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Goal: to help a teacher come up with creative solutions to a thorny dilemma

There are two different questions I often hear from visitors to High Tech High that are both based on the same misconception about project-based learning.  The first is, “How much time should we be spending on PBL per week?” And the second is, “Is it still OK to give lectures?” The answer to both of these questions lies in the understanding that a project isn’t a specific kind of lesson, but rather a specific kind of unit.

Ron Berger shares how teachers can use model critiques for instructional practices.

When I started teaching, I kept hearing things like, “You’ll want to make sure you set classroom norms in the first week.”

Eleventh grade students created ceramic dinner sets that celebrated community members of the San Diego region.

Alec Patton talks to teacher High School teacher Karen Shaffran and student Alegria Vargas about how their class created a socially conscious cosmetics business, featuring products made from plants grown hydroponically in a storage room!

The connection between a lack of reading proficiency and low-income background is well-established. And while the barriers are real, this is a solvable problem—not simple, but solvable.

Over the past decade I’ve attended 11 schools across the United States and Japan. I was born in San Diego, then my family moved to Yokohama, Japan when I was seven years old.

It started with a simple idea: to bring a 60-minute visual countdown clock into my class. What began as a classroom management tool turned into something bigger—a small shift that made the room more predictable, accessible, and humane for every learner.

I used to think I was too cool and progressive to give quizzes. But a quiz tells you whether students are learning what you think you are teaching them, quickly and precisely. It’s a perfect data-collection tool: If students learned what you wanted them to learn, they will answer the questions correctly. If they haven’t, they won’t, allowing you to provide targeted help to specific students based on which questions they get wrong. The only caveat is that you shouldn’t grade the quiz, because attaching a grade to a quiz ruins your data.