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How can we create an education system that works for kids, instead of against them? Watch eight inspiring talks (and one beautiful performance) from TED's May 2013 PBS special, given in their entirety.
# Title Description
1
“High School Training Ground”
03:00
Young poet, educator and activist Malcom London performs his stirring poem about life on the front lines of high school. He tells of the “oceans of adolescence” who come to school “but never learn to swim, of “masculinity mimicked by men who grew up with no fathers.” Beautiful, lyrical, chilling.
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2
3 rules to spark learning
06:30
It took a life-threatening condition to jolt chemistry teacher Ramsey Musallam out of ten years of “pseudo-teaching” to understand the true role of the educator: to cultivate curiosity. In a fun and personal talk, Musallam gives 3 rules to spark imagination and learning, and get students excited about how the world works.
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3
Every kid needs a champion
07:48
Rita Pierson, a teacher for 40 years, once heard a colleague say, "They don't pay me to like the kids." Her response: "Kids don't learn from people they don’t like.’” A rousing call to educators to believe in their students and actually connect with them on a real, human, personal level.
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4
How to escape education's death valley
19:11
Sir Ken Robinson outlines 3 principles crucial for the human mind to flourish -- and how current education culture works against them. In a funny, stirring talk he tells us how to get out of the educational "death valley" we now face, and how to nurture our youngest generations with a climate of possibility.
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5
My story, from gangland daughter to star teacher
08:03
Pearl Arredondo grew up in East Los Angeles, the daughter of a high-ranking gang member who was in and out of jail. Many teachers wrote her off as having a problem with authority. Now a teacher herself, she’s creating a different kind of school and telling students her story so that they know it's okay if sometimes homework isn’t the first thing on their minds.
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6
Our failing schools. Enough is enough!
17:07
Why, why, why does our education system look so similar to the way it did 50 years ago? Millions of students were failing then, as they are now -- and it’s because we’re clinging to a business model that clearly doesn’t work. Education advocate Geoffrey Canada dares the system to look at the data, think about the customers and make systematic shifts in order to
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7
Teachers need real feedback
10:21
Until recently, many teachers only got one word of feedback a year: “satisfactory.” And with no feedback, no coaching, there’s just no way to improve. Bill Gates suggests that even great teachers can get better with smart feedback -- and lays out a program from his foundation to bring it to every classroom.
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8
The key to success? Grit
06:13
Leaving a high-flying job in consulting, Angela Lee Duckworth took a job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She quickly realized that IQ wasn’t the only thing separating the successful students from those who struggled. Here, she explains her theory of “grit” as a predictor of success.
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