Analyzing a TED Talk: Teacher-Student Relationships

Interacting With Students - A Speech Analysis

By Jacob Whitmore

Video from www.ted.com

In April of 2013 in New York City, New York, Rita Pierson, an educator with 40 years of experience, gave her presentation “Every kid needs a champion” to inform others that teacher-student relationships need to be stronger in order to increase academic success. The audience was simply a group of spectators who knew that the talk was associated with education in some form, not knowing what was to be discussed. In her speech, you can see her passion about the importance of relationships with students, delivering her speech in a heart-warming, sincere manner while always stressing the importance of proper interaction with the students. She tells stories about students in her classroom and about other educators and their thoughts. These stories connected with me and the audience as she showed her true feelings about her duty as a role model and source of inspiration for her students. As she spoke, it felt like Ms. Pierson was holding a conversation with each person in the audience. The tone and emotion in her voice, including the certain manner in how she pronounced her words, made her seem like she was talking to the audience as people rather than spectators, moving her hands and pointing into the audience to physically interact with them as well.

Ms. Pierson opened my eyes to just how important it is to look at students not simply as those receiving information but as people with drives and feelings. She talked about how it is okay for

Photo Credit: www.cultofpedagogy.com

teachers to apologize to students; it makes it seem like teachers are looking at the students as people rather than inferior humans. Treating students in this manner can impact their lives, as she saw at her mother’s funeral. Her mother, a fellow educator, took care of her students by providing them with both emotional support and physical care. At her funeral, Ms. Pierson was awestruck with how many students showed up to pay their respects to her mother. I believe this was Ms. Pierson’s jaw-dropping moment as it exemplifies just how important it is to treat students kindly, affecting them as people and how they behave later in life; you do not often hear about students at a teacher’s funeral. Along with impactful moments like this, Ms. Pierson also incorporated humor multiple times in her speech. She mentioned specific examples of student reactions in class, including one student not understanding why there was a smiley face on a failed assignment. The audience laughed at each example, showing their engagement in the speech. 

The speech was only 8 minutes long, so it never felt like Ms. Pierson was giving an overload of information. Because her speech was short, she had to pick key topics to talk about in that restrained time. She talked about what others thought, what she has done, and how it is important to establish quality relationships, and it never felt like she lingered too long in any area. The use of her examples, in which she imitated how the students reacted, helped paint a mental picture. She gave quick examples and did not go into great visual detail about situations, which could have been enhanced, but her audio descriptions of people and situations were wonderful. In my opinion, I believe Ms. Pierson stayed in her lane as she talked strictly about her personal experiences as an educator.

Photo Credit: donornation.org

Overall, I felt the presentation was extremely persuasive. You could feel Ms. Pierson’s sincerity in the entire speech, and her delivery with her voice was exceptional. At the Homework Help, we are supposed to treat each student with sincerity, kindness, and a positive attitude, providing an open atmosphere that differs from the classroom and in which the students can feel like they can relate to us; we treat the students as fellow people, not simply as a student in a class. Ms. Pierson’s speech really showed me just how important it is to understand others and to treat everyone with kindness to bring out anyone’s potential.

If the video is not working for some reason, you can watch it here.