In this clip from TED India 2009, designer-turned-educator Kiran Bir Sethi shares how she nurtured the notion of “I Can” within children who attend her school in India. This highly inspirational talk suggests targeting children’s mentality in order to empower–or “infect”–them with the hope of limitless possibility.

What can American educators learn from her techniques? Quite a lot, we hope. While attending design school at the age of 17, Sethi was inspired by adults who believed in her ideas and challenged her to achieve her dreams. She found that by simply changing her mindset toward learning, she become motivated to succeed for herself rather than see success as something she was forced to attain by others. In addition, she found that by embedding learning within real-world contexts and blurring the boundaries of school and life, education came much more naturally.

Watch as Sethi shares her story and also the stories of young people she has “infected” with the drive to succeed. In the ten years after she founded the Riverside School in India, her students have become competent problem-solvers in their local communities, as well as educators in their own right–teaching their peers and even their parents.

(TED is an annual conference on innovative thinking, focusing on Technology, Entertainment, and Design.)