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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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Planting Community

Students read about and researched issues related to agriculture and biology before working in groups to create large mobile planters for kindergarteners to learn from.

Come Play With Us

Kindergarten students create an inquiry-based project about the nature of play, and in the process transformed an unused piece of land into a new play area.

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.

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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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.

Voices of Justice

Students ran a political campaign simulation and conducted extensive interviews with people from the community about societal issues so students could learn about these topics both on a macro-level and through personal experiences.

Chapter 3: With each other

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

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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.

Light of Kindness

Students learned about properties of light and the effect it has on certain materials via experiments before writing shadow puppet plays.

Toga Night

Students read plays by three Greek writers before adapting them into an onstage version following themes of genocide, war, refugees, and the treatment of women.
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