Capture the Learning: Crafting the Maker Mindset

Innovation Mindset = Growth + Maker + Team Experiences - Getting Smart by Tom Vander Ark - 21st century skills, academic mindest, deeper learning, education, Innovation, leadership What do young people need to know and be able to do be successful? Sure reading, writing, and problem solving are important to just about every family wage job. Content knowledge gives you something to work with, but what else is important for success in life? It turns out there are a bunch of factors that schools seldom talk about, teach, or provide feedback on that are at least as important as academic skills. What research says. Two traits predict success in life: grit and self-control; that was the conclusion Penn professor Angela Lee Duckworth reached eight years ago. A 2012 CCSR lit review said that grades do a better job than tests at measuring life success habits including study skills, attendance, work habits, time management, metacognitive strategies and social and academic problem solving that allow students to successfully mange new environments and meet new demands. Beyond growth. The KEEN frame is a great framework but it could use a dose of maker. Team. I statements.

Creating an Authentic Maker Education Rubric While many teachers are excited about the maker movement and may even be creating projects for their classrooms, assessment can be puzzling even to veteran classroom teachers. How can teachers prove that deep, rich learning is occurring through making? How do we justify a grade to students and parents alike, especially to the student who "just isn’t good at art"? Part 1: Process The process of making in the classroom needs to be incorporated in the final grade. Photo credit: Lisa Yokana As part of a recent project in my school's senior-level public policy class, students crafted scale models of Lower Manhattan in preparation for a disaster simulation. Students created a scale model of Lower Manhattan in City 2.0 at Scarsdale High School. Part 2: Understanding Students must demonstrate an understanding of materials and tools. Habits of Mind As part of the process grade, you will need to assess your students' habits of mind. What was difficult? The Story of Understanding Part 3: Product

The Maker Mindset: Albemarle County Public Schools & Maker Corps By Chad Ratliff and Pam Moran, District Administrators, Albemarle County Public Schools (Charlottesville, VA) A few weeks ago, some of our young people reminded us that “making” is a mindset that can occur any time, any place. During a snow day, a group of kids were co-opted by a local teenage video “maker” into creating and publishing a fabulous YouTube video, “Call Me Maybe, Josh Davis.” It represented the inherent passion and joy that surfaces when young makers get together and intersect talents, skills, and interests in a collaborative venture. We also see inventive potential when our elementary school students children construct their own cardboard arcade games for their school carnival, use chairs, tables, and unifix cube bridges to test bending movement and design engineering solutions to meet challenges pitched to them. Making is a natural learning state for humans. Making offers integrated learning opportunities–the best of learning in any century.

Designing a School Makerspace Makerspaces, STEAM labs and fab labs are popping up in schools across the country. Makerspaces provide hands-on, creative ways to encourage students to design, experiment, build and invent as they deeply engage in science, engineering and tinkering. A makerspace is not solely a science lab, woodshop, computer lab or art room, but it may contain elements found in all of these familiar spaces. Therefore, it must be designed to accommodate a wide range of activities, tools and materials. Diversity and cross-pollination of activities are critical to the design, making and exploration process, and they are what set makerspaces and STEAM labs apart from single-use spaces. A possible range of activities might include: Cardboard construction Prototyping Woodworking Electronics Robotics Digital fabrication Building bicycles and kinetic machines Textiles and sewing Designing a space to accommodate such a wide range of activities is a challenging process. Ask the Right Questions Going Forward

Developing a Maker Mindset | Creativity Lab – Making in School Fun fact: here at the Creativity Lab, Making isn’t just about making things. Making is also about learning to see the world with new eyes, and developing deeper knowledge and understanding of the world around us. One of the ways we incorporate this idea is through using Agency by Design’s thinking routines. Educators can easily integrate these routines into any subject — even those not typically associated with making, like the Humanities. The first routine, called Parts, Purposes, and Complexities, (PPC) is a great one to start with, and is applicable to physical objects as well as abstract ideas and constructs. Last week, the 11th grade pre-Calculus class used this thinking routine to explore a retractable pen. As they familiarized themselves with the parts of the pen, they began to create theories about what each part does (the purposes), and recorded how these parts might interact with one another and questions they may have had about them (the complexities). About Cissy Monroe

Making Room for Making As a teacher, the library has always been an important, almost sacred place for me to go with my students. It was an opportunity to use the computer lab once in a while and look for books to help support research. Over the past few months, the library has taken on a new and different role for all students and teachers. Our library has become a place where I hang out during my prep period and brainstorm with my amazing teacher librarian, Courtney McGuire. We have been looking at our space and trying to think of ways to bring more students in during their study period. We immediately started thinking about what we wanted to see in this space and talking to students and other teachers. Here are some of the things we have done to make the makerspace happen at our school. 1. One of the things that was really important was finding a space that was accessible to all students during the day. 2. 3. Speaking of money, funding a makerspace is not always a cheap prospect. 4.

The Maker Mindset » Stir-fried Science Written by Dr Kiruthika Ramanathan, Senior Manager, Education Services & Outreach at Science Centre Singapore. A key event of the Singapore Science Festival, Maker Faire Singapore, aims to inculcate the Maker mindset – a growth mindset that encourages people to believe that they can learn to do anything. As the founder of Maker Faire, Dale Dougherty, puts it, Makers reject the idea that you are defined by what you buy. Makers focus instead on what they can make and what they can learn to do. Makers are thus motivated by internal goals, and not external rewards. This is a very empowering thought, especially in today’s world where consumerism is rampant. The Maker mindset has a very important role to play in the transformation of education. This process of setting personalized authentic learning environments becomes almost effortless with the Maker movement.

Educators as Lead Learners I have discussed educators as model learners before: The educator’s role has or should change in this age of information abundance or Education 2.0-3.0. The educator’s role has always been to model and demonstrate effective learning, but somewhere along the line, the major role of the educator became that of content and knowledge disseminator. Now that in this information age content is freely and abundantly available, it is more important than ever to assist learners in the process of how to learn. (Educator as Model Learner) The goal of this post is to encourage educators not only to adopt the mindset of the educator as a lead learner but also to model, demonstrate, and teach his/her learners the process of learning how to learn new “things”. To effectively do so, though, the educator needs to understand and be able to articulate and demonstrate the process of learning, him or herself. How do I gather information about what it is that I want to learn? Like this: Like Loading...

Educator as Lead Learner: Learning LittleBits I have discussed educators as model learners before: The educator’s role has or should change in this age of information abundance or Education 2.0-3.0. The educator’s role has always been to model and demonstrate effective learning, but somewhere along the line, the major role of the educator became that of content and knowledge disseminator. Now that in this information age content is freely and abundantly available, it is more important than ever to assist learners in the process of how to learn. (Educator as Model Learner) I advocate for the educator, as leader learner, to demonstrate the process of learning: To effectively do so, though, the educator needs to understand and be able to articulate and demonstrate the process of learning, him or herself. To learn and model this process, I recommend that educators pick something new to learn and practice doing the following: I am teaching at a maker education camp this summer and want to integrate LittleBits into my curriculum. Iterations

Learning About Young Makers I am a huge proponent of using hands-on, interactive learning activities to explore ill-defined problems as a way of teaching for all age groups. Given the spontaneity and uncertainty of these types of active learning environments, I believe educators should observe, reflect on, and analyze how learners interact with the materials, the content, the educator, and the other learners. This practice is in line with the teacher as ethnographer. In my role as a teacher as ethnographer, I made some initial observations during my first two weeks of teaching maker education for elementary age students. With half the kids under 7, I learned a bunch about young makers. Young makers are more capable than what people typically believe.Young makers need to be given more time, resources, strategies to learn how to solve more ambiguous and ill-defined problems (i.e., ones that don’t have THE correct answer). Young makers are more capable than what people (adults) typically believe. Conclusion Like this: