Alec talks to fifth grade teacher Jeff Govoni about a project he and his fifth grade colleagues did last year, in which students designed and built dog houses and cat condos for animals seeking adoption.
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.
Alec and Nuvia talk to artist Scarlett Baily about her life, her art, and in particular the process of collaborating with 200 elementary school students
Here is a paradox of teaching: if you want your classroom to be full of conversation and self-directed learning, you need to be able to quickly capture everybody’s focus.
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.
