10 TED Talks for the Teacher Who Needs Inspiration
Spreading Inspiration Through Voice
The TED Talk tagline of “ideas worth spreading” is a powerful message about sharing the power of the human voice to transform the everyday experience. Whether it is Luvvie Ajayi urging us to step outside of our comfort zone or Shonda Rhimes telling us to slow down and enjoy the power of play, we learn from shared human experience. A TED Talk is a teacher. A voice that can reach out and inspire others to feel something different or think about something in a new way. Teachers are living TED Talks each day. However, the work of being a living TED Talk in education can be exhausting. The work we do is heavily reliant on our communities and each other when we feel like we are tired, discouraged, or on the edge of burnout. This post is a collection of 10 TED talks that are compiled for the purpose of inspiration to the classroom teacher or person in education who needs to find a small nugget of truth to feel rejuvenated and refreshed. The small “ah-has” are where we find the strength to continue to find meaning inside and outside of our classrooms.
1. Luvvie Ajayi, “Get Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable”
“When it's time to say these hard things, I ask myself three things. One: Did you mean it? Two: Can you defend it? Three: Did you say it with love? If the answer is yes to all three, I say it and let the chips fall. That's important. That checkpoint with myself always tells me, "Yes, you're supposed to do this." Telling the truth -- telling thoughtful truths -- should not be a revolutionary act. Speaking truths to power should not be sacrificial, but they are. But I think if more of us chose to do this for the greater good, we'd be in better spaces than we are right now.”
2. Clint Smith, “The Danger of Silence”
“…I challenge my students to explore the silences in their own lives through poetry. We work together to fill those spaces, to recognize them, to name them, to understand that they don't have to be sources of shame. In an effort to create a culture within my classroom where students feel safe sharing the intimacies of their own silences, I have four core principles posted on the board that sits in the front of my class, which every student signs at the beginning of the year: read critically, write consciously, speak clearly, tell your truth.”
3. Chris Emdin, “Teach Teachers How to Create Magic”
“Now people oftentimes say, "Well, magic is just magic." There are teachers who, despite all their challenges, who have those skills, get into those schools and are able to engage an audience, and the administrator walks by and says, "Wow, he's so good, I wish all my teachers could be that good." And when they try to describe what that is, they just say, "He has that magic."
4. Kelly McGonigal, “How to Make Stress Your Friend”
“When you choose to view your stress response as helpful, you create the biology of courage. And when you choose to connect with others under stress, you can create resilience. Now I wouldn't necessarily ask for more stressful experiences in my life, but this science has given me a whole new appreciation for stress. Stress gives us access to our hearts. The compassionate heart that finds joy and meaning in connecting with others, and yes, your pounding physical heart, working so hard to give you strength and energy. And when you choose to view stress in this way, you're not just getting better at stress, you're actually making a pretty profound statement. You're saying that you can trust yourself to handle life's challenges. And you're remembering that you don't have to face them alone.”
5. Rita Pierson, “Every Kid Needs a Champion”
“Teaching and learning should bring joy. How powerful would our world be if we had kids who were not afraid to take risks, who were not afraid to think, and who had a champion? Every child deserves a champion, an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection, and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be. “
6. Angela Lee Duckworth, “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance”
“So I left the classroom, and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist. I started studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings, and in every study my question was, who is successful here and why? My research team and I went to West Point Military Academy. We tried to predict which cadets would stay in military training and which would drop out. We went to the National Spelling Bee and tried to predict which children would advance farthest in competition. We studied rookie teachers working in really tough neighborhoods, asking which teachers are still going to be here in teaching by the end of the school year, and of those, who will be the most effective at improving learning outcomes for their students? We partnered with private companies, asking, which of these salespeople is going to keep their jobs? And who's going to earn the most money? In all those very different contexts, one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. And it wasn't social intelligence. It wasn't good looks, physical health, and it wasn't IQ. It was grit.”
7. Ramsey Musallam, “3 Rules to Spark Learning”
“So, 21st-century lingo jargon mumbo jumbo aside, the truth is, I've been teaching for 13 years now, and it took a life-threatening situation to snap me out of 10 years of pseudo-teaching and help me realize that student questions are the seeds of real learning, not some scripted curriculum that gave them tidbits of random information.”
8. Laura VanderKam, “How to Gain Control of Your Free Time”
“Anyway, the idea is we'll save bits of time here and there, add it up, we will finally get to everything we want to do. But after studying how successful people spend their time and looking at their schedules hour by hour, I think this idea has it completely backward. We don't build the lives we want by saving time. We build the lives we want, and then time saves itself.”
9. Emily Esfahani Smith, “There’s More to Life Than Being Happy”
“So this all made me wonder: How can we each live more meaningfully? To find out, I spent five years interviewing hundreds of people and reading through thousands of pages of psychology, neuroscience and philosophy. Bringing it all together, I found that there are what I call four pillars of a meaningful life. And we can each create lives of meaning by building some or all of these pillars in our lives. “
10. Shonda Rhimes, “My Year of Saying Yes to Everything”
“I said yes to less work and more play, and somehow I still run my world. My brain is still global. My campfires still burn. The more I play, the happier I am, and the happier my kids are. The more I play, the more I feel like a good mother. The more I play, the freer my mind becomes. The more I play, the better I work. The more I play, the more I feel the hum, the nation I'm building, the marathon I'm running, the troops, the canvas, the high note, the hum, the hum, the other hum, the real hum, life's hum. The more I feel that hum, the more this strange, quivering, uncocooned, awkward, brand new, alive non-titan feels like me. The more I feel that hum, the more I know who I am. I'm a writer, I make stuff up, I imagine. That part of the job, that's living the dream. That's the dream of the job. Because a dream job should be a little bit dreamy.”
