Hands-On Learning at High Tech High

Students prepare for the real world through technology-enabled projects.

A biotechnology student uses a gazelle leg to study form and function in nature. Credit: David Julian

by Grace Rubenstein

On June 27, 2009, High Tech High biotech teacher Jay Vavra and several of his students returned to Tanzania to hold a bushmeat-identification workshop to help local wildlife-protection officials fight poaching. For more information, go to the group's Web site, High Tech High African Bushmeat Expedition, and read the expedition journal. (Watch a trailer for Students of Consequence, the students' award-winning documentary about their 2008 expedition.)

As I navigated her busy classroom with a microphone this fall, sophomore Maya Walden paused in researching the root causes of genocide to ask what I planned to do with my recordings. I explained that I would use editing software to meld the best clips into a soundtrack for an audio slide show, to appear online.

"Oh," she said. "We could probably do that for you." (And they did. Check out their work.)

The episode reflects not only the confidence and abilities of one good student but also the entire attitude of High Tech High. The San Diego charter school exists to prepare students -- all kinds of students -- to be savvy, creative, quick-thinking adults and professionals in a modern world. It has scrapped a lot of what's arbitrary and outdated about traditional schooling -- classroom design, divisions between subjects, independence (read: isolation) from the community, and assessments that only one teacher ever sees. (Watch a series of videos about High Tech High.)

Instead, the textbook-free school fosters personalized project learning with pervasive connections to the community. Any visitor can see the evidence in the students' engagement and the eye-popping projects that adorn almost every corner and wall -- many of which the teens have exhibited to local businesspeople, not just teachers. As the school's name implies, technology enables many of the projects students create. And teachers routinely craft lessons that blend subjects, reflecting how interwoven they truly are.

On all fronts, the teaching and learning experience here is keenly attuned to the demands of today's world, not the industrial world that existed a hundred years ago when the American school model came into being.

For more on this story, see Edutopia.org