Michelle Young has been open about balancing looking for love on national TV and teaching fifth grade, and now the Bachelorette is stopping by “Talking It Out with Bachelor Nation” for an honest conversation about her life as a teacher.

Michelle has noted that she always puts her students first, despite being in the public eye, and during her conversation with co-hosts Bryan Abasolo and Mike Johnson, Michelle got candid about her discussions about race with her students.

Bryan and Mike asked Michelle about what it was like to be a teacher in Minnesota after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020.

Michelle said she handled the situation “tactfully” with her students but made sure her students knew her classroom was a safe place to have the important and difficult conversations.

Michelle said, “Coming in, I had a plan of how I wanted to communicate. A lot of the time, being a teacher is providing the information and having factual information, but we have to remember that our students are resilient. These children are so smart, it was more just me facilitating that conversation. It was not just them sitting and listening to me, but I opened up a panel for them to talk about their feelings.”

The Bachelorette revealed that she had students in her classroom who were directly impacted by the tragedy, so she allowed them to share their stories.

Michelle said, “I had students who were directly affected and they shared their stories. When you see that raw emotion and those tears and the quivering in the voices, it just opened up this environment where everyone could talk about it and we could bond about it, revisit it, think about ways we could change rules that we didn’t like in our own community.”

She continued, “It was more setting the stage and the tone and the platform and these fifth-graders do some amazing things. A lot of times they end up taking the lead too.”

But it wasn’t just her students that Michelle had these conversations with. She also discussed making sure her fellow educators and her students’ parents were also moving forward.

The teacher said, “Everybody is at a different point in their growth, awareness, and education about race and controversial issues. In my community at my school, we just want to make sure everyone is moving forward. We need to move forward with a sense of urgency because it’s important.”

Michelle also noted, “The students that we service at our school, they all come from a diverse background, and we have to understand what they go home to and how we can create an education where they are actually able to move forward. When you have a bunch of educators who are able to step back and look at it from the students’ point of view and what they have to deal with, that makes it a little bit easier.”

Since then, Michelle has continued to make conversations about race, self-love, and how to be a good person a part of her daily discussions with students.

She shared how she has been trying to help the young girls at her school embrace themselves for exactly who they are.

Michelle said, “I’m trying to teach young women how to be confident and comfortable with themselves, but they have cell phones earlier on, so they have TikTok and all these things they’re being exposed to and comparing themselves to. We talk a lot in my classroom about putting that down, putting the phone away, being a kid, and going outside to play.”

She also shared a story about how she connected with a second-grade girl who she met in the hall of her school.

“We do affirmations with young girls at my school who are having a hard day. There was this one girl who I met in the hallway and she was really struggling. She didn’t like her hair that day, she felt like it was nappy and everywhere. So I took her into the bathroom and we yelled affirmations in the mirror,” Michelle explained.

Michelle continued, “We started with ‘I love my hair’ and I was like, ‘No, you gotta yell it!’ And by the end she was screaming, ‘I love my hair! I love my lips!’ I really do believe that at a young age, teaching the youth to talk about being proud of what you look like. The human brain is a crazy thing, but if you say it over and over again, you start to believe it.”

Now, Michelle said that she and that student meet weekly to go to the bathroom and yell their affirmations into the mirror.

Michelle added that one day she hopes to open her own school in hopes of really changing the world.

We can’t wait to see that happen and for Michelle to continue to impact the lives of our youth. She’s already changing the world!

For now, if you want to hear more of Michelle’s conversation with Bryan and Mike, check out this week’s episode of “Talking It Out with Bachelor Nation” below.