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Friday, July 19, 2019

(Re)Inspiring Innovative Mindsets Through Making

Bringing making into education isn't just about access to the materials; it's also about developing a maker mindset in our students and cultivating their confidence to be makers.

During the first week of school last year, my teaching partner and I tasked our 2nd graders with a quickfire design challenge: get to know a partner and then make a gift for that person out of the materials of your choosing.

Most of our students were thrilled with this first "assignment", but not all. Having not taught 2nd grade before, I assumed that all 7-8 year olds would be thrilled about an assignment that required them to cut, paste, color and glue, but that wasn't necessarily true. A handful of our 2nd graders weren't at all excited. On the contrary, they were stressed... some stressed to the point of tears each time we launched a making project that didn't come with step-by-step directions of that put them at risk of not doing something "perfectly" the first time.

In his 2006 TED Talk, Sir Ken Robinson stated that we tend to grow out of creativity, or more recently, that we are educated out of creativity. It was in that moment with my students on the first day of school that I learned that this is happening even earlier than I'd realized, and that we have a duty in education to help bring that creative confidence back to our students.


Why Develop Creative Confidence?

So why is it important to cultivate more creative confidence in students? We know that our world continues to change rapidly, and in the larger scheme of things, the future of jobs is changing significantly.

The World Economic Forum 2018 "Future of Jobs" report found that 50% of companies expect automation to continue to replace some of their workforce by 2022, and because of that, new jobs will be created, but with a stronger emphasis on more flexible roles. Anything that can be done by a machine, simply be creating an algorithm for that task, will be. In the coming years, there will be a larger need for those in the workforce to be more adaptable, multi-skilled, able to think critically and creatively in their roles. Creativity is third of the list of skills reported as most likely desired by employers in 2022 and innovation is number one.

Also a part of his 2006 TED Talk, Sir Ken Robinson reminded us that if "...you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original..." A characteristic of the maker, the creator, the innovator is the confidence to try something and know that it might not work out the first time and that's okay. Having creative confidence and a maker mindset is being willing to continually fail forward on the journey toward creating something amazing.

Seymour Papert, often referred to as the father of the maker movement, questioned in his book, Mindstorms (first published in 1980), "Is the computer programming the child, or the child programming the computer?" With all of this technology around us, it is imperative that we understand how it all works. Artificial intelligence and machine learning may sound like things of a Ray Bradbury science fiction novel, but they are already, right now, impactful parts of our everyday lives. Digital making ensures that students are not just using computers to create, but are actually learning how to control those computers as they create with them.

Most importantly, it is the hands-on learning, the authentic experiences, and the learning by doing that we know really make learning stick. This is not a new idea, and yet it is still not common practice in all of our classrooms. Seymour Papert also wrote in Mindstorms that "...discovery cannot be a setup; invention cannot be scheduled." The most powerful learning happens when we make authentic discoveries and have to solve authentic problems. Mitch Resnick echoes this idea in his book, Lifelong Kindergarten. Learning through making means learning to iterate, take risks, solve problems, think creatively, and collaborate authentically. It's a chance for students to learn in context, making the learning more sticky.

The Barriers

We know that children are naturally curious, so what then become the barriers that create such an anxiety in some of our students at such an early age?

Psychologist Thomas Curran studies what he calls the "plague of perfectionism" and notes in his research that there has been a siginificant increase in perfectionist mindsets in our youth in the last 25 years. Two of the causes that he discussed in a recent TED Talk stood out to me.

One was the onslaught of social media in the last 10 years or so and the effect that social media is having on young people. The images of the "perfect lifestyles" that are portrayed all over social media instills in our students this overwhelming need to achieve that perfect life. And while you might not think that this would be as much of an issue at the elementary level, it is. Yes even 7 year olds are dialed into the most popular "YouTubers" of the week, and if you've ever watched the Seesaw and Flipgrid videos that my students record for me, you can tell that quite a few of them hope that they'll soon be the next YouTube star.

A second cause of perfectionism that Curran talks about that was even more concerning to me was the way that we rank and sort our students in schools. Part of this problem is such a hugely systemic issue, it's hard to know what to do about it as a classroom teacher. State required testing, AP tests and SATs are not something that the average educator has much control over, and the pressure that those tests put on students, teachers and parents alike is, according to Curran, affecting students' mental health like never before. Even at the elementary school level I notice the stress that our testing culture has on young students... the tears, the escape acts to the bathrooms every 10 minutes, the heads down on desks during a short math quiz, the scribbling or ripping up of papers in a moment of frustration... I've seen them all. 

That being said, I am not at all anti-assessment. Knowing what my students can do independently helps me to plan better instruction, suited to their individual needs. But the type of culture that we develop around assessment in our homes and classrooms can either positively or negatively impact our students' beliefs around assessment. 

Making mayhem
It also seems that fewer and fewer students are being given time for creative moments and play in their overly academic, overly scripted, overly planned, overly plugged in days. This is one of the reasons that my schools is a no-homework school. We may send our students home with the option to continue a project that we've started in class, or to teach their families a new game that we learned, and we also encourage them to read at home, but generally we want our students to go home in the evening and have time to play, spend time with family, explore, follow their passions, be creative. And at first, it was a tough adjustment for both students and their families. But now, it's fantastic to see students go home and make cardboard sculptures in their free time, and develop their own video games in Scratch, create slideshows about the things that they love, produce movies about their vacations, play with the new Micro:bit or Raspberry Pi that they're parents bought them, write fantasy stories and books... and then bring those creations back to school to share with their peers and teachers. We love seeing students working on their passions at home instead of spending hours on busy work.

Nurturing Creative Confidence

How do we help nurture our students' creative confidence? And help them develop more of a maker mindset?

Students present project made with Raspberry Pi & MakeyMakey
1. Provide more opportunities for making
First off, simply providing more maker and creating opportunities in the classroom can have a huge impact. We constantly tell students that practice makes permanent in the "core" subject areas and the same goes for creativity. The more we engage in creation and making, the more proficient we become in ideating, trying new things, getting messy in the making process and being okay with that.

In the book Empower, educators and authors John Spencer and A.J. Juliani remind us that even with all of the content that we must teach and the assessments that we're required to give, we are still the ones designing the learning experiences in our classrooms. "Standards are the architect's blueprint," they write, "and you, the teacher, are the still the builder and designer." Finding the time for our students to play, make and create empowers them as makers.

2. Scaffold creative work
Secondly, we can scaffold creative and maker projects in our classrooms. Some students will need a framework within which to start their maker projects. In my classroom, all making projects typically start with some type of mini-lesson or guide to help them get going. With our digital making projects, I use printable, step-by-step guides that my students can use to learn the basics at their own pace. I might also provide them with videos or project directions from the Raspberry Pi or Code Club World websites that they can use to help them create (and then customize) what they want.

3. Give them a target
I also like to give my students a specific learning target to work towards. For many students, having a clear end goal in mind gives them necessary constraints within which to focus their creative thinking.

4. Create by copying
Sometimes we use templates that students can duplicate and then customize to make the work their own as they're learning a new tool or technique. During our first digital design project last year, I pushed out a Google Drawing to all of our 2nd graders and they were able to use the template to change as much or as little of the design as they chose to, so that they could get comfortable with the new tool while creating. When they are ready to create their own from scratch they will, but in the meantime that have the resources that they need to help them.

Students use targets & printable guides to learn new making skills
When practicing creativity, artist and writer Austin Kleon encourages us to "steal like an artist." Something I've noticed in some of our students suffering from extreme perfectionism or maker anxiety is the belief that you can only truly be creative or innovative if your idea is completely new. This belief holds them back from ever getting started. Kleon, however, reminds us that nothing is ever complete original. Our creative work is often encouraged by something we saw or read somewhere else. Creativity is many times a collaborative effort-- an idea built from someone else's idea, that was built from someone else's idea, that was built from someone else's idea. I let my students know that copying to learn is perfectly okay.

The Scratch platform is a great example of this. Scratch encourages what they call "remixing." Copy someone else's program (with credit of course) and remix it, change it, improve upon it and then reshare it. When working within the design process, we teach students that ideating involves not just coming up with as many new ideas as you can, but it can also mean building off of others' ideas as well.

5. Model, model, model
We can also encourage more creative confidence in our students by modeling that mindset for them. We model reading, writing, math, science skills with our students... why not model creative thinking and maker mentalities. I like to create alongside my students in the classroom, doing the same creative work that they are and modeling aloud make ways of thinking when I can. "Well, I don't exactly know how to do this yet, but let's look it up..." or "...let's see what happens if I try this...." or "This isn't looking quite the way that I'd imagined, but this part is kind of cool so I'm going to keep it and see how it turns out."

I tell them stories about my own maker projects and setbacks that I've faced and how I work through those setbacks. How it took me 6 months to figure out how to successfully record audio waves on my Raspberry Pi and then to convert that into sound waves that print in a graph, but after a hundred failures and a lot of help from friends, I finally had part of it figured out!

The Impact

It is easy to say that we don't have time for more making in our classrooms. That there are too many other things to do, but the benefit of nurturing students' creative confidence and maker mindsets is the impact that that mindset has across all aspects of student learning. Making offers a safe and engaging space for students to practice making mistakes; a more low stakes arena within which to fail and then figure out a new to try and make something work. And having spent months developing that mindset within my own young students, I have seen their attitudes toward challenges and difficult tasks change. They aren't as quick to get frustrated and they are much more solution-focused than they were at the beginning of the year. They take more initiative to solve problems and to make decisions for their own learning.

Student statements on importance of making in education

And for some of our students, making finally gives them the opportunity to shine. One of my favorite
examples of this happened a couple of years ago, when I was working with a 5th grade class on a digital making project in Minecraft Pi. One of the students in the class had been struggling with math most of the year. The project that we were working on involved using the Python 3 coding language to program the construction of a colonial tool in Minecraft Pi. This particular student happened to be a big Minecraft fan, and although he had zero experience programming, he quickly became one of our project experts. Suddenly, a student that was barely getting by in his traditional math class, was explaining 3-D coordinate systems to his classmates, and calculating area and perimeter in Minecraft as he made construction plans with his team.

Maybe most importantly, providing more time for creativity and making, and helping them develop more confidence in their ability to be makers, my students are now more excited about learning when they get to make something real. They have more fun creating than filling in worksheets, and it is exciting to see the pride in their faces when they've created something out of seemingly nothing.




"Cultivating Confident Creators" talk given at Pi-Top Learning by Making series, L.A. 
(April 2019)