Reflecting on Maker Experiences with Reflection Cards
I’ve discussed the importance of reflection in my Framework for Maker Education; and specifically discussed reflecting on the maker experiences in several of my blog posts:
- Reflecting on the Making Process https://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2015/10/05/reflecting-on-the-making-process/
- The Maker as a Reflective Practitioner https://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2016/02/02/the-maker-as-a-reflective-practitioner/
One of my friends and colleagues, Lucie DdeLaBruere, interviewed me and recently blogged about my thoughts and strategies for reflecting on the maker experience in Create Make Learn: March 5 – Reflection as part of Maker Centered Learning http://createmakelearn.blogspot.com/2018/03/march-5-reflection-as-part-of-maker.html?spref=tw
One of the tools I use to facilitate the reflective process is a board game – see below.
Some of the things that I believe makes this game successful are:
- The questions provide the prompts but they are open enough to be personalized by the learners.
- The game promotes discourse and active listening.
- The interactive and semi-structure of the game make it fun for the learners.
Because of the success of the game, I was motivated to create a similar tool for maker reflections. I created a set of reflection cards that I believe can facilitate some deeper reflection.
Caring and Compassionate Confrontation
When I was in my Doctoral program, I met in one of my classes Debbie who was the Corporate Education coordinator for the university. She ran workshops for teams from profit and non-profit organizations and corporations. I had mentioned that I had a background in adventure education with a focus using outdoor team building activities. She got excited and said that the university does team building on their off campus site and asked me to join her as a facilitator. At the time I was a chain smoker, about 2 packs a day, and had been smoking like that for about 10 years. These activities were outdoors so I would smoke during these day long team building days. We would have the clients fill out evaluation forms at the end of the day and use these evaluations to do our end-of-day debriefings. During one such debriefing, Debbie had found several comments about how my smoking disturbed several of the individual clients. She looked at me with such a caring look and said, “You are so good at what you do. It’s such a shame that your smoking detracts from that.” On the way home that evening I threw away my cigarettes and never smoked again. This ended up being a peak experience in my life in that Debbie’s unconditional caring facilitated major behavioral change in me.
Fast forward to present day . . . this is about a 5th grade student in one of my gifted education classes. Last semester, J. was incredibly annoying. He got on both my and his classmates nerves way too often. He was a “know-it-all” with both the other students and me. He was loud, often claimed he knew the answer (he often did), and when he was correct, he would exclaim loudly, “I told you so.” When we had competitions such as with board games and Kahoot, he often won and would gloat. I had lots of one-on-one talks with him telling him that I believe that he is smart and insightful, but that he often alienates others (including me) with his comments. I emphasized that I wanted others to see his talents but with his comments and attitudes, others would not see them. I also told him that winning competitions does feel good but that he should congratulate himself silently as not to get his peers angry. We’ve been back from break for several weeks (I meet with them twice a week for a few hours each time). I noticed that he is not so loud, doesn’t make such antagonist comments, and lets me help him with technology-based assignments. On several occasions, I told him that I noticed his changes and that I am proud of him. When asked, he said he made a New Year’s resolution to make changes. Last semester I didn’t think he was listening to my suggestions, but he was!
The following excerpts from the Harvard School of Education’s The Troublemakers (http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ed/18/01/troublemakers) support the idea of caring and compassionate confrontation.
We teachers all have our Joes, our students who consistently call out, talk back, refuse to participate or sit down or stay on task. They throw our lessons into disarray, make our heads pound. They keep us up at night strategizing, worrying. How can I connect? What strategies might work tomorrow?
How do we reach and teach our troublemakers? Most teachers have binders brimming with ideas: shuffled seat assignments, tracking systems, rewards for on-point behavior. But when these fail, what can you do when it’s you alone in your class balancing 29 personalities, the clock ticking and your 40-minute-long class is almost up?
Some strategies for working with these kinds of difficult students include:
Seek out our students’ strengths. All students have strengths. Perhaps they are avid photographers, basketball players, coders, or poets when not in school. But when it comes to our troublemakers, it can be easy for their assets to be overshadowed by behaviors that disrupt the carefully cultivated cultures of our classrooms. We cannot lose sight of these strengths. Yet it is not enough to know that our troublemakers are budding artists, scientists, and entrepreneurs. We must also seek to reframe and better understand the qualities we find most frustrating.
Strategize with students. We can only guess as to why a student might call out or fail to do homework. Rather than assume we know the answer, ask. From our students we can better learn what hurdles they face and in what ways we can support their success. And in doing this we demonstrate our commitment to our students.
Create opportunities for students to realize their potential and be publically recognized for their academic achievements. All students are capable of achieving remarkable things, they just might need our help to do so. In raising the stakes, but also the support, we can create opportunities for students to explore at the edge of their capabilities. And when they do succeed, celebrate these achievements. Our troublemakers are too often only publicly acknowledged for their disruptions. We can change this pattern by intentionally creating opportunities to publicly recognize their strengths.
The World’s Largest Lesson: Global Goals Activities
I have a strong belief that education should assist learners in developing the desire and skills for global stewardship. I discussed this in my post, Empathy and Global Stewardship: The Other 21st Century Skills https://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2013/07/28/empathy-and-global-stewardship-the-other-21st-century-skills/.
Learners, grades 5 and 6, in my gifted class do the global goals projects one hour per week. What follows are some of the activities they have done.
Introducing and Choosing the Goals
The Global Goals lesson was introduced to learners through the following videos:
They were then asked to explore each of the goals via the World’s Greatest Lesson website: http://worldslargestlesson.globalgoals.org/ using their newly constructed Global Goals glasses (template found at http://cdn.worldslargestlesson.globalgoals.org/2017/08/WLL-Glasses-V3.pdf).
The final part of their introduction and exploration of the global goals was for each learner to choose one or two goals to further explore and research; and to list these on their personal blogs. They presented their selections to the rest of the class.
Activity: Board Game Go Goals!
“GO GOALS!” board game. The purpose of this game is to help children understand the Sustainable Development Goals, how they impact their lives and what they can do every day to help and achieve the 17 goals by 2030. The game can be downloaded at http://go-goals.org/
Activity: Exploring Wealth Inequalities
This was such a powerful activity. I blogged about it in Exploring Wealth Inequities: An Experiential Learning Activity https://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2017/12/02/exploring-wealth-inequities-an-experiential-learning-activity/
Here is a video from their activity:
Activity: Superhero to Help Rescue Climate Change
Learners completed the worksheets (1-3) found at http://cdn.worldslargestlesson.globalgoals.org/2017/09/WLL_ClimateComicContest_Final-1.pdf.
The learner responses were posted on the bulletin outside of the classroom hopefully to bring some awareness to other teachers and students in the school.
Creating a Website
Learners, either alone or with a partner, are creating websites about their chosen goals using Google Sites (we are a Google apps district). They are required to include the following items:
- An overview of the problem using reputable resources and with live links included,
- Multimedia presentations (2) using Web 2.0 tools from this list provided to them via our Google Classroom – https://www.symbaloo.com/embed/multimediatools8?,
- A self-grading quiz using Google Forms,
- A Green Screen or Flipgrid commentary.
They work on their sites when time is left after the experiential activities. (I will add an aggregate of their sites once they are done.)
Focusing on the Process: Letting Go of Product Expectations
I am a process-oriented educator. I focus on how to learn rather than what to learn. I’ve addressed this in Freedom to Learn:
In order to facilitate these desired elements of learning, I believe it is important to focus on the process of learning rather than the products of learning.
When learning is viewed as a product, and the same performance measure applies to all students, learning facilitation can be reduced to cookie-cutter teaching: same pieces of information and instruction are seen sufficient for all students. In a product-centered learning environment emphasis is often in doing activities – worksheets, charts, pre-designed projects – that are either teacher-made or provided by the publisher of the curriculum. The important part of completing these products is getting them right because these products are usually graded! Skilled and obedient students comply with these requests and try hard to get their tasks done right, yet there are many students who just leave them undone.
What about viewing learning as a process? Because students begin their daily/weekly/yearly learning from different levels of knowledge and understanding, they also will end up in different competency levels. And that is okay, honestly. We are not clones. Students shouldn’t be treated like ones. When learning is understood primarily as a process of acquisition and elaboration of information, the natural consequences in the classroom are ongoing differentiation and individualization. Approaching learning as an individual process helps us refocus learning and teaching: the student is in the nexus of her/his own learning, (Is Learning a Product or a Process?)
The following principles from Rogers’ Freedom to Learn are directly addressed when the process of learning becomes the intent of instructional practices:
Much significant learning is acquired through doing. “Placing the student in direct experiential confrontation with practical problems, social problems, ethical and philosophical problems, personal issues, and research problems, is one of the most effective modes of promoting learning” (p. 162).
Learning is facilitated when the student participates responsibly in the learning process. “When he chooses his own directions, helps to discover his own learning resources, formulates his own problems, decides his own course of action, lives with the consequences of these choices, then significant learning is maximized” (p. 162).
The most socially useful learning in the modern world is the learning of the process of learning, a continuing openness to experience and incorporation into oneself of the process of change. If our present culture survives, it will be because we have been able to develop individuals for whom change is the central fact of life and who have been able to live comfortably with this central fact. They will instead have the comfortable expectation that it will be continuously necessary to incorporate new and challenging learnings about ever-changing situations. (pp. 163-164)
Weibell, C. J. (2011). Principles of learning: 7 principles to guide personalized, student-centered learning in the technology-enhanced, blended learning environment. Retrieved from https://principlesoflearning.wordpress.com.
To truly focus on the process rather than products of learning, the educator needs to let go of expectations about the specific products that should be produced by the students. There are expectations regarding some of the processes in which learners should engage (e.g., divergent thinking, questioning, researching, creating, innovating) but the educator lets go of the pictures in her or his mind about what the products should look like.
The benefits for my learners include:
- They are not limited by my expectations nor the expectations of a lesson or assessment developed by an outside entity (e.g., textbook or testing company).
- Their engagement, motivation, curiosity, and excitement increase.
- They learn to tolerate and then embrace ambiguity.
- Natural differentiation and individualization result.
- They learn skills such as self-directed learning, taking initiative, locating resources, asking for help that can be transferred to all learning endeavors.
- It reflects and models how learning occurs outside of school.
- There is an increased investment and pride in their work.
- They develop both a sense of confidence and a sense of competence.
The benefits for me, as the educator, include:
- I work hard to pre-plan process-oriented classroom activities but the learners work harder than me during class time. Students should work harder than the educator during class time.
- I am continually surprised at and elated about what learners produce. Because of this, I get to learn from them, too. We become a learning community.
- I get to directly observe how each individual student approaches learning tasks. This furthers my ability to plan learning tasks tailored to the learners’ unique abilities and interests.
- I get to experience the joy with them as they accomplish a learning task on their own using their own personal abilities, intelligence, learning strategies, and struggles. This joy rarely occurs with standardized curriculum and assessments.
Here are some examples of process-oriented learning activities I have done with my students:
- Design Thinking Activities for Elementary Students
- Designing a Video Game
- Maker Education Activities
- Circuit Crafts https://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2017/07/08/maker-education-camp-circuit-crafts/
- Cardboard Creations https://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2017/06/18/cardboard-creations-a-maker-education-camp/
- Toy Hacking https://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2017/04/08/toy-take-apart-and-hacking/
- Rube Goldberg Machines https://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2016/11/29/simple-and-rube-goldberg-machines-a-maker-education-steam-lesson/
- Halloween Wars