Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash

Within the film Most Likely to Succeed, its exploration into the innovative school of High Tech High captivated me completely. The way the school functions, completely breaks the traditional ways of instructing, learning, and assessing. Students and teachers have almost complete autonomy as to how they teach, learn, and show their learning. At large, High Tech High is the high school of my dreams. The school is focused on genuine learning of not only content, but soft skills such as communication, creative thinking, time management and conflict resolution, with the intent to prepare students for the technologically advancing world we live in. The students in the film were completely engaged and in control of their learning and It was clear that High Tech High Students were experiencing insightful learning, rather than short-term memorization.

There is a lot to learn from the way the High Tech High teachers approached instructing in the film. Seeing the amount of control the students were given to complete their projects shows that their teachers were prioritizing deeper understanding. They allowed for students to experience conflicts with one another, and to get lost in their learning process no matter the time it would take to find understanding and success. A huge example of this is the way the student Brian, failed to lead his group to finish their exhibition piece on time, but he continued to work on it even through the summer. His teacher stuck by him and supported him as he made more mistakes and learned from those missteps to finally find success. There is a scene in the film where Brian’s teacher observes him making mistakes right in front of him. His teacher voices how tempting it is to plainly point out the issue that needs fixing, but he resists, knowing full well that it would actually be a disservice to Brian’s learning process. In the end, not only was Brian incredibly content, but it was obvious his teacher found an equal amount of excitement to see Brian’s growth. As a future teacher, I hope to build a similar community within my classroom where students feel comfortable to learn and make mistakes.