Setting

Location - High Tech Middle School, Chula Vista

High Tech Middle Chula Vista was established in 2011. We are in our second operational year. The building is new and was also finished in 2011. Located on the edge of a large canyon, the school sits at one of the southern most points of Southern California. At night the lights of Tijuana reflect on our glass window.

Figure 1: Picture of the school and campus looking south.

Entering the school from the north, one is surrounded by the familiar markings of suburban Southern California. There is a mall down the street and a housing development sits directly across from the entrance. Upon exiting the school from the south side, one is immediately struck by the vast undeveloped wilderness. Rattlesnakes and coyotes are still found in abundance. Wild grasses dry to tumbleweed and mark the changing seasons. Hawks perch from the power lines along Discovery Falls Drive; they face the south, towards the canyon, full from a meal of field mice or preparing to hunt for another.

The building is two stories and houses both a middle and elementary school. The two schools share a common entrance. The middle school extends to the south of the entrance on both floors, and the elementary school to the north. Our campus is shared with High Tech High Chula Vista.

The building was designed to be an educational learning space for its students, staff and the community. Hallways serve as galleries of student work. The classroom walls facing the hallways are made of glass. They provide a sense of openness and encourage work that is worth seeing as well as doing. Much of the buildings light is provided naturally through the creative use of day lighting. Our school is one of the most energy-efficient in the nation and 70% of the energy used by our facility is self-generated through the use of rooftop solar panels.

Figure 2: Solar panels supply much of our energy needs.

Demographics
Our student body is admitted by lottery. This system allocates a number of spots for each zip code based on its middle-school aged population compared to the corresponding

population of the community. In this way our student population closely mirrors the student population of the communities they come from. Forty-two percent of our students are eligible for free or reduced lunch. The ethnicity of our student body is shown in the following table and chart.

African American

American Indian

Pacific Islander

Total students 115 111 113 339

Vietnamese

Caucasian

Japanese

Hispanic

Chinese

Filipino

Korean

Figure 3: Table of Ethnicities by Grade Level with Totals

Grade 6 7 8

Asian 1 0 1 2

11 10 10 31

9 11 11 31

0 0 3 3

16 15 16 47

70 64 64 198

6 3 3 12

1 3 1 5

0 2 1 3

0 3 3 6

1 0 0 1

Figure 4: Graph of Ethnicity of Student Body

Principles of Design, Three Key Integrations

The three schools on our campus share more than proximity. We share a common set of guiding principles that drive our work. The principles are shared by all of the High Tech schools, of which there are now eleven. The ideas are not strictly static, but rather interpreted and manifested in different ways across classrooms and schools. Despite this, they are clearly the foundation of our shared vision and form the basis of our common language.

The HTH principles of design are personalization, adult world connections, common intellectual mission and teacher as designer. These principles are distilled from the earlier work of our founder and CEO Larry Rosenstock. The ideas are infused into all aspects of our educational approach at the middle school.

These principles of design highlight three key integrations, which are the signature of a High Tech school: 1. Connecting the classroom and the community 2. Integrating students 3. Linking hands and minds

The design principles and the three integrations are implemented through a project-based approach to learning. We learn by doing, by creating and by exhibiting our creations.

Connecting the Classroom and the Community Our classrooms are not seen as separate from our community; our projects are always connecting the classroom with the world around it in some way. Education is not something we provide in isolation.

The connections take many forms but common implementations include: o Consulting experts during the design phase of a project. o Inviting guest speakers and experts from the community to assist on projects. o Designing products that benefit or reflect the community.

Some examples of how we have established this connection in the past year are: o Inviting a scientist and participant in the show The Colony to assist students in building devices to help them survive a hypothetical apocalypse scenario. o Inviting radio producers from NPR to help students produce radio pieces about stories from the border. o Having student families and community members help create altars for a project celebrating Dia de los Muertos.

Figure 5:Bringing expert guests into the classroom help students connect what they do in class to how it will be used in the outside world. Here, Amy West, scientist and contestant on the television show "The Colony" poses with students during the Dystopia to Utopia Project

We also hold many public exhibitions of our students work, highlighting the importance of our work outside of the classroom and the purpose of it being created for a wider audience than just our academic community.

Figure 6: Exhibitions are one way of integrating the community into the classroom. This is the poster from our schools first exhibition. Integrating Students Admission at HTCV is non-selective, and we do not track our students. We have a higher percentage of special education students than the district as a whole and provide a fully inclusive environment to all our students with special academic needs. Heterogeneous grouping is both a point of pride and a challenge of our academic model. How to provide an appropriately challenging curriculum to all students in a classroom with a wide spectrum of abilities, maturity and previous skills is a question that is continually asked

and constantly refined. Projects provide multiple entry points for students and varying degrees of challenge. Projects also give students choices which cater to individual passions and strengths. Often the grouping of students at all points of the academic spectrum leads to performance increases in all students. This is in part due to the high standards expected of all and the personalization of the academic programs.

Figure 7: Admission to HTMCV in not selective and we do not track our students.

Linking Hands and Minds Learning at HTMCV is applied. Our projects stress learning by doing in response to questions asked. Here are some examples from my projects over the last year: o How does the science air pressure effect the operation of a hovercraft?

o How does a truss structure compare to an arch structure in the design and implementation of a bridge? o How can you harness the power of the sun to cook food? o What is the difference between filtering water and purifying water?

The answer to these questions is both theoretical and applied. Students learn to successfully explain theories and apply them to products. In response to the above questions, they must build hovercrafts, water purification systems and solar cookers.

Figure 8: Learning is as much about doing as it reading.

Figure 9: Concepts like scale and proportions can be integrated into projects.

My Classroom
I teach 8th graders: a team of 56 students broken into 2 classes of 28. I teach integrated math and science. I share these 56 students with a humanities teacher, and as a team we spend most of the day with them. Usually I spend about 2 hours with each group per day.

In 8th grade, we cover the physical sciences and applied mathematics including topics in algebra and pre algebra. I am in my fifth year with the High Tech organization and my fourth year as a teacher. My classroom is active. I am still, and will probably always be, refining the process of integrating math and science through projects.

To accommodate the way I teach, the setup of my room is always changing; I have three configurations that students know by heart. All of the desks are on wheels and the setup of the room can be changed in less than four minutes. The different classroom setups are designed to best utilize the space for the type of teaching or working we are doing. The two most common setups are:

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1. Seminar setup - half the class works independently while the other half works in seminar discussion groups. 2. Project groups - where students are setup in groups of four to collaborate more effectively

I am given a lot of freedom to decide how to go about designing a math program that meets my strengths as a teacher and the needs of my students. I have tried many different approaches and tweaks and with each year bring what I like and what has worked from years past to bear on the current year.

In my first three years of teaching I used a program called Judo Math, developed by another teacher in my organization. This year I have explored and experimented with problem based learning along with computer aided procedural practice. I plan to expand and refine this model next year.

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