“We learn better by doing… we learn better still if we combine our doing with talking and thinking about what we have done. But we learn best of all by the special kind of doing that consists of constructing something outside of ourselves…” – Seymour Papert Our approach to professional development is intentionally designed to […]
Wheel of Documentation: Workshop Takeaways
How can documentation support assessment? How do you know when learners know? What types of learning do we value, but don’t normally assess? In our recent two-day, hands-on workshop, Documenting for Assessment, we explored these questions while developing a variety of tools and strategies to make learning visible and broaden our notion of what is assessable. One of the tools we have been integrating into our workshops is a Documentation Prompt Jar. Read more…
Computational Thinking with micro:bit at an East Bay Maker Educator Meetup
As an opportunity to explore programming and computational thinking with a community of educators, we recently prototyped a physical computing with micro:bit activity at our kickoff East Bay Maker Educator Meetup (EBMEM). Read more…
Announcing Our Fourth Cohort of Making Spaces Hubs!
We are very excited to announce our fourth cohort of Making Spaces Hubs! These 10 hubs—including two community makerspaces, three K–12 school systems, three higher education institutions, and three museums—are joining this 30-month professional learning and capacity-building program designed to develop local leadership around maker-centered learning. Read more…
Building a Culture of Repair in Maker Education
Over the past few months Agency by Design Oakland and Maker Ed have partnered with The Culture of Repair Project to consider how to ignite an interest in repair within maker-centered learning and the broader K-12 landscape. Our working group recently had the opportunity to present our repair research at the annual Maker Ed Convening. Read more…
Examining Social Justice Themes through micro:bit and Scratch
Weaving together themes of social justice with ELA standards, block-based programming with Scratch, and physical computing with micro:bit, this series of linked activities from our Approaches to Maker Education workshop showcased a learning progression that integrated all three of our Approaches to Curriculum Integration: Tinkering to Discover, Making to Learn, and the Application Project. Read more…
Tinkering with Light and Shadow to Support Science Discovery
We recently hosted a Maker Educator Meetup for 30 K-8 science educators in collaboration with Community Resources for Science (CRS) as part of their Field Trip for Teachers program. Read on for an example of a learner-driven, inquiry-based activity that aligns with Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) practices, built on our Approaches to Maker Education workshop! Read more…
Institute Day Five: Equity Maps, Resources, and Final Reflections
After working all week on identifying resources around curriculum integration, program development, and assessment through the lens of equity and sustainability, we had the opportunity to share and present all of our work with each other. Read more…
Institute Day Four: Creating and Prototyping Resources
On Day Four of our summer Institute, we started the morning with an equity session centered on the Ready for Rigor framework provided in Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain by Zaretta Hammond. This framework outlines four areas of practice of culturally responsive teaching that enable us to support learners to become more independent: awareness, learning partnerships, information processing, and community of learners & learning environments. Read more…
Institute Day Three: Culture, Strands, and Ideation
In order to reflect on how culture impacts our learners, we started Day Three of our Summer Institute by asking participants to consider their own cultural roots through Zaretta Hammond’s representation of the culture tree. Based on this reading and our equity session on Day Two, participants created a physical representation of their own culture trees and reflected on the ways the three levels of culture showed up in their learning environment. Read more…
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