Post Kind: Article

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. 
Much like a movie’s opening scene, the launch of a lesson should grab everybody’s attention, spark curiosity, and get students asking questions.
Last spring I was standing in my fifth-grade classroom, mid-project, rearranging student groups when I realized we had a problem. My students were building scale models of dog houses and cat condos that they had designed—and would ultimately build—to donate to a pet-adoption event later that spring.
This collection is called “true project stories” because it’s all about teachers (and students) telling the stories of the projects they’ve done, from the heights of achievement to the depths of despair.
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