Here is my recommended song for this post.
So as I mentioned in my California post we went to a school called High Tech High.
High Tech High is a school focused solely on PBL. (Project Based Learning) they take curriculum units and turn a whole unit into learning and then transferring the learning into a project.
We went down down there and spent about 2 days on campus exploring and learning with their Grade 9 students.
On the first day we got partnered up with a HTH student. I was with Tremel and Aiden. We got to go on a tour of the various buildings on campus and just got a feel for the area. Then we went back to the building the Grade 9 were at and did some icebreaker games. We learned about what HTH was like and how it’s different and the same from PLP. Then we went for lunch. Lunch was probably my favourite part of the day because they have a giant strip mall with a bunch of little shops, a grocery store and some restaurants. We got Five Guys. Then we returned to the school and debriefed as a class about what we learned and what we wondered about. I was really curious about how HTH students start to gear towards universities and post-secondary education. Then we got together with the HTH students again and recorded interviews. I based my questions around how the students think HTH has set them up (so far) for going into the work force.
I was quite happy with the answers I got and I started to really like HTH and some of the things they did. They had many different “career days” and oppritunites to explore the many options and different fields in the work force and how to achieve those. It was really kinda cool to see that students a year younger than me have had similar exposure to university and post-secondary information in a relatively short amount of time.
The second day was more of a fun and less work oriented day. We did some light math and went to our partners “X block.” (Pretty much a fun block where students can select various activities and do them at the end of the day) My partner, Tremel, was in a sports block so I spent the afternoon playing football.
Overall I really enjoyed my experience at HTH. It was cool to see how PLP is different from other PBL programs and I almost want to implement some of the things, they do at HTH, into PLP. I really like the idea of have a common room for just the grade and having all the classes in a short distance from each other.