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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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The Blood Bank Project

Students worked in groups to research and define an aspect of blood physiology, blood banking, or blood-related diseases before creating multimedia art pieces using what they had learned.

Toy Story

Students created their own toy alongside local pre-schoolers and write a story about what that toy does when no one is around.

The Backyard Ecosystem Project

The core purpose of this project was for students to develop a connection to the natural world, and examine the role of pollinators, and re-plant a school garden.

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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Growing Beyond Earth

Students learned biology concepts and scientific methods through a real world challenge -- growing food with no natural light, no gravity, and hardly any space.

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.

XONR8

Students critically examined the criminal justice system in the US by working with the California Innocence Project (CIP) to analyze actual clients’ case files and recommend to CIP whether or not to take the case.

Chapter 3: With each other

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

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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.

Light of Kindness

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

Nature or Nurture

“Do you know what symbiosis is?” reads the first line of the book Evolving Ecologists, ...
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