How does the “high tech” part of your name manifest itself inside the classroom?
White: To lead off what I just said in terms of students being able to articulate or present their work: Students are assessed and given a grade, but they’re not assessed in terms of traditional standardized testing—memorizing information and regurgitating it. Instead, every quarter our students are required to do a presentation of learning, and/or an exposition, where they exhibit their work. The premise behind it all is that when a student is informed that this work is going to be publicly displayed, they’re encouraged to ask themselves, “Am I proud of this work that will be publicly displayed?” And on top of it, we tell them, “You’re going to be in a group of your peers describing your work, so you must have a command of that content.” And of course students get all dressed up and they have their PowerPoint or a website they created to share.
More to the question of how they utilize technology to maximize or display their work: It could be through designing websites, PowerPoints, Photoshop, and all these different tools I can’t even begin describing. That’s where the high tech comes in. It’s not so much generating engineers or computer science experts, it’s really: How do we maximize technology in the education world that you’re in, or out in the professional world?
Is there a K-12-wide focus on moving kids into college?
White: There is a focus on being a college prep environment and its tricky going from a nontraditional project-based learning environment to 99 percent of our students going on to college. A lot of it, because I am the only advisor in a building of 600 students, doing college counseling, does stem from working smarter not harder. We use a college readiness software system called Naviance, which plays a true role in allowing the college prep culture to be built.
Every counselor has a caseload of students split into what I call the three Ms. The top 25 percent, you’d want to manage your time with them—those are the kids that are seeking your help all the time. They’re great students, and a lot of the time counselors like to spend time with these students, but not too much time. The middle 50 percent is make time. You’ve got to make time for those kids being that they’re flying under the radar and doing OK, not causing problems but at the same time, through technology with Naviance, you can help them see they do have higher potential than just getting Bs and Cs. And then the last 25 percent you need to motivate.
When the caseload is that big, how do you organize your time so that you’re efficiently using it? It helps if you can give that top 25 percentile a tool like Naviance, which lets them learn and investigate and research about schools on their own. Yes, you can talk to them about it, but at least when when they’re coming in to talk to you it’s a very efficient conversation where you can get to the heart of their question. It’s comprehensive curriculum that’s grade-level appropriate for building a college-going culture and addressing college-going questions, if you will. In a public school, I can’t get to every kid, especially ninth and tenth graders, and some of them are scared to ask certain questions or maybe not even aware of certain questions to ask.
Do students typically stick with High Tech High from K-12, or do they come and go?
White: I wish I had numbers to really address that but I guess I would say students mostly stay with the system. When we have our freshman orientation, there’s about 15 percent that are not from one of our middle schools. Some of that growth is just due to the fact that we have more spaces at the high school level than at the middle school, so we’re filling in spaces. I would say most of them stay with our learning environment. We’re going to open a new elementary school next fall. We actually have three, and this will be our fourth.
Next page: The biggest challenges and benefits with this model
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