Schools

In this section you will find examples of schools that have an interdisciplinary curriculum and use the project based learning method.I was very pleased and encouraged to find that these method are used with such outstanding results.

The first example is the High Tech High organization (K-12) from San Diego.They have over 3,000 students and I have learned about them from "The Global Achievement Gap",an excellent book written by Tony Wagner.Here is a short excerpt that will motivate you to read this book and to learn more about HTH.

"The HTH schools have gained international recognition for their highly innovative education practices and for their results. Since graduating its first class in 2003, 100 percent of High Tech High students have been accepted to college-80 percent to four-year colleges, including Johns Hopkins University, MIT, Stanford, Howard, University of Southern California, University of California at Berkeley, NYU, and Northwestern.

More than half of HTH grads are first-generation college students, including some who are the first in their family to complete high school(...)

All this is accomplished on the $6,200-per-student operating budget that the state provides charter schools.

The national average of college graduates who get a technical degree from college is 15 percent. High Tech High's is 27 percent(...). But High Tech High does not track students by ability or offer any Advanced Placement courses in its academic program.

Although the California accountability system (called the Academic Performance Index) reports the HTH test scores as among the highest in the state, the schools steadfastly refuse to teach to these tests, in the belief that doing so would dilute their curriculum.

Test-prep simply has no place at High Tech High. Nor do textbook driven, stand-alone courses such as 9th grade English, world history, chemistry, and so on that have defined the high school experience for a century. Instead, all academic content (with the exception of 11th and 12th grade math and science) is taught through interdisciplinary projects-and even the science and math classes are organized around project-based learning, rather than based on textbooks.

To pass from one grade to the next, students have to show samples of their work, collected in digital portfolios, to a panel of teachers, students, and other adults from outside the school. They must also complete a ten-week internship in llth grade, and a senior project, in order to graduate."

Return from Schools to Interdisciplinary Learning