Group items tagged

A Maker is an individual who communicates, collaborates, tinkers, fixes, breaks, rebuilds, and constructs projects for the world around him or her.

Making loves the process and allows the teacher to move fluidly between levels and subjects. When I designed a middle school level Forces and Motion unit, NGSS MS-PS2 dovetails nicely with CCSS Mathmatical Practice.

Great projects, on the other hand, are opportunities for learners and teachers to collaborate with those around them.

Set and Debrief Goals for "Work" Time

Reflect on the Driving Question

Use Team Contracts

First, assure parents that they are not expected to be teachers.

let parents and caregivers know what you’ll be doing to support students’ work on projects, make sure they know how to communicate with you, and let them off the hook for as much as you can

the flip wasn’t the same economic and political entity then that it is now

my brief love affair with the flip has ended. It simply didn’t produce the tranformative learning experience I knew I wanted for my students .

The flipped classroom essentially reverses traditional teaching. Instead of lectures occurring in the classroom and assignments being done at home, the opposite occurs.

In aiming for full engagement, it is essential that students perceive activities as being meaningful. Research has shown that if students do not consider a learning activity worthy of their time and effort, they might not engage in a satisfactory way, or may even disengage entirely in response (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004).

highlighting the value of an assigned activity in personally relevant ways.

Researchers have found that effectively performing an activity can positively impact subsequent engagement (Schunk & Mullen, 2012). To strengthen students' sense of competence in learning activities, the assigned activities could: Be only slightly beyond students' current levels of proficiency Make students demonstrate understanding throughout the activity Show peer coping models (i.e. students who struggle but eventually succeed at the activity) and peer mastery models (i.e. students who try and succeed at the activity) Include feedback that helps students to make progress

STEAM projects, like all good inquiry learning, need to be driven by excellent, open ended questions.

Questions that require the learner to think like a scientist as they interpret the world, make observations and conduct experiments. Where the relationships between numbers, quantities and shapes are explored with the mindset of a mathematician. Questions in which an artistic response demands more thought than ‘what colour shall I paint the wheels’ and where the intersection of engineering and technology brings new ways of doing things. Good STEAM projects will demand learning contexts that generate novel solutions made possible only through the collaboration of each discipline and whenever possible should be driven by the questions students discover.

Engineering is also the field least present in traditional school models and as such may be that field which brings the others together as it has less to lose and most to gain in such a recombination of disciplines.

Making matters. And design thinking matters to makers.

Eleven students, including four who had just graduated eighth grade, would spend the weekend explaining how design thinking drove our program’s work and their learning. Kids used student-built prototypes to explain how they employed design thinking to solve problems and make the world a better place.

We set up stations where Faire attendees got to experience prototyping for themselves, tackling design challenges based on the Extraordinaires Design Studio and expertly explained by our kids.

Working through guided projects can help students to develop the skills that they need to further explore creatively.  It’s true that some students can just figure it out, but most need that gentle push to get them started.

Following patterns to the letter when I first got started helped me to learn the skills that I needed to be creative in my knitting.

The problem comes when all we ever do are guided projects.  Sylvia Martinez and Gary Stager warn against the “20 identical birdhouses” style class projects, where there is zero creativity involved.  It’s very easy to fall into the trap of focusing too much on standards, rubrics and guided projects and zapping all the fun and creativity out, turning a makerspace into nothing more than another classroom.  It’s tempting for many educators to just print out a list of instructions, sit students down in front of a “maker kit” and check their e-mail while students work through the steps one by one.  This is obviously not what we want in our makerspaces.