Testing out a part of Latitude

The School Model

Latitude High 37.8 will open in the Oakland neighborhood of the Fruitvale in August 2018. Our vision for the school is to engage students in rigorous project-based learning by using the city of Oakland as our classroom. Utilizing all of the assets and the rich cultural history of the city, our students will engage with the city in a number of ways. To learn more about our school, check out these slides.

Design Principles of Latitude 37.8 High School

Advisory

We created a prototype of a project we want our students to complete as part of our advisory curriculum. One of the key areas we want our students to develop in over their time at our school is with their career goals and aspirations. Growing up, I always found that my own understanding of the different careers and job opportunities out there was pretty limited. Our hope, over time at Latitude, is that students will interact with professionals out in the world, so that they will be exposed to the different jobs out there. We brought our students to meet with the owner of E14 Gallery and a senior designer at Gyroscope, Inc.

On our first day, we brought our students through an activity called Every Job Under the Sun. One of our students recently told us, “we named as many jobs as we knew of. I wrote down jobs like Doctor, Scientist, etc. I was exposed to many jobs I wasn’t aware of such as Botanist.”

The jobs that students generated as part of the activity

The remainder of the first day was meant to prepare them for the interviews coming up the following day. We taught the students how to use DSLRs, boom microphones, camera angles, how to capture B-roll, we even brought out some drones for them to test out getting establishing shots for the videos we created.

[embed]A behind the scenes video weaving together footage the students and I collected

Our Learnings

There are too many to list, and we were glad that we did this with students who are planning to join our school next fall. We will post the final student videos soon, but we were [not] surprised to see when you put professional equipment in the hands of students, with access to professionals to interview, and then professional editing software to edit their clips, they can produce videos that make you say “Wow, I never thought a kid could do that.”

Our hope is that this project will become the start of a YouTube channel. The channel will be curated and produced by students of Latitude to help bring other high school students out into the professional world.