Fwd: Maker Ed | 2nd Denver Mini Maker Faire & Articles of Possible Interest
Jennifer D. Klein
Begin forwarded message:From: Paul Kim <paul...@coloradoacademy.org>Date: April 5, 2015 at 9:19:31 AM MDTSubject: Maker Ed | 2nd Denver Mini Maker Faire & Articles of Possible InterestTo: undisclosed-recipients:;Hi All,
The 2nd Annual Denver Mini Maker Faire is coming up on June 13th and 14th! This year, the Faire will be preceded by and include Maker Ed events beginning Friday June 12th – these events in particular may interest you if you are curious about creating space for making and tinkering in your work as a teacher. If you are unfamiliar with the Maker Movement:
The current Maker Movement in America is the result of “a new wave of Do-It-Yourself and Do-It-Together culture fueled by passion and powered by the advent of new technologies” that is more than a group of hobbyists. It is a new ecosystem of design and doing on the geography of the worldwide web that is sometimes called the “3rd Industrial Revolution.”To understand the Maker Movement beyond misleading stereotypes focused on robotics and STEM education, it is important to know that : “Makers come from all walks of life, with diverse skill sets and interests. The thing they have in common is creativity, an interest in design and access to tools and raw materials that make production possible.” In its essence, the Maker Movement includes diverse practitioners: cooks and canners as well as coders and computer scientists; tinkerers and thinkers; entrepreneurs and engineers; inventors and innovators; builders and growers; wordsmiths and blacksmiths.VOLUNTEER & PARTICIPATION OPPORTUNITIES AVAILABLE http://denvermakerfaire.com/volunteer/
Please Save the Dates and Spread the Word!
Thanks,Paul
Also, below are 3 articles that may be of interest:- Learning Through Tinkering by Allison Arieff- Homework vs. No Homework Is the Wrong Question by Maurice Elias, Director, Rutgers Social-Emotional Learning Lab- 8 weeks to a better brain: mindfulness… changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy, stress
FULL ARTICLES BELOW – scroll down
Learning Through Tinkering by Allison Arieff www.nytimes.com/2015/04/04/opinion/learning-through-tinkering.htmlHomework vs. No Homework Is the Wrong Question by Maurice Elias http://www.edutopia.org/blog/homework-vs-no-homework-wrong-question-maurice-elias8 weeks to a better brain: Meditation study shows changes associated with awareness, stress http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/01/eight-weeks-to-a-better-brain/Learning Through Tinkering by Allison Arieff APRIL 3, 2015
SAN FRANCISCO — My 9-year-old daughter is in the midst of a “pioneer” unit in her third grade class. It’s a great example of a project-based curriculum: The kids are developing math skills by determining what and how much they can pack without overloading wagons for a cross-country trek. They roll a “twist of fate” die that presents (virtual) obstacles they might have faced in the late 19th century — bad weather, loss of livestock, etc. — and then have to problem-solve to get their trek back on track. They’re reading a variety of historical perspectives, such as Louise Erdrich’s “The Birchbark House” and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books. And perhaps most important, they’re learning about self-sufficiency and resilience — and how even the youngest kids needed it in spades.
Before the Industrial Revolution really kicked into high gear, people had to know how to do everything, from navigating routes to preserving food, building homes to sewing clothes. You couldn’t head to the nearest supermarket or mall, you had to figure out how to make it, catch it, build it or grow it. For contemporary kids used to streaming video, play dates and even drone delivery, it’s illuminating to learn about this. And it’s not something easily — or typically — conveyed through grade school homework.
I’m not nostalgic for pioneer days. I’m a huge fan of modern conveniences. But as we’ve become so disconnected from where things come from, from the knowledge, resources and effort required to fulfill even the most basic needs, I believe we’ve lost something essential (if intangible). That’s why I want to talk about two amazing endeavors geared toward cultivating that sort of resourcefulness and creativity.
If we want to raise kids to be independent thinkers and change-makers, one of the best things we can do is give them the tools to figure stuff out for themselves. And a terrific manual for that is “50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do),” by Gever Tulley, a self-taught software engineer.
“There are not enough opportunities in a child’s life to be taken seriously, to be given autonomy and to learn authentically,” says Tulley. “I think they need learning opportunities that respect and incorporate their ideas.”
Tulley’s book presents 50 challenges (with instructions), each utterly at odds with today’s rampant helicopter parenting, such as Stand on a Roof, Taste Electricity (by licking a 9-volt battery), Dam a Creek and (I’ll admit I’m not ready to allow this one yet) Cross Town on Public Transportation.
“50 Dangerous Things” emphasizes the importance of introducing risk, facilitating autonomy and letting kids know that with danger comes discovery. This book comes to life at The Tinkering School, a program Tulley started here in San Francisco in 2000. (There is also a K-12 school, Brightworks, and a sleepaway camp down the coast; the program has recently expanded to Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin and Buffalo.)
At the start of the week, children are given a project: to design and build a Yellow Submarine, perhaps, or to construct a Monster City and a mechanical King Kong to destroy it. Starting as early as age 6, kids are taught how to use tools (hammers, orbital sanders, skilsaws) safely and responsibly (and to put everything back the way they found it at the end of the day). They form teams, determine tasks and timelines and, with guidance from an expert crew of instructors (the ratio is about one adult to four kids), are entrusted as project leaders designers and heads of a construction crew.
This isn’t just a bunch of kids messing around with stuff. Behind the chaos you can see the gears turning. There is no template, no set of instructions (and no screens). They need to be attentive, engaged and curious. As they begin a project, they’re learning how to collaborate, identify the skill sets of their group and deploy those talents accordingly, and problem-solve creatively. “The use of real tools dramatically increases agency,” says the Tinkering School’s manager, Joshua Rothhaas. “It’s like learning Spanish and suddenly realizing you can talk to about 400 million more people in the world than you could before you knew Spanish. It fundamentally changes the way your kid thinks about the world, how it works, and what they are capable of.”
All these children need are tools, materials and guidance. From there, their imaginations take over and creative problem-solving commences. They are still young enough not to have totally surrendered to that horrible adult trait of second-guessing. They’re given parameters and deadlines, which they take with the utmost seriousness. And at week’s end, the kids take the project apart; the materials can be reused and recycled, so they’re also learning about the life cycle of products and materials.
“When I started 10 years ago, I had the strong sense that kids were not being treated as competent people,” says Tulley. “It was as if no one expected them to be able to actually do anything until they graduated high school. I knew that they were capable of more, and wanted to create a place where they could show themselves and their parents that they could tackle a big problem.”
The Tinkering School ethos is echoed across the bay at Project H in Berkeley, Calif., where, says its founder, Emily Pilloton, “There’s no reason in the entire world to be bored.”
After graduating from architecture school, Pilloton quickly became disenchanted with what she was being paid to design while working at a for-profit design company. So, in 2008, she established Project H, a nonprofit that merges design and hands-on building to inspire youth, transform communities and improve K-12 public education from within. She and her small team teach 200 students at the Realm Charter School in Berkeley (it’s part of the regular curriculum). She also runs a summer camp for girls, and recently added a weekend workshop program for adults. (I couldn’t let my daughter have all the fun — I took welding with Pilloton last year and can’t wait to do it again.)
Her young crew is currently building two tiny houses that they designed. In the process, they’re looking at housing through a social, economic and environmental lens: upon completion of work, the students will donate the homes to Opportunity Village, an organization that helps the homeless in Eugene, Ore. Pilloton had wanted to donate locally but this group is the only one she could find that uses houses of this size (175 - 200 square feet) to house the homeless legally. Her students learned another valuable lesson as aspiring designers/architects — you’ve got to learn to work with zoning restrictions.
Creating something as ubiquitous as a house, says Pilloton, makes these kids look at the things around them in a different way because now they understand how they’re put together. (By the way, this all happens on an annual budget of $200,000. I think the greater challenge is the inability to clone multiple Emily Pillotons.)
“Every student in our class has something to contribute,” says Pilloton. “When you put a tool in the hands of a young person there’s the instinct to use it in a really creative way. It’s super powerful for a kid to say I drew this thing and now I’m building it.”
As Pilloton describes what and how these kids, and the young girls in particular, are learning, her observations jibe with what I’ve seen with my own daughter. “It’s powerful and necessary to give girls the opportunity to do something unexpected,” she says. “There’s nothing you could say to them that they wouldn’t try.” In short, they’re true pioneers.
Homework vs. No Homework Is the Wrong Question by Maurice Elias, Prof. of Psychology, Director, Rutgers Social-Emotional Learning Lab, Director, the Collaborative Center for Community-Based Research and Service
The real question we should be asking is, "What do we believe should happen after the end of the school day to help ensure that students retain what they have learned and are primed to learn more?" Any answer with the word, "work" in its name, as in "homework," is not typically going to be met with eagerness or enthusiasm by students.
Ideally, we want children to understand that they are always learners. In school, we refer to them as "students" but outside of school, as children, they are still learners. So it makes no sense to even advertise a "no homework" policy in a school. It sends the wrong message. The policy should be, "No time-wasting, rote, repetitive tasks will be assigned that lack clear instructional or learning purposes."
A realistic homework strategy should be a key topic of back-to-school night and the first parent-teacher conferences of the school year. But it should also reflect a considered school policy and not simply be up to each individual teacher to carry out according to his or own theory of student learning. Another advantage of this approach is to ensure that individual children are not inadvertently overloaded with demands from teachers who may not know what other teachers are asking of the same student. This is a particular concern in secondary schools.
Home Activities That Matter the MostChildren should be encouraged to read, write, perform arithmetic, better understand the world around them in terms of civics, science, and the arts, and, of course, develop their people skills -- their emotional intelligence. This encouragement should be part of everyday family interactions outside of school, and the school should provide developmental guidance to all parents, in the appropriate languages, to help them do this. For some children, specialized guidance will be needed, and this, too, should be provided proactively to parents.
Some parents will select focused programs or after-school experiences to help foster their children's learning in one or more of the aforementioned areas. To promote equity within and across schools, communities should think about how to make these kinds of experiences available to all children in high-quality ways -- without undue or unrealistic expense to families.
Of course, some teachers will have specific, creative ideas about how learning can be enhanced at home, in the context of particular units of study in school. Maybe what we need is a new word for all this. Instead of "homework," how about "continued learning" or "ongoing growth activities?"
Parents Playing Their PartFinally, students' learning would be greatly enhanced by schools taking a clear stance about supporting good parenting. My colleague Yoni Schwab and I have written about the importance of parents focusing on parenting as a priority, and secondarily working on assisting schools with educational issues (Elias, M. J., and Schwab, Y., 2004).
Aspects of good parenting that could be encouraged by schools include workshops, family nights, and discussion series on ways to promote:
Children's social-emotional and character developmentParents spending more time directly interacting with their kids in enjoyable waysParents visibly showing how much they value the importance of education and effortParents monitoring their children's use of and exposure to electronic mediaChildren's "continued learning" in as many possible opportunities during everyday household routines.Above all, schools should remind parents to never lose sight of modeling for their children the value of close relationships, support, caring, and fun. That is the most important home work of all.
Reference
Elias, M. J., and Schwab, Y. (2004). What About Parental Involvement in Parenting? The Case for Home-Focused School-Parent Partnerships. Education Week, 24 (8), 39,41. www.edutopia.org/blog/homework-vs-no-homework-wrong-question-maurice-elias
Eight weeks to a better brain: Meditation study shows changes associated with awareness, stress By Sue McGreevey
Participating in an eight-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy, and stress. In a study that will appear in the Jan. 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, a team led by Harvard-affiliated researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) reported the results of their study, the first to document meditation-produced changes over time in the brain’s gray matter.
“Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day,” says study senior author Sara Lazar of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program and a Harvard Medical School instructor in psychology. “This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing.”
Previous studies from Lazar’s group and others found structural differences between the brains of experienced meditation practitioners and individuals with no history of meditation, observing thickening of the cerebral cortex in areas associated with attention and emotional integration. But those investigations could not document that those differences were actually produced by meditation.
For the current study, magnetic resonance (MR) images were taken of the brain structure of 16 study participants two weeks before and after they took part in the eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Program at the University of Massachusetts Center for Mindfulness. In addition to weekly meetings that included practice of mindfulness meditation — which focuses on nonjudgmental awareness of sensations, feelings, and state of mind — participants received audio recordings for guided meditation practice and were asked to keep track of how much time they practiced each day. A set of MR brain images was also taken of a control group of nonmeditators over a similar time interval.
Meditation group participants reported spending an average of 27 minutes each day practicing mindfulness exercises, and their responses to a mindfulness questionnaire indicated significant improvements compared with pre-participation responses. The analysis of MR images, which focused on areas where meditation-associated differences were seen in earlier studies, found increased gray-matter density in the hippocampus, known to be important for learning and memory, and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion, and introspection.
Participant-reported reductions in stress also were correlated with decreased gray-matter density in the amygdala, which is known to play an important role in anxiety and stress. Although no change was seen in a self-awareness-associated structure called the insula, which had been identified in earlier studies, the authors suggest that longer-term meditation practice might be needed to produce changes in that area. None of these changes were seen in the control group, indicating that they had not resulted merely from the passage of time.
“It is fascinating to see the brain’s plasticity and that, by practicing meditation, we can play an active role in changing the brain and can increase our well-being and quality of life,” says Britta Hölzel, first author of the paper and a research fellow at MGH and Giessen University in Germany. “Other studies in different patient populations have shown that meditation can make significant improvements in a variety of symptoms, and we are now investigating the underlying mechanisms in the brain that facilitate this change.”
Amishi Jha, a University of Miami neuroscientist who investigates mindfulness-training’s effects on individuals in high-stress situations, says, “These results shed light on the mechanisms of action of mindfulness-based training. They demonstrate that the first-person experience of stress can not only be reduced with an eight-week mindfulness training program but that this experiential change corresponds with structural changes in the amygdala, a finding that opens doors to many possibilities for further research on MBSR’s potential to protect against stress-related disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder.” Jha was not one of the study investigators.
James Carmody of the Center for Mindfulness at University of Massachusetts Medical School is one of the co-authors of the study, which was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the British Broadcasting Company, and the Mind and Life Institute. For more information on the work of Lazar’s team.
Upper School Social Studies Department ChairProject X :: teaching lab coordinator
“Now that we can do anything, what will we do?” -- Bruce Mau