I asked a few students to share their takeaways from Friday’s Cooper Series guest lecture. And, as if to support the speaker’s “thesis,” if you will, the students’ reflections are indicators of how their individual experiences and involvement within the Brewster community help form their own identities. Here the students share their impressions and takeaways of Dr. Derrick Gay’s message.
– Marcia Eldredge, Communications Director
Senior Evan Edmonds shared the following: one standout about Dr. Derrick Gay’s presentation this morning was the emphasis on our society and how it will look when we move on from Brewster. On a campus like ours, it’s easy to forget that there is a world outside of high school, but it’s there, waiting for us. Dr. Gay touched on many varying aspects of society that we may encounter in the coming future and the biggest connection to one of those changing factors we can make as Brewster students is the transition from the ‘cubical’ style of work toward collaborative and cooperative workplaces. Dr. Gay mentioned huge companies like Google and Yahoo have already switched to this method, and I believe the reason for that put simply is that it is more effective. Communicating with people and sharing ideas is a much more productive way of problem solving because there are multiple brains all working in their own unique ways for a solution. Because there is such high value in mastering collaboration, cooperation, communication, etc. it is important that we are learning these skills, which is why group-based skills are so emphasized in our everyday learning environment at Brewster. There is more reasoning to why we do STAD (Student Team Achievement Divisions) reviews than just giving teachers a break; it is absolutely crucial in today’s world to learn these skills, and I believe Dr. Gay wanted to punctuate that.
Continue reading “Cultivating Cultural Competency”
