Gretchen Brion-Meisels has known she wanted to be a teacher since she was eight years old. As she sits contentedly in her cozy office wearing a simple t-shirt, jeans and flipflops, she is quite possibly the most comfortable and friendly Harvard university lecturer you can meet. This comes as no surprise given that her work involves helping young people feel at home, safe and openly communicative in their schools and communities.
Brion-Meisels first started teaching through a program called Breakthrough by tutoring fifth graders for summer school. In fact, since a young age she found it more fun to play with younger children than her own classmates, in many ways. To this day, she prefers spending time with younger people, including her students.
After completing her undergraduate studies at Harvard, Brion-Meisels became a middle school teacher. Her first years teaching in Baltimore were challenging. She loved her students, but often found that the school felt oppressive. “The students were basically asked to check their lives at the door and come in for school,” she says. That first year, Brion-Meisels promised herself, “I would not keep teaching past the point at which I felt like I was dehumanizing kids.”
Today, Brion-Meisels teaches courses focused on the prevention of bullying and how to improve school communities for young adolescents. She contends that in order to understand youth and to find the best ways to help them, we must involve young people in finding the solutions to their success at school. That way education research would be different and more progressive for young people. Her research involves asking youth how they “define, choose and use” supports, and examining why students may not be using these support systems. One thing she has found is that adults may not always know what students need from the support systems.
In her teaching experiences, Brion-Meisels noticed how problematic and impractical it was to have a group of adults sit at a table deciding what types of supports students needed. She has a disapproving look on her face as she describes how many school systems are failing students and a deep conviction that adults and the administration need to find better ways to help students. Instead of pointing fingers, the leaders of the school should provide an inclusive and loving environment so that students are unafraid to seek help. Adults should be much more careful to ensure that their implicit bias is not hurting the children that they teach.
Brion-Meisels is an advocate of social emotional learning, a way for students to use the necessary skills and knowledge to identify and manage their emotions. This approach, often spearheaded in schools by counselors, helps students get along with one another, maintain healthy relationships and achieve positive goals. She believes that schools with strong multi-tier anti-bullying and anti-discrimination programs — including clear policies, supportive adults, strong relationships among all stakeholders, and supports for struggling students — are the most successful in providing a safe and inclusive community for students.
“The purpose of education is to give you the tools to improve the world and to improve yourself,” insists Brion-Meisels. For her, this means using her own education to further the education of others.