Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope your week went well. It seems like at my university everyone is getting over a cold this week. Since we are coming into the weekend I just wanted to share some talks I’ve watched recently that have inspired me. These three talks, well one is actually a poem, demonstrate to me how powerful good speakers can be and why the binary we keep hearing in higher education of “sage on the stage” versus the now popular “guide on the side” is not as binary an issue as some would make it out to be. Great speakers can inspire us still, if we just take the time to listen. Enjoy!

This first video I just watched this week and is Angela Lee Duckworth talking about how grit is the key to success.

This video is another TED Talk (don’t you just love TED Talks?). I had my students watch this talk by Amy Cuddy about the power of body language (power posing). Most of my students found Dr. Cuddy’s talk very inspiring and I hope you do, too.

I adore Taylor Mali’s, “What Teachers Make,” and I love this version with multiple teachers performing the poem.

I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and weekend. I’ll be back soon with more. Allons-y!