Open: How We’ll Work, Live and Learn In The Future

by David Price

And work is the operative word here. There are few conventional classrooms, rather they have workshops or studios. Student work is on display everywhere you look, largely because High Tech High’s main vehicle for learning is ‘the project’. High Tech High is probably one of the world’s leading exponents of project-based learning (PBL). If you’re unfamiliar with PBL, it’s frequently (and usually wrongly) associated with a generalised approach to learning by ‘topics’, which was popularised in the 1970s and vilified thereafter for its laissez-faire, anything-goes, laxity. In the hands of expert practitioners, like those at High Tech High, PBL is what most of us do for a living: we have a need, a client, some complex questions to answer, and we come up with a collaborative solution – all within a timeframe.