News Year 10 TED Talks 15.02.2024

At the Year 10 assembly before half-term we were very excited to launch the new Year 10 TED Talks as part of the G&L Futures Live Projects programme.

There was no better way to launch the programme than with a video from Chris Anderson who was the curator of the TED Conference in 2002 and has developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading. He explained that although there isn’t a set formula for a TED talk, they all do have one critical thing in common and that is as follows: ‘Your number-one mission as a speaker is to take something that matters deeply to you and to rebuild it inside the minds of your listeners’.

To further understand what this means and to see it working in practice, the girls then went into break-out sessions with teachers who had volunteered to talk – in a TED Talk style – about subjects that they are very passionate about. Topics included:

  • Considering rates of change, where they come from and how they are useful
  • Learning a language is a lot of work. If you already speak English why bother?
  • Is it true that Economics is only about money?
  • Why is the human body so badly designed for childbirth?
  • Judaism and Christianity in the Roman Empire
  • The Monty Hall problem
  • Defining and challenging secularism in the French school context
  • Defining religion as shared rituals instead of deity
  • Propaganda in the rise of the Augustan regime
  • How few people are needed for the chances of a shared birthday?
  • How understanding y=mx +c leads to winning an Oscar
  • How do contemporary artists and designers use drawing?
  • Exploration of Spanglish, impact of Hispanic community in the US, bilingualism, evolution of language through migration and tech

Students then spent some time pondering the questions:
What do you want to argue about?
What do you want to make people aware of?
What do you really believe in?
What fascinates you?

After undertaking some research on their chosen topics they then developed their own mini-TED Talk which they delivered in small groups. It was a fantastic first session that they will build on over the following months before delivering their fully-fledged TED Talks to their fellow students and parents.

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