>>The essential elements I would
list as several integrations.
You're integrating students
across social class.
As Thomas Jefferson said "The purpose
of public education is
to create a public."
You're integrating head and hand,
MITs motto and a place like this
and John Dewey's point that
understanding drives from activity.
Making and doing things
is a very engaging way
and you've got to engage them first.
You're integrating school
and community, you don't want
to warehouse kids away from
the world outside them,
the world that they're preparing
to enter as young adults.
You want to have lots of people
coming in like we do here
and you want the kids
going out on internships,
doing community service etc. etc. So
you want the walls to be as permeable
as possible and no longer to be
the citadel apart from community
like the very first schools were uh..
one thousand years ago.
And finally the integration of
secondary and post secondary.
Some people well intended and
say we should have programs
for non college bound but having
taught carpentry which is presumed
to be one of those programs,
the problem with that is
that if you create a program
for the non college bound,
at the end of the 8th grade the
decision you make about who goes
into them is based on socioeconomic
predictors of the education
and economic level of one's parent
who might not be doing it
consciously but you're doing it.
So you're deciding by creating
a program for non college bound
that someone's not going to college.
But my hypothesis is that those kids
who ultimately won't go to college
and some will not are better served
if they're not being segregated
from those who are and not
being segregated from programs
that expect that they will be.
That's why we've got a hundred
kids accepted to college 100%,
99.5% participating in college,
70% going to four year colleges,
50 to 55% first generation
college entrants.
That's why we're getting those
results because we've got
that integration across all
those four integrations.
>>You've got tech and
you've got academics
and you're taking the methodology
of tech which is group performed,
team taught, experiential applied,
expeditionary, you're producing
and the content of academics,
literacy and numeracy,
[inaudible] all the things that
kids need to know and you're trying
to wed the pedagogy of tech,
not the content with the content
of academics that's really the
purpose of sort of restructuring
and getting schools like this.
That's MIT, head and
hand is the motto of MIT.
>>Why is it that your average
kid regardless of socioeconomic
or educational background, if
given an MMO or video game,
computer game would left to
their own devices play with it
for 10 hours a day for 14
months, even though it was fraught
with failure, frustrations,
setbacks and successes
but going through and persevering.
And some of us think isn't
there something that we can take
from that pedagogically if we were to
change the nature of the transaction
and so there's a lot of opportunity
there so at High Tech High
from the beginning we've said
that you can't play video
games unless you made them here
and they can't be violent and
they have to be educational.
I want kids again producing
not consuming,
I want kids making,
making those things.
>>So here we have fewer blocks
of time and we integrate art
into physics and into biology
by having kids publish books,
by having kids create
documentary films instead
of saying well every
45 minutes you're going
to jump up and run around.
So there's time to
do things, seriously.
The other thing is by having
small teaching teams of a teacher,
one teaches math/science, the other
one teaches humanities combined
that the two of us
together have 50 kids
in a seven period day I teach six out
of seven, I got 28 kids in a class.
I'm teaching 180, 190 kids
at one time as opposed to 50,
tremendous benefit to that.
If you want to integrate pedagogy
of technology with the content
of academics and have kids be
producing things and be doing it
in an interdisciplinary fashion,
teachers need to meet
with each other.
If you go into a school
that says they're doing that
and I have visited
schools in 38 states,
everyone says they're doing it
and then you say well
do your teachers meet
with each other, they say no.
I said oh well got a plane to catch.
So we knew that we
needed to build that in.
So in my school back east
we had a group of teachers
that met first period and a group
that met fourth period
of a seven period day.
Teachers who met fourth period
randomly assigned to first
or fourth over three years.
The ones who met fourth period talked
about what Billy just did wrong
and the ones who met first period
were able to talk about three years
from now, it's something
about human nature and so here
when we built High Tech
High we said we're going
to have people meet every morning
of the year in different teams.
So on Friday everyone in the whole
school meets, on Wednesday they look
at student work, on Tuesday
and Thursday the teachers
who share the same kids at the same
time that year, they meet etc. etc.
So we have different configurations
of common planning time
which allows people to
feel like and behave
like they're treated professionally.
>>You want to treat kids with respect
and kid's antennae are very well
tuned to pick up contrivance
and fakery and things that
are not fair and not just
so you don't have kid's bathrooms
in adult bathrooms, you
just have bathrooms.
You don't have PA systems that go
off throughout the day making foolish
announcements of who should come
to the office where it feels
like quazi bus station/police
station.
If kids need to go to the bathroom,
they get up and go to the bathroom
and just little things, a lot of
little things that all add up because
as Voltaire said, suspicion
invites treachery.
If you treat kids with
respect they'll be respectful.
>>A lot of people say well they come
in and say well we can't do this
because we don't have the computers
or we can't do this because of this
or we can't do this because of that
and I think that actually you can
and we did this exercise
yesterday and sort of a gift
to whoever might be listening
to this called the most memorable
learning experience exercise.
It's simple, you're in a
cafeteria, you've got 100 people
from your community, teachers
or whomever and they're sitting
in tables with five or six or seven
to a table and you say to everybody,
would you please just spend
five or ten minutes writing
down your two most
memorable learning experiences
from your high school years.
They do that and they you ask
them, would you please all discuss
at your table those memorable
learning experiences and come
up with the key characteristics
that defined what was an important
significant memorable learning
experience for you all.
And then you're going to get up
at each table and share those
and report back to us and I'm
going to be up with this chart here
and I'm going to write
down what they were.
I've done this in about
28 cities, I've done this
with my colleagues many times, we did
it yesterday with these architects.
I could several pages back
on that flip chart I've been
tempted sometimes to write
down like a card trick person,
what they were going to say
because I know what
they're going to say.
What they say is it was a project,
it involved community, it had fear
or failure, it had recognition
of success, it had a mentor,
it had a public display of work.
It had all of the things
that at this point
that High Tech High is based on.
It had all of the things
that I'm talking about,
so then you respectfully
ask a group of teachers,
really respectively say well this
was not externally imposed on you,
the midwifery that we just did was
about your own most memorable
learning experiences.
How does this comport
with the way you teach?
And if it doesn't comport with the
way you teach, what can we then do
to get you teaching the way
that you yourself learned?
Again it wasn't imposed on
you, this came from within you.
That's a great place to
start with communities,
it's a great place to
start with teachers.
I think that what we're
doing is really obvious.
>>For more information on what works
in public education
go to edutopia.org
