Before presenting Loving Lives to my students, I felt isolated in my thoughts. With the support of my students, the teenage rebel in me was inspired. As a teenager, I always felt like it was me versus the world. With a privileged upbringing, this wasn’t actually the case, but I always found the defiance to be kind of fun. So here I was again, plotting ways to overthrow the system when a younger (but more mature) teacher asked if I had thought about sharing the presentation with Administration. In my rebel head, I thought, “The Administration will never go for this. I’ve got to sneak up on them and trick them into supporting this. There’s no way I could just ask them for their support.” With a good nights sleep, I remembered that I’m 36, not 16, so I followed my friend’s advice, and shared the slides with administration.

I was simply asking permission to share the slides in the faculty newsletter, but the administrators liked my slides so much that they created a faculty meeting the following week (which never happens) so I could present to a live audience. Suddenly I felt nervous; Was I doomed to fail because teachers were being asked to stay after school for some lame faculty meeting? Teachers are free to leave school at 3pm, so I expected most teachers to rush for the door as quickly as possible after my presentation (which ended at 3:05pm), but almost everyone stayed engaging in Q and A and small group discussion until 3:45 and beyond. I couldn’t believe it! I must have really been on to something my community needed. But how could I keep up the momentum?

The slides for the faculty meeting are below. I started by giving the same presentation that I gave to the students, followed by some student survey results and some content specifically for the teachers. I also added some teacher survey results collected following the meeting.

Teacher Presentation Slides