This article is an edited excerpt from an episode of the High Tech High Unboxed podcast. You can listen to the full episode here.
In this excerpt, Andrew Lerario explains how he uses the iterative design process in order to give students more power within projects and share the “cognitive load” of project management.
Andrew is a co-founder of Blue Dot Education. Before that, he taught at High Tech High for 16 years. In one of his most impressive projects—which he ran with teaching partner Adam Borek—students designed and built metal rockets from scratch, which they launched from the Friends of Amateur Rocketry launch site in the Mojave Desert. The rockets went between 6,000 and 8,000 feet in the air and approached Mach 1. This wasn’t a specialist engineering course, it was a normal physics class.
Andrew Lerario:
Iterative design in my projects means beginning with something that is really small and easy to access that represents what is to come.
A key idea for me here is “sharing the cognitive load.” Teachers often try to think of all the outcomes in a project that are going to happen, and try to come up with an answer for every single thing that might come up in the project.
The idea of sharing the cognitive load is that you don’t have to have an answer. You can work with kids and as the project unfolds, answers are going to emerge from the work.
This also means that kids are allowed to identify the things that are significant in their learning, and that becomes part of what you’re developing within the classroom. You could say it becomes part of the educational currency—that which is valued.
Andrew Lerario:
When we first did the rocketry project I didn’t know how to build big rockets, but that was the goal. So as an adult learner, I engaged with the kids and I said, “What can we start with?”
We decided to start with paper rockets. And the first day we just rolled up some paper rockets, and put them on a tube connected connected to a two liter soda bottle that we stomped on.
What’s important for that first iteration is that students can engage creatively, with minimal instruction.
Alec Patton:
Why is that minimal instruction important?
Andrew Lerario:
It establishes an expectation that students are not going to be told what to do and how to do it. They are going to be given creative capacity within this work, and their voice is valued within the community that we’re building together.
Alec Patton:
And when kids are building paper, stomp rockets with minimal instruction, how many of those rockets do you expect to be functional?
Andrew Lerario:
If even one is functional out of the whole class, you can build shared knowledge from there.
I recommend you shoot a video of those initial stomp rocket launches. Then, the class can review the video together: “Which ones worked? Which ones didn’t? Can we put ones that kind of performed similarly together and look at what design features they share?”
Then you can set up the room to do a gallery walk to look at the designs. You set up a gallery walk by having everybody set their work up around the classroom, and tell each student to write questions that they want answers to next to their work—for example, “How could I modify this design to get it to fly straighter?”
Next, students roam throughout the room, study each other’s work, and write responses to the questions on post-its.
As you go through multiple iterations, it becomes more focused. Kids get used to that process and they tend to respond to it more. And they even start operating within the building process and the design process knowing that’s going to come.
On that first day of the rocket project, after our gallery walk everyone made their second paper rocket.
After the second round of launches we asked the same questions: Which ones worked? Which ones didn’t? What are the characteristics of the ones that worked? How are we implementing those characteristics in our designs?
That led us to a deeper questions: Why do these characteristics work? And that led us to the physics. Then we could start looking at how we can design better models moving forward.
Eventually we started building rockets with cardboard tubes and building our own motors.
We looked at model rocket kits together and figured out how we could re-create them with our own materials.
By the end of the project, kids were running their own teams because throughout the iterations, they identified the things that they were good at and the things that contributed to a team collaborative structure. Ultimately they built huge metal rockets that went 8,000 feet and reached Mach 1.
Alec Patton:
Were there times that you thought “I could just tell them all how to do this and we would save three weeks”?
Andrew Lerario:
If you know how to do something, that’s not something to keep from kids. But how you share what you know is important.
In this communal learning structure, everyone brings things to the table. As a teacher, you bring your mastery of subject content, which is one part of doing the project. And you also bring adult learning habits towards the project work itself.
Bearing that in mind, I would never tell students “how to do it” because that’s presumptuous, but I would share “This is my approach to trying to figure this out, and I’m going to engage all of you in a similar approach and see what we figure out.”
This is important because even when I’m confident that I have an answer, I can’t be sure that it’s the best answer in this instance. And I always invite more kids into the discussion, even if the things that they were contributing might not move the way we decide to proceed. We’re still considering their ideas and more often than you would expect, those ideas do change the way we’re going to proceed.
Alec Patton:
What are the easy ways for this approach to go wrong?
Andrew Lerario:
Planning with too many expectations in mind. Trusting the process is more important.
Also, it’s important for a teacher to be a conduit of energy instead of shutting it down. I never knew we were going to end by building those big rockets, but the energy of the classroom went there.
So if you trust in the process, it leaves the opportunity open to really follow those creative energies within the classroom. You’ve got to be intentional: you can’t follow every potential tangent, but you can be alert to “What is the next step from here? What are the interesting questions we want to pursue from this one?” And it doesn’t necessarily lead to a fancier, shinier product we’re going to put on the wall, but it definitely leads to a better experience and the students are going to have a personal, distinctive story about their learning to share at the end of this.
