Digital Portfolios

Graduate students develop a digital portfolio to document their learning, reflections, and research. Each student’s digital portfolio includes work from their core courses and the Master’s Capstone Project. The purpose of the digital portfolio is for students to share and disseminate their graduate work and research with a broader audience of practitioners.

Samantha Fisk

2011

How can I use personalized learning goal setting to help students take ownership of their learning?

What is a goal? How do you use them? I examined what happens when students create classroom goals and personalized learning goals for their writing. By analyzing student surveys and interviews about S.M.A.R.T. goals in a seventh grade full inclusion project based humanities class, I was able to understand how my students felt about goal setting.

Samantha Gladwell

2010

What happens when I use student choice to differentiate elementary math learning stations?

Each student in our classroom is a unique individual with personal interests, preferred learning styles, and academic readiness levels that may differ from other members of the classroom community. It is a teacher’s responsibility to find ways to address these differences and engage all learners by differentiating the content, processes, products, and learning environments during learning tasks. This action research project examines the impact of using student choice to differentiate mathematics learning stations in an elementary classroom at San Diego Cooperative Charter School.

Samara Francisco

2017

Creating equitable student-led discussions

This class served as a crash course in the ways of HTH and the GSE. Course activities included hands-on experiences, reading and discussion of scholarly articles, personal reflection, interviewing, and writing. We participated in the HTH Odyssey, an introductory institute for all new HTH staff members, and attended class sessions with fellow GSE students. The course culminated with an in-depth presentation of learning of the final paper.

Sandy Miedema

2020

Primary Educational Facilitator- Montessori Charter

I am a life long learner who loves learning from the primary population! I am a passionate Montessori educator with an open mind for diverse learning experiences.

A big take away from this graduate program was the magical opportunity of taking my years of experience and wisdom and collaborating with new teachers who were shining with fresh new perspectives and ideas! We combined our strengths for the benefit of our students and for ourselves.

Sandy Park

2019

Positive Literacy

Positive literacy promotes love and joy of reading by providing structures for students and parents to receive positive communication and feedback on student reading goals. I worked with emerging bilingual first grade readers and their parents, however, I do believe that this work can be implemented for any readers.

Sarah Strong

2009

How do students experience open-ended math problems?

The study of math is often viewed as the memorization and practice of a closed set of rules and procedures. This outlook stands in stark contrast with the mathematical needs of a person entering the job market in virtually any field.

Sean Woytek

2016

What strategies can a project based learning school implement in order to retain a higher number of teachers?

Teacher burnout is especially higher in project-based education. How do we retain more educators in this highly passionate and draining setting?

Shannon McClung

2017

How does writing in dialogue reading journals affect students’ reading comprehension, specifically integration of knowledge and ideas, and their overall motivation to read and write?

Of all the options in the thesaurus for the word leader, guide and harbinger are the ones that I connect with the most. The impression of control and power that I feel from the other words listed there, like ruler, supervisor, and boss, are the furthest notions from my mind when I think of leadership. Service, support, and collaboration are what come to mind when I reflect on the leaders I most admire. I am eternally grateful for these thoughtful guides that crossed my path and nurtured these same values in me. Each of these individuals lovingly supported, appreciated, and challenged me.

Shelley Gordon

2017

How can educators utilize two-way text messaging to involve parents in a way that respects and supports diverse families and is developmentally appropriate during early adolescence?

While many educators are aware that parental involvement is an important indicator of student success, schools often struggle with the challenge of how to best engage families in meaningful ways. Research focusing on middle school indicates that parental involvement reflecting academic socialization, which can be summarized as a parent speaking with their child about the importance of education, has the strongest positive association with student achievement. This action research project explored how middle school teachers might use two-way, multilingual text messages to support this type of parental involvement across a diverse population.

Sonya Ramirez

2014

How can we empower teachers to use student-led curation to display our school's story through student work?

At High Tech High North County (HTHNC), along with the rest of the High Tech High schools across San Diego County, we intentionally design an environment that values the work our students do and honors thoughtful work. HTHNC is filled with products of all sorts that display the learning and creating that all of our students do. From the furniture I mentioned previously to the posters and artwork, our school’s narrative is that we are a project-based learning school whose students are learning by doing.