WHY CREATING / MAKING MATTERS in EDUCATION
I turned a corner on my Maker Road journey this summer. A great corner. Previously, I had been tip toeing around the edges of the STEAM movement: I started my trip a few years ago with a class from Greg Young, then I took an Engineering Class with the Vermont Science Initiative, taught some "Engineering is Elementary" units in classrooms, and did a Makey Makey project with 5th and 6th graders. Those were great first experiences for me to get my feet wet and give me a chance to model Making for classroom teachers. I feel that my growth this summer is a personal commitment to expanding my efforts with students in ways that link STEAM to the standards, provide students tinkering time in a Maker Space in my classroom, and lead teachers towards embracing some curricular changes.
Making matters to society, to classrooms, and to me. I'm saying nothing new when I reiterate - the world has changed, our students have changed, and we can no longer rely on nineteenth and twentieth century skills. Jobs today and in the future require critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. These skills are essential if we want to teach young people to solve problems that don't even exist yet.
My school thrives when students at the center of authentic, integrated learning. We've gotten closed to project based learning with short term initiatives, projects and artist in residencies. I want to encourage teachers to experiment with more kinds of learner- focused activities because our students learn best when learning is meaningful and embedded in a culture of sharing. In our professional development last week, teachers had fun, were makers, and seemed excited to talk about a return to hands-on, student-centered teaching. Our curriculum is already overcrowded and if this is ever going to work we must integrate the disciplines. The NGSS Engineering have obvious connections to Making and a quick look at the Common Core shows us how compatible Making is with those standards:
- Math Best Practices: Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them, Reason abstractly and quantitatively, Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others, Model with mathematics, Use appropriate tools strategically, Attend to precision, Look for and make use of structure, Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.
ELA Comprehension and Collaboration, Presentation of Knowledge and Ideas
The last few lines of your post "I think the reason that my learning was so powerful this summer is that I met truly inspirational people - teachers and co-students alike and I realized that there are plenty of folks on the same journey I'm on. I also reframed my image of myself as a maker, which of course is huge when it comes to developing that very maker-ness in students and colleagues." are exactly what I was shooting for.. that you WOULD MEET each other and be inspired by each other. and CONTINUE to be part of each others personal learning network. (perhaps in our community.. perhaps in other ways). THANK YOU for being part of the energy and the people resources that made CML a success.
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