Seeing the Forest AND the Trees: Student Exploration Time

By Darin Anderson

Picture this: You arrive for your first painting lesson from a renowned local artist. Before you lay all the materials you need to begin creating your first masterpiece.

As you settle in with your surroundings, in walks the artist, who begins visiting with each participant about the beauties of art and painting.

You simply cannot wait to get started.

Monsieur Paintbrush walks to the front of the room and begins speaking to the group about the endless possibilities of paints and palettes and prisms of color. He continues into very interesting dialogue about purpose and passion, and you become even more excited to fill your empty canvas with wonder.

However, as the minutes pass by, you notice the instruction, while incredibly valuable and inspiring, has left you no time to do what you came for.

As the artist bids you a find adieu, you leave your still blank canvas and pristinely clean brushes behind, hoping for a chance - next time - to work wonders with them.

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Would you stand for such circumstances? Regardless of whether or not you paid a fee for the class, I'm certain you would be disappointed with the outcome. Why, you never even got to open up the paints!

Imagine the thousands of students who walk in and out of thousands of classrooms each school day with the same emotions - "Sounds cool, but I never even got a chance to try it out!"

Now, imagine yet another situation - similar and just as frustrating to our students:

Monsieur Paintbrush walks to the front of the room and instructs you to follow his lead in painting a red flower. He takes you step by step through the process, even stopping the class to ensure that each participant neither speeds ahead or lags behind. "We all must build the red flower as I do," he says.

Since you are a decent painter who has done his or her share of flowers, bushes, and trees, you begin to become antsy and annoyed at the teacher for not letting you "do your own thing" and paint what you want. But in the interest of staying with the group you decide to just remain silent and paint your red flower.

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While I understand the need for direct instruction and scaffolding in classrooms, I believe that we often go overboard with controlling the scenario in the interest of classroom management and, honestly, making our own lives as teachers easier.

However, many of our students leave classrooms each day without having had the opportunities to explore and design and create and tinker with (insert content/skills here).

Think of the tools we have in our classrooms that are metaphorically represented by the canvas, brushes, and paints in our story:

Computers and laptops

iPads and other tablets

Video cameras

Student Smartphones
3D Printers (perhaps)
CNC Machines (perhaps)

Not to mention these:
Glue
Scissors
Cardboard
Paper
String
Plutonium (according to Dr. Emmett Brown, it should be readily available these days)

But those "standard issue" tools are only the beginning. Think of a computer (or other device) as a box of toys. In and of itself it is a container with little practical use. However, the inside holds the wonders of the world (and I'm not talking about word processing programs).

For example:
+ Google Hangouts or Skype allows staff and students access to content area experts all over the world.
+ 3D programs such as Tinkercad and Thingiverse make design and creation easily accessible for users.
+ Video and audio creation programs allow students to express themselves as never before.
+ 24/7 discussion and collaboration are a snap with Google Drive and a wide variety of social media outlets.

But here I am preaching to the choir. Or am I?

Please take to heart the memes inserted in this post. Ensure that on a daily basis you are having your students explore, create, design, and tinker with content, skills, and - most importantly - their own thoughts and ideas.

Our world - and their - will be the better for it!

Does a Successful Maker Project Mean Success on a Standardized Test?

So you have straws and tape and tennis balls all over your classroom workspaces. Your students are

diligently scrounging Google Images for ideas and Internet links to help them construct the tallest and strongest towers possible.

Each team member is actively involved in research, design, and revision processes, and all the while you marvel at their engagement and learning. It is iteration at its teenage best!

You sit back in your desk with your feet up (your principal just left the room, so it's safe) and take a quick moment to reflect on the project. A huge smile extends across your face and you take a quick selfie to post on Instagram. #ToY

Then a sudden realization leaves you frozen and breathless...your state science exam window opens tomorrow and you completely neglected to spend class time doing test prep.

Are your kids ready??

As you begin sinking in despair, you think back over the past several weeks when your students were researching, designing, collaborating, and building. The project results were amazing. The lab and project reports were spot on. The data checked out and the charts and graphs were nothing short of lab-worthy.

Are my kids ready? you ask yourself.

Another smile crosses your face. You know they will blow this test out of the water. For they are prepared.

You know that most standardized assessments are written at a DOK 1-2 level; they are based largely on recall and basic application of content and/or skills.

Students in your classroom have been working well beyond these levels for the better part of the school year. Not only could they recall it...they could fold it, fly it, print it, connect it, and, if the area was secure enough, blow it up!

You know your maker projects, your design challenges, and your project-based learning units have more than prepared your kids for success in some dumb 'll irrelevant test.

You have prepared them with the knowledge and skills that colleges and corporations want and need.

That is why you forgot about the silly state exam.

You were busy doing so much more for your kids.

Are After-School Programs Doing the Jobs that Schools Won't?

Perhaps you have experienced this story...

Your kid comes home from school, joyously speaking of a wonderfully new activity that will allow her to explore and create and laugh and have fun - all while learning about science and math and engineering and all of the other good stuff that happens in a child's life.

Excited for her new-found interest in academics, you ask her when this school project will begin.

She opens her backpack and produces a large stack of papers, including math worksheets and artistic renderings of beasts and animals of every unimaginable kind. After rifling through the sheets for a few moments, she pulls out a purple flier and excitedly thrusts it out for you to see.

You look at it and your heart begins to sink. Instead of her school - the place in which she spends upwards of 8 hours a day - taking on this new and exciting and engaging project, you find that the United Association of Motherly Knights of Cincinnati are asking you to pony up a $75 "one-time" fee to have your precious daughter spend two nights a week at the local kids' club making, designing, and creating all kinds of science-y and math-y and engineering-y things.

If this is your story, sadly, you are not alone.

Across the country, our students are being relegated to national standardized testing, state-mandated assessments, and a wide variety and voluminous sets of school and classroom work... none of which I have a real problem with (but that is a different story for a different post).

What I am speaking more about is the manner in which many of our school approach the teaching and learning of academic concepts.

While the phrase "death by worksheet" is not the stuff of student lamentations in all schools in our country, there is a fair amount of academic institutions unwilling to make the break away from an antiquated system and move forward into engaging, high interest, and student-driven educational models such as PBL, inquiry-driven instruction, and makerspaces - to name just a few.

In the mean time, after-school programs offered by many local clubs and organizations have stepped in to fill the void of fun and excitement towards learning left by the monotony of funeral rows of desks in classrooms with lots of potential otherwise.

What's worse, many of these programs are funded and facilitated by the school districts themselves.

Kennedy Space Center Education Foundation

In effect, they are telling their constituents, "While we are mostly unwilling to provide students with quality and engaging classroom instruction during the day - our schedule and testing demands simply won't allow it - we are more than happy to offer an after-school program designed to provide your students (well, some students, as we are limited by funding to only 20 kids) with activities specially designed to expose them to STEM & STEAM concepts, all in a fun, yet structured environment."

My beef boils down to this:

If innovative after-school programs (and let's not forget summer school session designed to try something "new and different" for our struggling students) are yielding good results with high praise from kids, parents, and staff, why aren't schools clambering to the front of the line to get on board this train?

To be fair, I am not condemning education in general. While the minority may neglect their duties and responsibilities, most teachers and staff are putting forth a great and noble effort towards the students in their charge.

I am simply saying that we can all do better with the time and resources we have. If it is training we lack, there are no small numbers of "experts" willing to lend time and information. If it is initiative we are without, there are those out there who can lead and inspire us, whether in person or via social media and the like. (When WAS your last Twitter EdChat??) If it is resources we need, there are many who have traveled this path before who are willing to either shine the way or return and walk side-by-side with us.

It is not easy and we will face criticism from those who do not understand, but the majority will see the change for what it is. We talk often about doing what is best for kids. Here is YOUR chance. Get started today.

To quote a very intelligent and inspired leader, T.S. Monson, "Let us always choose the harder right rather than the easier wrong."

Maker Education and the Common Core: Closer Than You Might Think

With Common Core State Standards being the driving force in education in The United States over the past several years, much attention has been paid to the subject of teaching and assessing our students based upon CCSS.

Due directly to both Federal and state mandates, our nation's education system has been bombarded with resources, curriculums, and programs designed to better teach Common Core and prepare our students for a new battery of standardized testing "options" designed to measure growth towards nationwide proficiency.

The added stress (to an already taxing field of work) has resulted in teachers and students alike growing tired and more disillusioned to the concepts of school, education, and learning - especially considering the following:

• In 2015, an estimated $950 billion of Federal, state, and local money was spent on education in the United States (according to usgovernmentspending.com). That number is expected to exceed $1 trillion by 2017.
• On average, US students are required to take 112 standardized assessments throughout their K-12 years, ranging from nearly 5 hours of testing per year for Kindergarteners to over 25 hours for our nation's 8th graders (see article about Council of Great City Schools study here).
• Despite large sums of money being appropriated to schools - and an emphasis on assessments to measure growth and school/teacher effectiveness - longitudinal test scores have remained largely flat (see Politifact Virginia article here).

In other words...water is wet.

At the same time, educators have seen major moves towards gamification in the classroom, project or passion-based learning, STEM and STEAM Maker education, computer coding and many, many other non-traditional approaches to teaching and learning.

The desire to engage students in educational material, creativity, and collaboration (among other learning facets) seems, in some circles anyway, to overshadow the mandates of state and federal monitoring of student achievement.

The cry?

"While students are having fun making rockets and visiting zoos and playing Minecraft," critics claim, "they are not learning anything. And the test scores prove it. Our time, and the students' time, is better spent on covering meaningful content and prepping them for measurable assessments. We have the Common Core and we need to focus on student achievement and progress towards meeting those standards. Etc. Etc."

Stop me if you've heard that argument before.

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For a dissenting (in a good way) voice I give you Sylvia Martinez and her stance on CCSS and the "Deeper" Learning:

"I get asked a lot about how making and tinkering can be integrated into classes in light of the Common Core. I think there are good answers to this, but it involves seeing the Common Core as something more than it is being portrayed in the media and in schools. 

"Simply, there are three parts to the Common Core – the overarching goals, the standards, and the assessments. I’m not going to go into great detail about each of these, but here is what I see happening in a lot of schools in each of these areas. 

"Assessment – Tremendous effort is being put into getting students ready to take the assessments and preparing the technology infrastructure to administer the tests. 

"Standards – New standards are driving changes to curriculum, but mostly in a rearrangement or rebranding of existing curriculum and classes. 

"Overarching goals – Very little is being done to address the goals of changing how and what we teach students by making it more relevant, more experiential, and requiring deeper dives instead of “covering” too many topics. 

"This is the problem I’m seeing – that assessment is the tail wagging the dog and taking the focus (not to mention money and time) away from changing classrooms for the better. So when we talk about how “making” can align with Common Core, it requires schools and districts to refocus on those overarching goals, and away from how many computers you need to run the tests.  Unfortunately this is a conversation that is not taking place in many educational organizations."

In short, Martinez is claiming that school systems are so entrenched in testing their kids that they forget to educate them. But again, stop me if you've heard this one.

If we are to teach/students to learn the necessary standards to the necessary depths, I contend that more must be done than simply offering up a common assessment every now and then or administering a bevy of benchmark exams at semester's end.

What follows is a short but poignant snippet of a recent Twitter chat, from our friends in Montana and #MTedchat

The question was this:

Q4: What higher-order thinking skills will students need to use to move beyond basic understanding of content text? #MTedchat

— Crista Anderson (@cristama) January 20, 2016

To help further Martinez's stance on teaching beyond the exact wording of the standards, this was my response:

Look at all the verbs in standards. THAT is what kids need to be able to do. #mtedchat #Imnotastalker https://t.co/F0ZZJSazYr

— Darin Anderson (@coachdarin22) January 20, 2016

 Here are a few responses Tweeted out during the discussion:

#mtedchat A4 - Ss need curiosity! Are we stimulating that through inquiry?

— Marla Unruh (@bookwormmarla) January 20, 2016

@coachdarin22 I was once told that the standards are the floor, not the ceiling #mtedchat

— Bethany Gochnour (@GochnourBethany) January 20, 2016

In order to reach that ceiling, there is much construction we must do on the open floor space below.

@GochnourBethany @coachdarin22 A great opportunity with #PBL #STEM #makered #deeperlearning to build on that floor. #mtedchat

— Colet Bartow (@cbartow) January 20, 2016

While few educators disagree with the notion of Project-Based Learning, STEM, Maker Ed and the like, their implementation has been much more difficult to bring to pass - mainly because of the over-emphasis on rote testing at local, state and Federal levels. The message has been, "If your pet projects do not address the standards, you will have to give them up."

As a result, many teachers have burned bridges on building bridges, and fill their time instead on bubble sheets and #2 pencils.

However, here is some good news. As it turns out, there is a fairly logical way to bridge the gap between accountability towards Common Core (plus other standards) and "non-traditional" educational ventures.

The connection is best illustrated by using an example of a stalwart activity that has been popular amongst teachers and summer camp counselors across the world - The Tennis Ball Tower Challenge.

Often used as a teambuilder or icebreaker, the Tower Challenge may give surface appeal as a fun yet shallow activity. However, with some careful implementation, it can indeed unfold into a full blown, Common Core, #DeeperLearning, Maker Education crowd pleaser.

Follow the link to the right for access
to a Maker/CCSS example project.

Take a look at this link for a spreadsheet that shows the correlation between steps of the Engineering Design Process (used for the tower building protocol) and Common Core ELA Standards. (Similar outcomes are possible, of course, with Math and Science Standards as well.)

The ultimate outcome of any lesson, activity, or project that teachers have students complete must be related to student achievement and academic and/or personal growth. Maker Education teaches and hones success skills.

Beyond simply having fun with school projects, our students deserve so much more. Maker Education - connected purposefully to Common Core Standards - is just what the doctor ordered.

Happy making, everyone!

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