Busy Educators

Children often live in two different worlds. That was the premise of a video Akimi Gibson, the vice president and education publisher of Sesame Workshop (the nonprofit behind Sesame Street), showed the audience at the EdSurge Fusion conference in Burlingame, Calif.

In the video, singer Ed Sheeran, flanked by Sesame Street characters, sings about the contrast between life at home and life at school for a kid. At home, a child can move around more and talk when she wants. School is a more controlled environment where she has an assigned seat and has to raise her hand.

“For our young ones, going from ‘me’ to ‘we’ can be quite traumatic,” Gibson said. Educators have to think about how children's’ brains work, she argued, and schools need to focus on educating the “whole child,” a term that takes non-academic factors into account, such as health and emotional supports both in school and at home.