Lisa Griffin jumped at the opportunity to teach at High Tech High in 2015, after 20 years of teaching and leading in Oakland and San Francisco in arts education, outdoor education, classroom teaching, and teacher education. She has traveled through New England facilitating the creative collaboration of teen theater artists, led backpacking trips on and around Mount Lassen, supervised and worked on high ropes courses, and has facilitated far too many icebreaker games. In her recent work in Deep East Oakland at Elmhurst Community Prep, she worked as a reading specialist and instructional coach for middle school history teachers, while serving on the Instructional Leadership Team. She is honored to have extensive training and coaching from over ten years in collaboration with the National Equity Project. In the Spring of 2015, she taught Adolescent Psychology to English credential candidates in the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley. In addition to her co-designing and collaborative work with teachers and students at High Tech High, Lisa also mentors teachers and teaches Secondary Reading Methods at the HTH Grad School of Education. She is inspired by students’ creativity and courage; she loves tocombine her passions for literature and history with projects that incorporate performing arts and themes of social justice, storytelling, and international collaboration. Though she was born in San Diego, Lisa moved every two or three years of her life, so San Diego was only for kindergarten and college (at UCSD), as well as her annual summer vacation destination to visit extended family. She is thrilled to be back and to live near her parents and in-laws. She is always looking out for new students, knowing that experience all too well. She lived up and down the West Coast, in Michigan, in the Philippines, and in Ireland during part of college. She has been impacted personally by two revolutions, having witnessed the People Power Revolution in the Philippines, and having traveled to Berlin, Germany, the year the Berlin Wall came down. When she is not at school, she is the happiest swimming in the ocean and doing creative projects with her husband, Koichi, and their two sons, Kane and Ando.