TED-Ed Educator Talks

The TED-Ed Educator Talks program provides a rigorous professional learning experience to a select group of distinguished educators throughout the world. The goal? To help them develop and share their ideas in TED-style talks.

A collection of educators and their audiences

A male presenter with hands clasped, beside a screen displaying an image of a smiling horse

A male presenter smiling at the audience with hands in an outstretched open gesture

A female presenter looking toward the audience with a smile

A pregnant presenter looking toward the audience, beside a screen displaying "TED-Ed Educator Talks"

Why Educators?

Educators are overflowing with brilliant, resourceful, innovative, and — in all likelihood — extremely under-circulated ideas. We seek to celebrate and elevate those ideas for the sake of improving student outcomes, bettering the experience of youth & adult learners, revolutionizing education and learning practices, and transforming the education landscape as a whole.

About the TED-Ed Educator Talks program

If accepted, program participants will join a cohort of selected educators and engage in a 4–6 month* learning journey utilizing synchronous and asynchronous modalities. The goal of the program is for educators to develop their own TED-style talk with help from TED-Ed staff and coaches. The TED-Ed team will then work to amplify finished and approved talks.

*Timeline is subject to change.

A presenter with hand raised while speaking

Tips for ideas

We ask applicants to think deeply about specific ideas they have connected to their work, research, and experience. To formulate an idea worth spreading an applicant’s idea must be new, unique, or can offer an insight or a new way of thinking to a large audience.

A TED Talk usually has a topic and an idea.

A topic is the high-level — the general direction you want to take the talk. (e.g. Students are dealing with a lot more trauma and mental health concerns.)

An idea is a specific angle that stems from the topic — a unique message, solution, or insight that only you can share. (e.g. When recurrent traumatic events happen, here is how we get students back to a place where learning can happen.)

Annual selection cycle & program timeline*:

*Note that the selection cycle is subject to change throughout the year. Please check our website regularly for timeline updates.

Late Spring

Applications open

Summer

Applications review, candidate consideration & selection

Fall/Winter

Educator Talks program & talk recordings

The application process

Stage 1

Submit an application form to apply or nominate an educator. The form contains questions to learn more about the applicant and their idea, along with space to share links and attachments related to the idea. These can include, but are not limited to, relevant research, articles, professional work, published material, and other talks from the applicant, etc. Think of this stage as the “Thesis”.

Stage 2

The strongest submitted applications will move on to Stage 2. In this Stage, applicants will be asked prompts and follow-up questions to give more context to their ideas and related professional experience. If Stage 1 is the “Thesis”, Stage 2 is the analysis, explanation, and detailed evidence that persuades and inspires the listener of the idea’s merit and potential for impact.

Examples of educator ideas