The Connecting, Making, Designing and Composing article talks about how we teach design thinking and making through the context of what we know about teaching writing. In particular, I found it important to think about design thinking as being integrated within the content, much like we’ve done with instructional technology.

As we move to a focus on design and making in education, we should consider how design or making is woven throughout the disciplines and consider how making and design emerge from disciplinary problems. We could learn a lot from the years of research in writing across the disciplines that could inform more thoughtful infusion of design thinking and making across our curriculum.

I loved this quote below about making and how it emerges:

As maker spaces take their place in schools, perhaps we should turn to artists, poets, engineers, scientists, and so on and ask them to describe what it means to make in their communities. We might turn a critical eye to the ways in which making emerges from communities instead of thinking that we bring making to their communities of practice.

And in particular loved the summary here in the last paragraph:

Like many of you, I will continue to be a champion for doing, making, tinkering, and composing ideas and artifacts. At the end of the day, design and making could be exactly the trojan horse we need to infuse constructivist pedagogies in teaching and learning. An affordance of a maker space is also its potential for breaking down disciplinary silos: a maker space can bring together a variety of disciplines and make explicit the kinds of problems various disciplines can solve, and more importantly, highlight the interdisciplinary approaches to meaning making and problem solving. As we take this step toward design and making in schools, my hope is that we keep an eye on the messy, recursive, and disciplinary ways we make and design.

Full Article here:
Thinking about design thinking and making through the context of teaching writing

I very much enjoyed this article and the great strategies from Wendy Ostroff, author of Cultivating Curiosity in K-12 Classrooms, to encourage older students to be creative! I especially loved that the article described her as “a student of imagination and curiosity.” What a great way to be described.

https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2018/02/01/how-to-help-older-kids-develop-a-sense-of-imagination/

I loved this article – in particular the below quotes! https://www.edutopia.org/article/future-coding-schools

“Many people think of learning and education as a process of delivering information or delivering instruction. Other people see learning and education as student-centered—learning is about exploring, experimenting, creating. Those are very different visions that predate the computer, but of course the computer can fit into either of those two models. It’s a wonderful device for delivering information, but it can also be a wonderful device for creating, exploring, and experimenting.”

“I think the reasons for learning to code are the same as the reasons for learning to write. When we learn to write, we are learning how to organize, express, and share ideas. And when we learn to code, we are learning how to organize, express, and share ideas in new ways, in a new medium.”

“These days I talk about our approach in terms of these four words that begin with the letter p: projects, passion, peers, and play. So that’s the approach I would take with coding, but also with any other learning: getting students to work on projects, based on their passion, in collaboration with peers, in a playful spirit. And each of those p’s is important. I think work on projects gives you an understanding of the creative process, how to start with just the inkling of an idea and then to build a prototype, share it with people, experiment with it, and continue to modify and improve it.”