Visitors to High Tech High often misconstrue its approach to planning as “loose” or “anything goes” compared to traditional schools, because teachers aren’t following a pre-set curriculum. In fact, High Tech High is “tight” on things that most schools are “loose” on.
The “standard” approach to managing teachers is to be very tight on the standards they’re “covering”, and loose about how they plan: in other words, as long as you’re teaching the content you are expected to teach, you can pretty much plan however you want, and for the most part, you’ll plan on your own.
High Tech High is the opposite: directors don’t impose a specific set of standards on teachers (though teachers and leaders refer to standards like the common core and NGSS because they’re useful), but teachers plan collaboratively using a shared set of protocols to develop and refine their work—in particular a protocol called a project tuning.
A teacher wouldn’t get in trouble because they weren’t teaching a particular period in US history, but if a teacher refused to take part in project tunings, that would be a problem.
Because High Tech High is tight on the HOW of planning, not on the WHAT.
That’s why they do collaborative professional development four days a week at most of their schools. The schools have a shared culture not because someone’s imposing it from above, but because teachers spend so much time together.
There’s a video version of this article—check it out!
