Kelly Wilson, HTH GSE Dean, talks to Louis Lacour, an eleventh grader at Green School in Bali, about project-based learning, local renewable energy infrastructure, and his plan to transform reef conservation with biodegradable zip ties!
Kelly Wilson, HTH GSE Dean, talks to Benjamin Freud, head of Upper School at Green School in Bali, about doing socially-meaningful, student-driven PBL grounded in the local community, in a school with bamboo buildings and no walls.
Third and eleventh grade students collaborated to research and share insights about local natural spaces, enhancing their understanding through lessons, writing, research, and videos.
In Student-Centered assessment the students first reflect and then receive feedback from peers, teachers, community, and experts to fully develop their projects.
Rosemarie Biocarles-Rydeen talks to Alec about “Everybody Needs a Rock”, the kindergarten geology project she designed and ran at High Tech Elementary Chula Vista
Students deepened their understanding of food’s impact on health, values, and the environment, fostering critical thinking through exploring food production, preparation, and consumption.
Students engaged in an interdisciplinary project exploring indigenous cultures, delving into the impacts of colonization and creating constellations inspired by storytelling traditions
Students conducted a comprehensive study of San Diego’s sensitive coastline, observing environmental interactions, interviewing individuals, and analyzing data to create various media forms, aiming to engage diverse audiences while connecting with younger students to share their experiences.
Alec talks to the XP Trust’s Chief Academic Officer, Andy Sprakes, about how XP schools make sure every child’s work makes it into the final product, and the hard lesson that made them take this so seriously.
Alec talks to the XP Trust’s Chief Academic Officer, Andy Sprakes, about how XP schools make sure every child’s work makes it into the final product, and the hard lesson that made them take this so seriously.
This is the longer “director’s cut” version of this episode.
High Tech High Interim CEO Kaleb Rashad and co-founder Rob Riordan talk about how High Tech High’s approach to teaching and learning informs professional development in the organization.
High Tech High Interim CEO Kaleb Rashad and co-founder Rob Riordan sit down to talk about what they were doing BEFORE High Tech High, and how it shaped their philosophy of education
Veteran teacher Andrew Lerario talks to Alec about “sharing the cognitive load” with students, and treating the project as a shared journey you go on together. He also talks about doing rocket science with high schoolers.
Students studied the geological processes of changing the land via erosion, human impact, and other forces to model gradual change in their topographical maps
Students created their self portraits using hundreds of linear and quadratic equations. They then annotated their portrait by solving intersecting lines using substitution and elimination
Middle School teacher Sean Gilley explains how he uses Chat GPT to share the load on project planning, so he can focus on the parts of teaching that matter most
“Paagalon ka school” (“School for lunatics”), “The Motley Crew’, “The Rag-Tag Army” were the not-so-flattering epithets the community used to describe our school —one would have thought we had started a rock band, not a tiny little school with nine children and grand ambitions.
Veteran PBL teacher Brian Delgado explains the power of thinking about the first time you do a project as a “first draft,” and unpacks a phrase coined by High Tech High cofounder Rob Riordan: “Let the experience be the text.”
Patricia Lim and Stacey Stevenson created an inquiry-based project about the nature of play, in the hopes it could ultimately transform the underused space into a nature playground.
The central idea of this project was to use the city itself as a text and students captured the details of the journey through photography and journaling
Students used words and images to express themselves through their experiences, passions, past memories, adventures, beliefs, sayings, dreams and more!
How do you grow food in space?
In this project, 9th and 11th graders teamed up figure out how to do exactly that: grow food with no natural light, no gravity, and hardly any room!
A math teacher and an art teacher were fascinated by the “wave machines” of kinetic artist Rubin Margolin. The art teacher spent two years learning how to make one of his own.
Then their students learned how too.
