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 as 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 both 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 issue or subject — 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.

2023 selection cycle & program timeline*:

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

Late Spring

Applications open

Summer

Application reviews, candidate consideration & selection

Fall/Winter

Educator Talks program & talk recordings

The application process

Application Stage 1

Submit an application form to apply or nominate an educator. The form contains open-ended questions to learn more about the applicant and their idea, along with space to share links/attachments to relevant articles, clips, etc. related to the idea.

Application Stage 2

Applicants chosen to move on to Stage 2 will hear from our team. Applicants will then have limited time to complete and answer prompts via recordings using a smartphone, computer, or another audio-visual recording device.

Application Stage 3

Applicants selected to join the program will receive an invitation from our team, instructions to join the program, and the syllabus for the 4–6 month learning journey. This year’s cohort will meet starting the Fall of 2023.

Apply here

Examples of educator ideas