Teaching at High Tech High is seen by some as the pinnacle of project based education. The school is influential to educators across the world who are trying to adopt a more progressive pedagogy. At High Tech High teachers are invited to teach what they love and design projects that are personally fulfilling to them (Robin, 2016). In an ideal environment this leads to high quality projects for all students.
An issue I have encountered during my time here is that project based learning (pbl) challenges teachers in ways unique to other styles of teaching. It's a paradox that only after a teacher completes a successful project will they be encouraged to master the pbl planning process. The invention and reinvention process (Friere, 1970) for pbl teachers involves months long cycles of experimentation and tuning. They might not get feedback about their change ideas until after a project has been tried for a second time.
For my project I posed the following question: what is required to lead a new teacher to plan and facilitate a high-quality project by the end of their first year? Our schools are built on the principle that you have to do something in order to learn and that knowledge comes from experience (Dewey, 1916). This is one reason why we are dedicated to pbl. Therefore, it's necessary to guide our new staff towards becoming experts at planning and facilitating projects for students. Logically then, we must require our teachers to try projects for themselves and gain experience. What safeguards need to be in place in order to make that process one of learning rather than failure?
This episode is me trying to fit together what I learned from these interviews into a unified idea for my continuing work next year. For more from me about education please visit www.philipestrada.org
