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Changing the Subject

Welcome

Of the thousands of projects High Tech High teachers and students have undertaken since the first school opened in 2000, the fifty documented in this book and website are a mere sampling; we hope they provide inspiration and a starting place for many more creative iterations.  We curated them by asking current and former teachers (now numbering in the hundreds) to nominate work that was both inspiring and replicable.

Our purpose is to share highlights from High Tech High’s first twenty years.  In doing so, we aim to describe, not prescribe.  “This isn’t how to do it, it’s how we did it.” 

“Knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention, through the relentless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.”(Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 53)

Chapter 1: Invention and reinvention

In these projects students and teachers are creating something new in the physical world.

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Staircase to Nowhere

Students created art pieces and accompanying posters inspired by the quote “If a staircase goes somewhere, it is craft; if it goes nowhere, it’s art.”

Spaceship Earth

Students built weather balloons and rockets in order to learn more about Astro-photography and Earth Science in an attempt to start their own HTH NASA.

Rotational Volumes

Students learned about rotational volumes by cutting shapes into books and rotating the pages around the axis of the book spine to create a three dimensional shape.

Chapter 2: In the world, with the world

In these projects, students are understanding the need for change in their world and making that change, through service or community action.

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The Bee Project

Students investigated the role of bees in our ecosystem, the various ways bees are being threatened, and wrote and performed plays about some aspect of what they had learned.

VersUS

Students went on a three-day, 23-mile journey on foot from the Mexican border to the Cabrillo National Monument, capturing the details of the journey through photography and journaling, later to be synthesized into a book focused on dichotomies that students chose to highlight.

Logs of the San Diego Bay

Students wrote pieces of poetry and conducted interviews to be included in different field guides about the San Diego bay.

Chapter 3: With each other

In these projects, students are investigating their beliefs and relationships and changing them.

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The Syrian Refugee Simulation

In this student-created and student-run simulation, participants took on the roles of Syrian citizens forced to leave and seek refuge in another country.

Free Your Mind: The Ultimate Escape Room

Students designed escape rooms that would challenge participants’ implicit bias by incorporating content related to attitudes about age, race, gender, sexuality, and mental health in each escape room puzzle.

Dribble and Rebel

Fourth grade teachers designed a project for students to look at history through the lens of sports and to explore how sports build and shape communities.
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