Harris goes to San Diego

We all felt so lucky to get the amazing opportunity to visit the High Tech High Schools in San Diego at half term. Our mission was to witness some of the outstanding teaching and learning and try to bring some of the best ideas back home to the Federation.
High Tech High had been reported in the papers in the UK as being one of the best schools in the world and we wanted to find out what was so good.

We kept in touch with everyone through the Harris Voice website and posted our updates every evening. Whilst visiting the schools we split into pairs and tried to focus our research in each of the four key areas of the twelve ideas. We thought that this would be a good way of keeping evidence. We also took lots of photographs and had smaller projects for our own Academies. Most of us spoke to our teachers beforehand to see if there was anything special we could find out for them.

“Clearly the students are at the centre of everything that happens here. From the design of the projects they are working on, the appraisal of their work, peer feedback and support to changes that may happen within the school, students are consulted and actively involved in every stage of the process. This clearly has the effect of making the students very proud of their school and extremely focused and engaged with their learning. Students seem to feel their education is relevant and worthwhile and they value the efforts teachers make to ensure that the products they create are real and have worth to their lives.”

Sara Goddard, Harris Academy Merton
and Nadia Osumanu, Harris Girls’ Academy, East Dulwich