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For all the excitement, though, there are also hurdles. One of the biggest: "Maker education" itself is a highly squishy concept. In general, the term refers to hands-on activities that support academic learning and promote experimentation, collaboration, and a can-do mindset. But in practice, educators use "making" to describe everything from formal STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) curricula to project-based classroom lessons to bins of crafting materials on a shelf in the library.

Should making happen primarily in a dedicated space or inside every classroom? And is the purpose of maker education to help students better learn the established curriculum or to upend traditional notions of what counts as real learning?

The whole point of maker education, Turner said, is to find new ways to engage students, especially those who have struggled to find a comfortable place inside school. It's a belief increasingly borne out by research. Academics have consistently found that making "gives kids agency" over their learning in ways that traditional classes often don't, said Erica Halverson, an associate professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There's also mounting evidence that making is a good way to teach academic content. "The fear out there is that schools have to choose between making and academic work, but empirically that turns out not to be true," Halverson said.

They found being in a K-8 school, where kids were top dogs for longer created a better learning environment, marked by less bullying, and better academic results.

“Top dogs are less likely to report bullying, fights, and gang activity and more likely to report feeling safe and welcome in school than bottom dogs due to their top dog status. In contrast, bottom dogs report higher rates of bullying, fighting, and gang activity and lower rates of safety and belonging than top and middle dogs.”

According to Guido Schwerdt, from the University of Konstanz and Martin R. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, students moving from elementary to middle school suffer a sharp drop in student achievement in the year they move, which persists through tenth grade (transitions to high school in ninth grade cause a smaller one-time drop in achievement, but the effect does not persist).

According to Myra McGovern, senior director of public information for the National Association of Independent Schools, more independent schools are becoming invested in how diverse environments should feel, rather than only concentrating on what they should look like. Likewise, more parents of color are discovering alternatives to public school that seem stable in the face of rapidly transforming neighborhoods and school systems.

Padlet as a simple blogging platform:

Padlet Mini as a bookmarking tool:

Padlet as a KWL chart:

a key readiness factor: knowing how to learn.

If you believe in what you're doing," he adds, "working out your problems is the only option."

Resilience turns out to be another key readiness factor for tackling hard problems.

handwriting appears to focus classroom attention and boost learning in a way that typing notes on a keyboard does not, new studies suggest.

Students who took handwritten notes generally outperformed students who typed their notes via computer, researchers at Princeton University and the University of California at Los Angeles found.

Compared with those who type their notes, people who write them out in longhand appear to learn better, retain information longer, and more readily grasp new ideas

Today's classrooms are notorious for handing students the basic skills to live in the world while denying them the strength of character to transform it.

Angela Duckworth (1), an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, studied (among others) the performance of West Point cadets during basic training. She discovered that the most powerful predictor of success -- acceptance into the academy -- was grit. Duckworth calls grit "the tendency to sustain interest in and effort toward very long-term goals."

Duckworth’s research is heir to the work of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck (2) on mindsets. Believing that we can succeed even after suffering repeated setbacks (what Dweck calls a "growth mindset") can actually re-wire our brains -- and rewrite our fortunes.

The Innovations class is deliberately open-ended, which means students have to propose their own project ideas and the standards they plan to meet.

"The mentor can't be their dad or their dad's buddy," Wettrick says. "It has to be an expert in an arena, and it has to be somebody who makes a commitment to help them."

Students benefit from honest critique along with positive attention for their projects, Wettrick says. "They don't need to hear, 'Good job!' They're better off when an expert tells them, 'That's not bad, but have you considered this, or you might want to look at that.'