I did my second TEDx talk this past week – TEDxPhilly. Unlike TEDxNYED, this was not an education-focused TEDx. The theme of TEDxPhilly was "Right Here, Right Now," so it had a very Philly-centric group of speakers, and the room definitely had a sense of urgency.

For me, the challenge of this talk was to find a way to communicate this message to a room full of non-educators. What is interesting about the lessons we’ve learned at SLA to that audience?

I really struggled with my lens for this talk for a while. At one point in the development of the talk, I tweeted out, "It is really hard to find a new way to say the things you always say." After all, it wasn’t like I suddenly thought something new, I still believe what I believe about education. I just needed to find a compelling new way to tell the story of SLA.

My slide deck is linked above, and I think it gives a really good sense of where I took the ideas. The beautiful thing about talking about SLA is that I can do what Zac always pushes me to do – Proof of Concept. We’re doing what we say we’re doing at SLA, and that means I always have a wealth of "stuff" to talk about to make the ideas real. This past week was the end of "benchmark season" at SLA, and several of the projects I talked about were ones that had just finished. And I really love talking about the work of the students and teachers at SLA.

The talk will, hopefully, be up soon, and I’ll post it as soon as it is. But I wanted to get my thoughts on the creation of this talk up now.

As for the event? My hat is off to all the TEDxPhilly organizers and speakers. It was an amazing day and WOW, the Kimmel Center is an incredible place to speak. As always, Rough Cut Productions (SLA’s in-house film crew) was amazing, and it always amps me up to do a talk with SLA kids in the house. TEDx events are an amazing opportunity for communities to come together and explore the most interesting ideas in their world. There are ideas worth spreading everywhere, and TEDx reminds us of that.

Congrats to everyone at TEDxPhilly. Thanks for letting me be a part of it.