Lots of teachers come to High Tech High, see how collaborative the teachers are, and get inspired to make their first project a massive interdisciplinary collaboration between, say, English, Spanish, Biology, and Algebra.
This is almost always a bad idea.
The truth is, collaboration at this scale rarely happens at High Tech High: in fact, plenty of High Tech High projects are designed and done by a single teacher.
So what, is High Tech High’s culture of collaboration just a big lie?
Not at all. Because a teacher might be designing their own project, but they aren’t doing it on their own. Here’s what a project design process looks like:
A teacher takes an initial, unformed idea, and brainstorms with a group of colleagues using a “charette protocol”. Later, they bring a project plan to be developed and refined by a group of students and colleagues in a “project tuning”. Partway through the project itself, they get support on the unexpected challenges that are coming up in a “dilemma consultancy.”
So from one perspective, this is a project done by an individual teacher. But viewed from another angle, they collaborated with half the teaching staff – and some of the students too.
And this works for students too – they don’t need to be doing a “group project” in order to be working collaboratively. Don’t get me wrong – group projects are awesome, but individual projects are awesome too.
And just like the teachers, those students will be getting critique from their peers every step of the way – because “collaboration” doesn’t have to mean “group work.”
Lots of teachers come to High Tech High, see how collaborative the teachers are, and get inspired to make their first project a massive interdisciplinary collaboration between, say, English, Spanish, Biology, and Algebra.
This is almost always a bad idea.
The truth is, collaboration at this scale rarely happens at High Tech High: in fact, plenty of High Tech High projects are designed and done by a single teacher.
So what, is High Tech High’s culture of collaboration just a big lie?
Not at all. Because a teacher might be designing their own project, but they aren’t doing it on their own. Here’s what a project design process looks like:
A teacher takes an initial, unformed idea, and brainstorms with a group of colleagues using a “charette protocol”. Later, they bring a project plan to be developed and refined by a group of students and colleagues in a “project tuning”. Partway through the project itself, they get support on the unexpected challenges that are coming up in a “dilemma consultancy.”
So from one perspective, this is a project done by an individual teacher. But viewed from another angle, they collaborated with half the teaching staff – and some of the students too.
And this works for students too – they don’t need to be doing a “group project” in order to be working collaboratively. Don’t get me wrong – group projects are awesome, but individual projects are awesome too.
And just like the teachers, those students will be getting critique from their peers every step of the way – because “collaboration” doesn’t have to mean “group work.”
