Not So Distant Future

Today we visited two very different schools and learned an incredible amount of things from both of them.   Poway is a high school of 3,000 in the surburbs, somewhat similar to the Westlake area, outside of San Diego. 

We talked to them about their senior project which is a culminating experience to the senior year, and which students work on with their social studies and English teachers.  Students are connected with a business mentorship in the community as part of this.

Poway also has a unique teaching internship, where they pair upperclassmen with teacher mentors at their own campus.  The students learn about assessment and lesson design, and work with ninth and tenth grade students as classroom assistants.  The principals teach the course.  It’s slightly similar to our teen teaching program.

Another unique program was their wellness program, which is funded mainly by grants.  They have a student support center where students can go to talk to the counselors, hang out with peers if they don’t have a “home” on campus, and you could see that it was a really important aspect of their campus.

They have a really excellent digital graphics, digital animation, and digital film program, as well as an excellent librarian who is also into wikis and blogs, etc.

We have made a lot of connections at these campuses that we can draw on as we work on new courses or want to share ideas or learn new things.  Sometimes we have been sharing ideas as well as learning new things, so it’s been a really valuable experience. 

The second site we visited this afternoon was High Tech High School, which is a charter school in
San Diego.   It was somewhat mind-blowing in that it is all project –based learning across the curriculum.  Students are taught by teams of teachers who share the time with students. 

Students were actively moving from room to room as they worked on projects—there were students in the hall using power tools to build projects, mounting their art on the walls as they finished it, and many many cross-discipline connections.  For example, the art teacher was working with the engineering teacher and physics teacher to design a project “box” about a physics topic that would fit in the frames of their windows.   Students were finishing them and actually hanging them up in the windows as we were leaving today.

When you asked students to explain a concept, they were able to explain all of what they were creating in great detail and explain the science behind it.

The architecture and design of the building was also really interesting which you can see from the photos. The design of High Tech really challenged our thinking.

There is a lot to process about all the different things we’ve seen, but this is a quick snapshot.  One school was much more traditional than the other, but we got so many valuable ideas from both.