When educators visit High Tech High, they are often impressed by how much our teachers collaborate with each other. They typically leave inspired to make their first project a massive interdisciplinary collaboration between all of the things—English, Spanish, Biology, and maybe even some Algebra thrown in there too.
This almost always backfires.
The truth is, collaboration at this scale rarely happens at High Tech High. In fact, plenty of projects are designed and executed by a single teacher, because you don’t need to design a collaborative project in order to take part in a collaborative design process.
Here’s what that project design process often looks like: A teacher takes an initial, unformed idea and brainstorms with a group of colleagues using a Charrette protocol. Later, they bring a project plan to a group of students and colleagues to develop and refine in a project tuning. Partway through the project itself, they receive support on any unexpected challenges 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.
This works for students as well. They don’t need to be doing a “group project” in order to work collaboratively. Don’t get me wrong: Group projects are awesome, but so are individual projects. And just like teachers, students can receive critique and other input from their peers every step of the way—because “collaboration” doesn’t only take place during “group work.”
