Blog 5: Call to Action
by Jenny Krystopowicz, Van Ness Elementary teacher
In my previous blogs I asked you to think about a time during childhood or more recently, when you made, invented, or altered something and the successes and challenges that may have occurred during your making experience. It is likely you used some capacity of critical thinking to meet your end making goal.
I now return to my original question: Think about what kind of impact would occur if we gave students the opportunity to become “makers” in the classroom. How would this new approach transform their social and emotional wellbeing? How would these experiences contribute to building the 21st century learning skills, such as critical thinking, that we expect our students to gain?
Now more than ever, do we as educators have an obligation to prepare our students for life beyond the walls that separate school from our communities. It has become my mission to communicate the importance of allowing students of all ages, backgrounds, and intellectual abilities to Learn While Making in the classroom setting. Learning While Making is a method of teaching that I have created that empowers students to take on the role as a maker where they build, create, design or produce while developing transferable skills that will improve learning across all disciplines.
There are there main stakeholders that can support in efforts to make Learning While Making an experience in every classroom: teachers, school leaders, and policy makers.
Call to Action for Teachers:
Plan in Phases:
It is important to recognize that hosting a makerspace in any classroom is not something that happens overnight. It has taken me 3 years to achieve the level of implementation that I have reached in my classroom.
I am currently in the process of creating the Phases of Learning While Making in your Elementary Classroom as a guide for teachers who are interested in or have started this transformative process in their own classrooms. I have identified and documented a learning progression that occurs during different phases after reflecting on my own experiences, lessons learned, what I wish I knew, and the different stages I continue to experience.
To help you prepare and execute this implementation, I have documented the processes and have divided into three distinct phases:
Phase 1: The Launch
During the first phase you will learn how to create a making vision for your classroom, create a making environment in your classroom, and introduce the idea of Learning While Making to your students.
Phase 2: Connecting Curriculum to a Making Experience
This phase will support you in connecting the content you are teaching in your units of study with a rigorous well-planned making experience.
Phase 3: Measuring Learning While Making’s Efficacy
This phase will guide you in assessing Learning While Making’s efficacy by selecting a skill to measure.
2. Treat your making environment as a living system:
Your making environment will grow, change, evolve, plateau, and peak, before cycling through this process time and time again. It is likely that your making vision will change from year to year as you experience each phase. Your Learning While Making journey should be treated as an ongoing process that will progress as you become more comfortable and know what to expect.
Call to Action for School Leaders:
I have been fortunate to observe my school Principal, Cynthia Robinson- Rivers, plan for the following to enable making to occur in the classroom setting: Budget, professional development, and time:
It is important for school leaders to support teachers in their quest to create a maker space by allocating budget money for materials, resources, and professional development. The best way I learned about maker spaces and project-based learning in the classroom is by visiting schools throughout the country and attending project-based learning workshops.
In addition, giving teachers the time to explore the maker space with students and having the freedom to figure out what works and what needs adjusting is crucial to a teacher’s success in cultivating a making environment.
Call to Action for Policy Makers:
Funding should be allocated for STEM programs in all school settings, especially at the elementary level. Specifically, programs that encourage partnerships with corporations, universities, and nonprofits that will support teachers with project-based learning experiences that incorporate hands on making experiences. For example, the “Zero Barriers in STEM Education” is a pilot initiative, funded through grants provided by General Motors (GM) and the Smithsonian Accessibility Innovation Fund (SAIF), that provides teachers and schools with the resources to create an inclusive culture that is accessible to all learners along the continuum of human ability and experience.
Most importantly, greater emphasis needs to be placed on critical thinking, developmental benchmarks, and growth while less emphasis on standardized testing. We have created a learning environment that is driven by numbers that do not holistically measure the whole child. There needs to be an even balance between standardized testing and social emotional learning. Perhaps the current covid-19 situation forcing PARCC to be cancelled will show that not much changed the learning environment. Children are resilient and will continue to learn with or without standardized testing.