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.

Students made their own kinetic sculptures inspired by artist Rubin Margolin, who makes wave generating machines.
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.
First grade students learned about rainforests, ecosystems, agriculture, history, the economics of trade, and cooking by studying the history of chocolate.

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.

Students wrote pieces of poetry and conducted interviews to be included in different field guides about the San Diego bay.
In Storytellers of the Land, fifth graders read and wrote origin stories about animals and nature and teamed up with local conservation organizations to analyze thousands of trail camera photos of local wildlife.

Chapter 3: With each other

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

Through interviews with family members, scientists, and medical professionals, students homed in answers to the question, "What am I most likely to die of?"
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.
“Do you know what symbiosis is?” reads the first line of the book Evolving Ecologists, ...