For this week in the faculty periodic professional development meeting, I was asked to present a problem, observation, case study (basically anything) to a set of 10 new teachers. (We switch off presenters each time we meet.) I chose to do mine on the relationship between teaching, presenting, and smartboard — and the evolution of my understanding of this relationship since I’ve started teaching.

Unlike animal and plant evolution which can take hundreds of years for permanent changes to become stable (I guess bacterial evolution can happen in a matter of hours), I’ve evolved a lot in my teaching style and I wanted to share that with others. So instead of bringing up problem and talking it to death without any resolution or actionable steps — which is the norm — I decided that my group would learn something.

And so I presented. I only had 1 hour to create the ten minute presentation, which is why it is on the bland side, but I think I inspired a few of the teachers. Especially one of the music teachers, for whom I see this to be a huge timesaver.

One of the lower school teachers who had heard about my presentation randomly stopped me and said that we should talk, because she too has been using smartboard a lot and we could trade observations and ideas.

But honestly, I’m not here to change anyone’s mind about anything. I’m here to do my stuff in the classroom. Whatever else comes out of it, great.