By Nathalie Duponsel
PhD Student, Educational Technology, Concordia University
@natduponsel
Ann-Louise Davidson
PhD Concordia University Research Chair in Maker Culture, Director Innovation Lab, Associate Professor in Education, Concordia University
@a_l_davidson
Education systems around the world are encouraging their schools to develop maker programs to enhance learning and skill development that prepares students for the 4th Industrial Revolution. Through maker education, students develop a plethora of skills and STEAM concepts. Ensuring that maker experiences live up to their potential can be difficult, however, as assessing student learning through maker projects and getting all stakeholders in education at the local and regional level on board can be challenging.
In our study, we spoke to more than 30 experts in making and education. We wanted to understand how schools, education leaders, and the local community can help teachers provide their students with authentic maker experiences. We also wanted to know about the types of learning that can result from making and the evaluation strategies they recommend for assessing student learning from making.
Here are some suggestions for school principals, leaders in maker education and parents and community members who want to help teachers.
School Principals
School principals play a key role in supporting their teachers as they engage in making with their students. Here are eight ways principals can support teachers with maker education:
1) Creating a culture around making in the school: Maker programs are more likely to flourish in a school if the principal can create a culture around making in the school. Principals can create this culture by:
- Ensuring that all the staff is on board and are flexible and open-minded about new approaches to learning.
- Giving teachers the freedom to try things and possibly fail—a lot of learning from making comes from failure and this is true for the teachers as well.
- Making sure to have someone or a small team in the lead on the maker initiative. The outcomes of a maker program at a school are heavily dependent on the sustained efforts of good leadership.
- Creating school-wide activities around the theme of making. Making shouldn’t be restricted to the classroom or the school makerspace. By having school-wide activities, everyone can become involved.
- Celebrating the successes of teachers’ and students’ work by holding school fairs or expositions and highlighting student work on the school’s website.
2) Providing professional development: Most teachers will be completely new to making. Teachers need the time and opportunity to take PD in basic maker skills and how to make the connections between making and the curriculum.
3) Providing sustained support: Having experts available for consultation or coaches who can support teachers in their initial experiences with making can really help teachers get on their feet with making in the classroom.
4) Giving teachers time: It takes time to learn a new skill and teachers will need the time to develop the skill of teaching through making. A great way to support teachers can be by giving them release days for PD and time in their weekly schedule to plan maker projects and collaborate with other teachers.
5) Providing tech support: Like school photocopiers and printers, digital fabrication technologies need maintenance and troubleshooting, so ideally a technician should be available to take on this role. If one is not available, at least two teachers should be trained and given time to take on this role.
6) Providing space: Some maker projects may require more space for safe manipulation of tools or for prototypes to be tested than a classroom can provide. Dedicating a room or even occasional access to the gymnasium for maker project purposes can allow for a much greater array of maker projects. Storage space is also essential as most meaningful maker projects will not be finished in one session.
7) Leveraging students’ knowledge: Many students have knowledge in tech that exceeds their teachers’ knowledge!Leveraging that knowledge by inviting them to help their classmates or younger peers, or even their teachers, can boost their self-esteem while offering teachers much needed support. Making is a community endeavour and there is no better way to demonstrate that than to include the students in an authentic way in the functioning of the community.
8) Partnering with community organisations and makerspaces: Many community organisations and makerspaces specialise in learning through making and can be an invaluable resource. Partnering with these organisations can help support teachers as they learn to make with the students. Working with these organisations can also be a great way to try out new tech to determine what would work best for a school before making any costly purchases.
Leaders in Education
Leaders in maker education play a crucial role in the success of maker programs in their local schools.
Here are five ways leaders in education can help schools and teachers engage in making with their students:
1) Creating a culture of making in the school system: Schools need to create a culture around making for their programs to be successful and the easiest way they can do this is if the whole school district has adopted that culture. Leaders in education can help foster this culture by:
- Getting everybody on board from the leadership administration down to the parents and students. By having everyone on board, barriers can be reduced allowing schools to create successful maker programs.
- Integrating making into the curriculum—the curriculum is
- the teachers’ priority, so if it is not in the curriculum, it is not guaranteed to happen in the classroom, especially if teachers are in a crunch for time. Creating multidisciplinary projects that integrate making into the curriculum highlights its importance to all stakeholders.
- Celebrating the work done by students and teachers at regional fairs or expositions and by having maker profiles on the region’s website. Creating regional events can encourage schools that are more reluctant to adopt the culture.
2) Providing training: Making is not yet a standard part of most teacher education programs. Most teachers will need training in basic maker skills (e.g. basic electronics, coding, 2D and 3D design, 3D printing, use of manual and power tools), making connections to the curriculum, evaluating learning through making, and pedagogical approaches most suitable for maker learning experiences.
3) Providing funding for consumables: Making uses a lot of materials that cannot be reused. Schools need funds for the purchase of consumables just as much as the digital fabrication equipment itself.
4) Providing resources: Teachers lack time! Providing intellectual resources, such as a website of projects that link to the curriculum, can help teachers immensely as they plan new projects.
5) Remaining open-minded and being flexible: Maker programs require schools to adapt to the nature of the making process and need flexibility to make it work. They need leadership that is flexible and considers requests that go outside the usual boxes.
Parents and Community Members
Maker education ideally includes parents and members of the community to help teachers.
Here are three ways that parents and community members can help schools and teachers with their maker programs:
1) Volunteering: Parent and community volunteers can help teachers prepare the materials for projects as well as help in the class while the students are actually working on the project.
2) Sharing expertise: Parents and community members with expertise in fields related to STEAM sciences and making can be an invaluable resource to teachers. By sharing their expertise, maker projects can be more sophisticated and students can learn more about the various professions or hobbies that people engage in.
3) Donating tools or funds: Budgets are tight in schools and donations of equipment, tools, or funds can make a big difference in what a school can do with its maker program.
Learning from Making
Manual and technical skills: Making offers students an opportunity to learn manual and technical skills that they would not otherwise have the opportunity to develop in school. They can learn skills like the use of digital fabrication equipment like 3D printers and laser cutters, use of manual and power tools, 2D and 3D design, robotics, coding, and more.
Creativity and problem-solving: The design process requires several skills to get from idea to working prototype. Skills like creativity and problem-solving will most certainly be further developed by students as they’re challenged to find a solution to a complex problem.
Interpersonal skills: The Maker Movement is all about collaboration and sharing. Well-designed maker projects can challenge students by drawing on different people’s expertise, requiring them to seek collaboration with peers and makers in the local community.
STEAM concepts: Making typically involves the authentic application of STEAM concepts. It can be an excellent way for students to use and further develop their STEAM knowledge in a concrete way that helps them make sense of the sometimes-abstract concepts discussed in class.
The curriculum!: Carefully designed projects will solidify curriculum concepts covered in class. Yes, maker projects will all look different, but with the right constraints, all students can learn about the same target curriculum content through a maker project. For example, by challenging students to find a solution to a rural village’s water filtration problem using only the natural resources available to the village, students will all learn about the geography and natural resources of the region, the water cycle, and safe water composition for human consumption while still having the freedom to develop their own unique solution to the problem.
Digital citizenship: Digital technology has become an integral part of our everyday lives, and so it is essential that students learn to use and produce technology ethically and sustainably. By learning how technologies work, students can be more critical about the technology they encounter, and become prosumers (producers, not just consumers) of technologies.
Global citizenship: Maker projects often tackle community or global issues like sustainability or the consequences of poverty. By participating in projects that require students to address these problems, they develop a better understanding of the issue at hand, as well as empathy for those involved, driving them to be better global citizens.
Personal growth: Making promotes the growth mindset, where students can develop the self-confidence to continually learn throughout life. Attitudes like persistence and resilience and learning from failure can be developed through making. Well-designed constraints can help students become resourceful as they seek to solve a problem with the resources they have at hand.
Evaluating learning from making
Now that we have a better idea of what can be learned from making, how can we assess what has been learned? Here are 7 strategies that emerged from our study:
1. Concepts from the curriculum: If the project is designed around concepts from the curriculum you can ask students to describe what they’ve learned about that concept. Because maker projects are multi-faceted, students may learn different things about the concepts, but they should all have a good understanding of it.
2. Cross-curricular competencies: These are often the hardest to address in teaching and making is an excellent way to tackle many of them. Skills like collaboration and communication can be observed in many areas of making like how students collaborate with their peers, how they communicate with online groups as they seek solutions for their project, and how they communicate their learning through a process journal or a final presentation.
3. Evaluate the process not the product: In education, we often evaluate the final product of a students’ work. In making, it can be problematic. Making is about the process and the learning that happens when things go wrong. If evaluation is solely about the final product, students may be reluctant to take risks and create something new in fear that it might fail. By evaluating the process, students may not succeed in creating a working prototype, but they may learn a lot more along the way.
4. Use rubrics or clearly defined learning criteria: Letting students know what you want them to learn can help emphasise what they need to focus on. For example, if you want them to develop their creativity, indicating creativity as one of the evaluation criteria and clearly defining it will motivate students to try something new or original.
5. Process journals and portfolios: Keeping traces of student learning is important. Using process or reflection journals where students describe their process, and having portfolios containing samples of students’ work, can demonstrate the progression of students’ learning as they become more experienced at making.
6. Self-evaluation: Self-evaluation is an excellent way to gain insight into your students’ thinking. Not only does it help them improve their self-awareness and progress, but it can also help you as a teacher gain some insight into what the student has learned that may not have been visible on the surface.
7. Peer-evaluation: Peer evaluation has three great benefits:
- Students often understand feedback better when it comes from their peers as they are at a similar developmental level.
- Students can often improve their skills at assessing their own work by assessing what is or isn’t going well in someone else’s project.
- Teachers can gain awareness of the experiences that students are having while working on a project. Through observing peer feedback, as a teacher you may be able to gain some insight into events that occurred when you were occupied with other students.
References
- Davidson, A.-L., Duponsel, N., Naffi, N. (2022). Pour une éducation à l’innovation au-delà du makerspace. In. Plante Patrick, Alexandre, M., Papi, C., Stockless, A., & Grégoire, R. (Ed.). Actes du Colloque ROC 2021 : Solidarités numériques en éducation : une culture en émergence. Québec, Québec : REFAD, ONE, CIRTA, Université TÉLUQ. https://r-libre.teluq.ca/2590/
- Davidson, A.-L., Duponsel, N. (2022). How to bring your class in a makerspace and make the best of it. Engaged Learning. Teaching in the Digital Age. Computer Programming: How to Develop this Skill at School. Spring 2022, 21-23.
- Davidson, A.-L., Duponsel, N. (2021). Building a makerspace in a youth center and imagining futures. 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS), 2021, pp. 1-7, doi: 10.1109/ISTAS52410.2021.9629131.
- Davidson, A.-L., Ruby, I. (2020). Perceptions of University Students About Skills They Develop Through Maker Activities. In Proceedings of EdMedia + Innovate Learning (pp. 547-551). Online, The Netherlands: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). https://www-learntechlib-org.lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca/primary/p/217357/
- Davidson, A.-L., Naffi, N. (2019). Faire face à un futur incertain à travers les activités “maker”. Spectre, 47(1), novembre 2019, p.11-15. Complete paper online : https://en.calameo.com/aestq/read/0051814835fffd5b55f32
- Davidson, A.-L. (2018). How Can Makerspaces Heighten Student Engagement? EdCan Network. Facts on Education. Complete paper online [https://www.edcan.ca/articles/makerspaces-heighten-student-engagement/]
- Davidson, A.-L., Price, D. (2017) Does Your School Have the Maker Fever? –An Experiential Learning Approach To Developing Maker Competencies. LEARNing Landscapes, 11(1), 103-120. [https://www.learninglandscapes.ca/index.php/learnland/article/view/926]
- Gerstein, J. (2016, October). Becoming a Maker Educator. Techniques: Connecting Education & Careers. Retrieved from: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/61763266.pdf
- Kim, Y., Edouard, K., Alderfer, K., & Smith, B. K. (2018). Making culture: A national study of education makerspaces. Drexel University.
- Maughan, S. (2018, December). Making Lessons Memorable. Publishers Weekly, 62-66.
- Harlow, D. & Hansen, A. (2018, March). School Maker Faires. Science and Children, 55(7), 30-37.
- Chang, S. (2018, August 30). Assessing Learning in Maker Education: A look at how maker education is assessed—and how assessment is evolving to measure more than just content. Edutopia. Retrieved from: https://www.edutopia.org/article/assessing-learning-maker-education