Pierson, R. (2013 May). Every kid needs a champion. Ted Talks Education. Retrieved from             https://www.ted.com/talks/rita_pierson_every_kid_needs_a_champion#t-446630

In this Ted Talk, Rita Pierson, a grandchild and child of teachers and veteran teacher herself, draws on her extensive educational experience to discuss the power of building positive relationships with students and taking an empowerment approach to teaching. Contradicting a teacher she once met who insisted that she did not need to like the students in order to teach them, Pierson uses personal stories about her own classroom and the teaching practices of her mother to demonstrate the necessity of teachers’ connections with, and belief in, students in order to truly motivate learning. Although personal in nature, this talk offers many takeaways that can be implemented into different classrooms, such as the idea of framing assessment and management practices in positive terms that leave room for growth, implementing mantras of empowerment that can increase each student’s sense of self-worth, going above and beyond in providing for students’ needs, apologizing to the students for mistakes made, and finding a way to love even the most difficult pupils. Although not all of the video explicitly relates to management, it is useful for me because it provides a real-world example of a master educator who has been able to use relationship-based strategies and social and emotional approaches to create successful classrooms. Therefore, I can use her strategies as a launching point to think about how I might develop my own relationship and empowerment based approaches to classroom environment creation. Its tone and message are also inspiring for me as I navigate the challenges of refining my own teaching and management style in the short year of the education program. However, since this video is relatively short, it does not provide enough concrete examples of how Pierson implements her philosophies into her teaching for me to be able to piece together a full picture of a day in her classroom. It also does not reach beyond Pierson herself and her family, so suggestions may require modification before being implemented into different contexts.