Top Ten TED Talks for STEM Educators

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As another academic year winds down, CEE hopes you are looking forward to your summer plans – time to relax, new professional development opportunities, travel, or whatever else is on your agenda. To keep you inspired, here (in no particular order) are ten fascinating TED talks we recommend for STEM teachers. Enjoy, and please share with colleagues! Let us know what you think – and feel free to share other talks or resources you love – in the comments!
 
Filmmaker David Hoffman shares a part of his documentary, Sputnik Mania, explaining how the world’s fascination with Sputnik contributed to the space and arms race that, in turn, led to an inspirational movement of math and science education across the US. 
 
Today's math curriculum is teaching students to expect — and excel at — paint-by-numbers classwork, robbing kids of a skill more important than solving problems: formulating them. In his talk, Dan Meyer shows classroom-tested math exercises that prompt students to stop and think. 
 
Career analyst Dan Pink discusses the power of non-traditional motivation. 
 
While accepting his TED prize, physicist Neil Turok shares his wish to provide opportunity for the future of Africa through opening and nurturing the creativity available in the young people there. Turok uses his math and science background to understand why and how Africa has been left behind–and how we can change it. 
 
Mae Jemison is an astronaut, a doctor, an art collector, a dancer. Telling stories from her own education and from her time in space, she calls on educators to teach both the arts and sciences, both intuition and logic, as one — to create bold thinkers. 
 
First, Keith Barry shows us how our brains can fool our bodies — in a trick that works via podcast too. Then he involves the audience in some jaw-dropping (and even a bit dangerous) feats of brain magic.
 
Diana Laufenberg shares 3 surprising things she has learned about teaching — including a key insight about learning from mistakes. 
 
An educator for 40 years, Rita Pierson understands the importance of educators having faith in their students and connecting with them on a meaningful, personal level. With humor and passion, Pierson speaks from the heart and advocates for relationships between teachers and students. She says, “Kids don’t learn from people they don’t like” and offers personal examples of how creating relationships with students made her job rewarding and students’ achievements possible. 
 
Salman Khan talks about how and why he created Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script — give students video lectures to watch at home, and do "homework" in the classroom with the teacher available to help. 
 
At her first museum job, art historian Sarah Lewis noticed something important about an artist she was studying: Not every artwork was a total masterpiece. She asks us to consider the role of the almost-failure, the near win, in our own lives. In our pursuit of success and mastery, is it actually our near wins that push us forward?