Students as Teachers

The first source of teachers our educators pointed to were the students themselves. Every person we spoke with was convinced of the importance of encouraging students to teach, and to teach in a variety of ways. For example, sometimes students function as experts and straightforwardly teach skills and information they happen to know a lot about, such as how to use iMovie or create a Minecraft video. Their students in these cases are sometimes their fellow students, but they are also teachers, parents, and other adults in the community. Sometimes students teach skills they have just recently learned to other students who are right behind them in an arc of learning, such as how to load vinyl onto a vinyl cutter or how to change drill bits or unjam a sewing machine. Frequently students teach by serving as mentors to other students, offering guidance, coaching, feedback, and other kinds of skill- and confidence-building support.

Based on our conversations with maker educators, we found that the pedagogical roles students assume are just as varied as the roles the regular classroom teacher assumes, including teacher as dispenser of information, teacher as facilitator, teacher as connector, and so on. Later in this chapter we look closely at the various forms of pedagogy at play in maker-centered learning environments. For now, the important point is that students have a robust pedagogical presence, teaching in various roles and serving various constituencies. Maker educators explicitly encourage this, and in fact, as a group, the educators we talked with were twice as likely to point to students as teachers as all other types of teachers combined, including themselves.

This extreme emphasis on students as teachers is rare. It is even more unusual if one considers the context: Quite often in maker-centered classrooms, students are using complex machinery, working with tricky materials, and making things to be used in real-life and sometimes high-stakes contexts. Such a scenario would seem to favor a more traditional pedagogical model in which students are taught “properly” the first time, usually by the teacher or other expert in the front of the room. But almost the opposite is true. So what is going on? Why are maker educators so adamant about encouraging students to be teachers?

We heard three reasons. The first is the simple fact that sometimes students really are the experts. They know something that no one else in the classroom does, so it simply makes sense to ask them to teach it, as shown in Figure 2.2. Moreover, some maker educators aim to create student experts, precisely so they can teach. For instance, at Fox Meadow Elementary School in Scarsdale, New York, principal Duncan Wilson explained, “As long as every kid can get the basic experience we want them to have, then let them be the experts. I already have 3-D printing experts among the students. We're going to have soldering experts. We'll have Arduino experts.”

A second reason maker educators encourage students to be teachers has to do with efficiency: having students play the role of teacher expands what maker educators can do in the classroom. One way this happens is by avoiding the bottleneck of teachers being the sole dispensers of information. As Peter McKenna, a technology teacher at Fox Meadow Elementary School, said, “If you try to teach 24 kids how to sew at once, you have a disaster on your hands.” Peter's strategy is to teach three kids to sew on the first day and then to ask those students to teach the next group. We heard many stories about this kind of tiered teaching, particularly in relation to learning skills like sewing and learning about various tools, like how to use a jigsaw. Indeed, many educators explicitly structure a tiered teaching sequence into their regular instruction. As Andy Forest of MakerKids in Toronto, Ontario, explained, “Frequently if I'm showing a group of kids how to use something like a jigsaw, and there's four people listed on the board that need to know how to use the jigsaw and one kid knows already, then I'll say, ‘You teach it.’ I fill in the gaps and make sure they covered everything—but it really makes them own the skill if they can pass it along to someone else.”

In addition to relieving learning bottlenecks, having students teach also frees up the regular classroom teacher to play other roles. For example, reflecting on his time at the Opal school in Portland, Oregon, Steve Davee remembered the benefits of having students teach other students to allow him to assume the role of documentarian: “It allows me to go around and document, because here I am taking pictures, showing students that I'm looking at things, asking questions, hearing from them what they're doing, listening to them, and writing down quotes.” Playing the role of documentarian is an important part of the educational surround, but it is one that often gets squeezed out when teachers put themselves in the position of being the sole classroom provider of direct instruction. At the Marymount School in New York, Jaymes Dec has been training his students to teach for a similar reason. “Now,” he said, “we've got two or three student experts on each of the tools or machines or techniques we use in this lab. So students are teaching each other.” The value of students teaching other students, he explained, is that “it frees up a lot of my time to be able to walk around and speak to the students and try to get them to expose what they're thinking about, and talk about their projects.”

The third reason maker educators encourage students to be teachers is because it directly serves the educational goals and outcomes we described in the previous chapter. Andy Forest offered, “Kids teaching kids is really powerful for confidence-building. They're excited to teach other kids; it really makes them own the skill, if they can pass it on to someone else.” In fact, Andy values kids teaching kids so much that he envisions a double-badge system, in which a student gets one badge for knowing a skill, and a second badge for teaching it.⁸

Steve Teeri, founder of the HYPE Teen Center at the Detroit Public Library in Detroit, Michigan, likewise stresses the value of young people teaching the skills and expertise they have gained to others. “When visitors come in unexpectedly and want to know about the makerspace, Terence is pushing us out of the way to explain all of these things we do here,” he explained.⁹ “Terence is one of the teens who is a regular at our workshops. We frequently find that when we're exhibiting at an event in the community and we have brought some of the teens like Terence with us, they are really excited to share what they have learned. Not only have they gained new skills, but they have gained confidence and a sense of accomplishment that they want to share.” This theme, of helping students develop a sense of confidence and agency through teaching others was quite dear to many of the maker educators we spoke with, and we return to it several times throughout this chapter.

Teachers in the Community

Encouraging students to be teachers in the maker-centered classroom is a pedagogical mainstay of maker-centered learning. But the sourcing of teachers also goes further afield. Students often do projects that require expertise beyond the walls of the classroom, and maker educators strongly encourage students to connect with experts in the local community who can teach them what they need to know (Figure 2.3). For example, in Portland, Maine, Gus Goodwin's students at King Middle School needed to learn how to mix fiberglass. Portland is a coastal city with an active seaport, so Gus helped his students connect with a local boat builder who could teach them the craft. At the Brightworks School, one of Gever Tulley's students was doing a project that involved making a complex map, so she was encouraged to work with folks at a local tech start-up that specializes in mapping software. At the Mount Elliott MakerSpace in Detroit, Michigan, a group of students wanted to learn how to screen print T-shirts, so Jeff Sturges helped them connect with a mentor in the community who could teach them not just the craft of screen printing but also the entrepreneurial aspect of it.

The walls of the maker-centered classroom are porous. Students easily pass beyond them to learn from members of the community, and the porosity goes both ways—members of the community are often invited into maker-centered classrooms to share their knowledge and inspire students. For example, we heard stories of visiting bike fabricators, Egyptologists, machinists, and farmers, all of whom have come to maker-centered classrooms to share their stories and teach their craft. We learned about tinkerers-in-residence, visiting inventors, and visiting artists who set up shop in maker-centered classrooms, sometimes to teach specific skills but sometimes simply to tinker and invent in the presence of young people, thereby teaching by modeling various versions of what it looks like to be a maker.

Online Knowledge Sourcing

Yet another source of instruction that maker educators embrace is not a person at all—it is the world of online information. The Internet is a huge teaching resource that offers an array of instructional experiences—students regularly go online to access text-based information, to watch demonstration videos, to get advice from other people, to explore and sometimes participate in professional communities related to their areas of interest, and to poke around and get inspired by seeing cool stuff. Online resources are a rich source of instruction that can be accessed in a variety of ways. Some of these resources, such as Instructables and DIY.org, are specifically designed for projects and maker-centered learning. But there are infinitely more resources that students can access simply by surfing the Web. We refer to online knowledge sourcing as a teacher because the educators we spoke with clearly view it as an important, and often crucial, teaching resource. As Duncan Wilson pointed out, “We have Chromebooks in fifth grade. That completely changes where the information comes from in the classroom.”

Online knowledge sourcing is important not only because of the vast informational content of the Internet but also because finding information online usually requires a measure of self-directed learning. Students make choices about what paths to follow, they make judgments about the validity and reliability of information, and they review and recalibrate their learning as they go along. For these reasons, sourcing information online is often a form of agentic behavior, and thus connects to the goal of helping students develop a sense of agency.

Tools and Materials as Teachers

Maker-centered learning often involves working with tangible materials, and maker educators often talk about tools and materials as teachers (Figure 2.4). They want their students to listen and engage with materials, to respond to them, to get to know them deeply, to have conversations with them. The relationship is not just about learning specific techniques; it is also about extending the imagination. At East Bay School for Boys, David Clifford talked about students' use of tools as “touching points for making sense of the world.” He elaborated, “Touching a tool and knowing what the tool does, using that tool and seeing what it does, are ways to understand possibility.” Relatedly, Jeremy Boyle, codirector of the Children's Innovation Project, spoke about the ways in which tools and technology function like vehicles for making and learning—just like materials do. “The idea that technology is a raw material is something that is such an important part of our practice,” he said, “because if we think about technology as no different from paint on a page, or clay being sculpted—technology becomes just something else you can make stuff out of.”

At the Exploratorium's Tinkering Studio in San Francisco, Karen Wilkinson wants students to learn to be tinkerers by learning to converse with materials. “If you have developed a tinkerer's disposition,” she said, “you have this way of asking questions of cardboard … responding to its feedback, trying something else, and having a dialogue with a material or an idea.”

It is noteworthy that maker educators think about the way materials and tools function as teachers in the same dialogical way as they view their own teaching—as a reciprocal relationship that is characterized by conversation and feedback and encouragement rather than by the direct transmission of skill. Speaking again of listening to the screw, Gever Tulley said:

Zooming back to the question, Who (and what) are the teachers in the maker-centered classroom?, the answer is that the role of teacher is distributed and variable. It is distributed in the sense that the function of teaching is distributed across multiple agents. These agents include the classroom teacher, members of the wider community, various online portals, physical tools and materials, and, very importantly, students themselves. The role of the teacher is variable because these agents play their teaching roles in various ways, including providing direct instruction, giving how-to advice, modeling behaviors, functioning as a coach or a mentor, and playing the role of documentarian. This variability in modes of teaching is noteworthy, particularly in terms of understanding the role of the lead maker educator—the person students would point to as the classroom teacher, if asked—and it brings us to the question of how maker educators themselves characterize the teaching they do.

Facilitating Student Collaboration

Walk into a maker classroom and you are likely to see clusters of students working together, as shown in Figure 2.5. Collaborative learning is a familiar term in education, and it refers to a wide range of practices, from highly structured cooperative learning groups to informal peer feedback. Not surprisingly, maker educators seem to have a broad and expansive conception of collaboration. In their view, it is a hallmark characteristic of maker classrooms, and it occurs in a variety of ways. For instance, often in the maker-centered classroom students collaborate on projects in which they make things or tackle a design challenge together. Sometimes students collaborate by finding and sharing resources, even if they are working independently. They often collaborate by teaching one another, as described in the foregoing section. Sometimes they collaborate by giving one another feedback, or by simply giving each other a hand with whatever is needed.

Given the pervasiveness of collaboration in the maker-centered classroom, it makes sense that when maker educators describe what they do when they teach, they view supporting student collaboration as a crucial part of their role. Some of the support they provide students is simply typical orchestration and management—for example, getting students into groups, helping them find time to work together, and providing goals and guidelines for group projects. Other times, they create highly structured collaborative experiences for students—and other times collaborative learning happens all on its own.

In the world of education there are many other ideas about what the term collaborative learning means and about the frameworks to structure collaborative learning experiences.¹⁰ As noted earlier in the discussion of peer learning, there are also different forms of and reasons for collaboration. For example, collaboration can refer to any kind of informally shared group work, or teamwork, or to highly structured cooperative experiences where each group member shares equally in the work.

Closely related to educational views about collaborative learning is educational theory about the processes of group invention and innovation—collaborative processes that often take place in the maker-centered classroom. Here theorists have made the case that not only is learning distributed, but so, too, is the variety of creativity that takes place in the maker-centered classroom.¹¹ From the perspective of distributed creativity, various young people participate in the development of ideas in much the same way that the educators we spoke with described the collaboration that takes place in their maker-centered classrooms. As mentioned earlier, students participate in making through a do-it-together process that involves the engagement of multiple individuals. With this in mind, some maker educators have connected the variety of distributed invention that takes place in the maker-centered classroom to the concept of participatory culture, which is often used to describe engagement and learning through digital media.¹²

Themes of collaboration, participation, and distributed invention may seem at odds with a cultural movement that has been branded as a do-it-yourself (DIY) renaissance, but as David Lang has pointed out in his book Zero to Maker, no one ever really makes anything on their own.¹³ DIY is a misnomer. Making and maker-centered learning are instead about doing things together, or, as Lang puts it, the maker movement is a do-it-together (DIT) revolution.¹⁴

Indeed, the maker educators we spoke with embraced the do-it-together nature of their work with young people, and they frequently used the term collaboration to describe the various manifestations of DIT in their learning environments. They did not, however, seem particularly concerned about defining collaboration narrowly. In fact, many educators viewed the collaborative spirit as an expression of the mutual encouragement and support that is part of the zeitgeist of the maker-centered classroom. As Steve Davee put it, collaboration “becomes this collective group effort that is a beautiful sign of what happens when you take a bunch of makers and put them all together in a room and say, ‘Alright, how do you support each other? What can emerge by this mutual support?’”

Maker educators do not, however, gloss over the fact that collaboration often comes along with arguing and negotiation. In fact they will often create conditions where these characteristics arise in ways that can get worked out naturally. For example, Steve Davee talked about setting up situations where there are limited resources—say, a handful of Hot Wheels cars and some half-gutters on a small hill on the playground—and then letting a group of kids go at it. With a little gentle attention from him on the sidelines, Steve watched students move from “fighting over something limited to cooperating over something limited.” His goal in these situations was not so much for students to learn how to efficiently “get things done” but rather to help them develop a sense of care and responsibility toward one another. He talks about how the set-up of limited physical materials helps students face and deal with an issue, like “… how do you share, how do you not covet that particular car, how do you make sure somebody is included?”

From within this frame of care and responsibility, maker educators naturally also emphasize the practical benefits of collaboration. They want their students to understand that projects are genuinely better when people work together in ways that include different voices, different talents, and different skill sets. As Gever Tulley stressed, he wants his students to understand that even when things are complicated, “they can find the right partners and suddenly the juices start flowing, and then things become possible and they can do it.”

In the current educational climate, collaboration is often talked about as a 21st century skill—something students will need to master if they are to be successful in the contemporary world. Indeed, the influential Partnership for 21st Century Learning framework (P21) identifies collaboration as a key educational outcome, and defines it as the ability to “work effectively with diverse teams, and be helpful and make necessary compromises to accomplish a common goal.”¹⁵ The maker educators we spoke with would probably agree with this as far as it goes. But it is important to keep in mind the real benefits of maker-centered learning discussed in Chapter One. Beyond the mainstream media narrative that stresses the potential impact of making on the national and global economy, the educators we spoke with stressed the importance of developing student agency and building character through maker-centered learning. To the extent that they would agree with P21's definition of collaboration, they would likely do so from the standpoint of care and character development rather than workplace-oriented efficiency. What this means in practice is that maker educators facilitate collaboration by doing such things as listening closely to each student and trying to understand individual needs; organizing group projects so that they represent social, intellectual, and academic diversity; designing project tasks and presentations so that they surface the voices of underheard students; and paying careful attention to the social and emotional dimensions of group dynamics (Figure 2.6). They do all of this while continually emphasizing the power of working together.

Encouraging Co-inspiration and Co-critique

As the previous section makes clear, facilitating student collaboration is an important part of what maker educators do. Often this involves a direct focus on student collaborative groups. But even beyond structured collaborations, maker educators find ways to help students learn from and with one another. The maker educators we spoke with discussed the process of learning from and with one another in two distinct ways, which can best be described as co-inspiration and co-critique. Co-inspiration involves creating opportunities for students to explicitly borrow and build on each other's ideas. Co-critique involves creating opportunities for students to give each other informative, generous, and productive feedback. Both instructional practices involve teaching students to look closely at the specific features of their peers' work and to translate their observations into words or actions.

Co-inspiration

Gus Goodwin has a teaching technique he calls making the rounds. He uses it when students are making something together in small groups. It goes like this: Once students begin to settle into their work, Gus instructs one student from each group to go around the room and look at the other groups' projects and sketch what she sees at each table. She returns to her group, at which point one of her other team members leaves to observe and sketch another group. The process continues until everyone has had a chance to observe and sketch other groups' work. At the end of the rounds, the members of the group compare what they saw, discuss what inspired them, and decide how they want to modify and improve their project going forward. Gus's intention is to get students to look closely at each other's work and use one another as sources of inspiration.

Rather than “stealing” ideas from one another, this process of co-inspiration can be seen as a form of collegial appropriation (Figure 2.7). As the education scholar Edith K. Ackermann described, “Appropriation is the process by which a person or group becomes acquainted with, and gains interest in, things by making them their own. It is an eminently creative process, often resulting in unexpected uses, clever détournements, and surprising outcomes.”¹⁶

Over at the Exploratorium's Tinkering Studio, Karen Wilkinson is also a believer in this objective, and she gets excited when she talks about how young people's ideas can be contagious. As an example, she tells the story of how one girl in the Young Makers Club at the Exploratorium built a tree house for fairies. It had a clever little pumping fountain and lots of appealing lights. What was really cool about it, Karen explained, was its verticality, the way it was built along a wall. She was not the only one who thought it was cool. The space in the Tinkering Studio is designed for co-inspiration, and the fairy house was displayed in a way that encouraged other students to easily examine it. As it turned out, its various innovative features inspired several other students' designs. Karen enthusiastically described how the inspiration was “literally kid to kid. It wasn't anything we were instructing.”

Karen may not have been explicitly telling students to inspire one another, but she and her colleagues at the Exploratorium have certainly put a lot of thought into how the physical features of a space can tacitly support co-inspiration. She noted that even the shape of a worktable can make a huge difference, and told a story of when the Tinkering Studio first began its open make series. At the time, the space was furnished with rectangular tables for people to work at. During one of the open make events, a staff photographer happened to take a picture of the tables in use from above. Karen and her colleagues came to call the scene an “angry buffet” because it looked like everyone was crowding in to get a glimpse of what the person at the head of the table—usually the instructor—was doing. After experimenting with different table arrangements and sizes, they eventually discovered that round tables worked the best (Figure 2.8). Physically speaking, a round table precludes anyone from assuming the head. With the teacher-at-the-front-of-the-room mentally ingrained in most of us, it is hard not to solely look to the head of the table for inspiration, thereby missing much of what other people are doing. Round tables, Karen found, work much better to help spread kid-to-kid ideas.

Co-critique

Teaching techniques for supporting peer-to-peer inspiration are often closely related to techniques for supporting peer-to-peer feedback, or co-critique. This is because both practices involve getting students to look closely and carefully at one another's work from the standpoint of a generous, probing, productive mindset. Many educators view co-critique as an important part of the learning process. Among them are Ron Berger, a veteran teacher and carpenter who has long encouraged teachers to make critique a habit of mind that young people apply across their school experiences. From Berger's perspective, peer-to-peer critique is a form of learning that doubly benefits students by helping them become more sensitive to design and by driving their work forward. Berger's approach to critique is simple. He encourages students to be kind, be specific, and be useful.¹⁷

Similar to Berger's approach to structuring peer-to-peer critique, the maker educators we spoke with likewise shared a variety of strategies they used. In the Tinkering Studio, Karen favors the strategy of “plussing,” a technique popularized by the animation studio, Pixar. The cardinal rule of plussing is that you cannot offer a criticism unless you also offer a positive suggestion. Like Karen, Pixar adopted the technique to counter people's natural tendency to see obstacles rather than solutions. Without a co-critique strategy like plussing, offbeat ideas that might grow into something great tend to get shot down before they even get off the ground.

Across the country in Maine, Gus Goodwin explains that he is always experimenting with various ways to encourage productive peer feedback among his students, and that he often switches things up. For example, one strategy he uses directly leverages the power of close observation. He will put one group's project on a table and direct the entire class to look closely at it. He tells them to ask questions, and notice features, but to withhold judgmental comments, even if the judgments are positive, like “looks good.” Instead, he wants them to make specific observations, like noticing the use of a gear for a certain function, or the unusual use of materials. At other times, Gus encourages peer feedback by pairing students up and giving them a graphic organizer that explicitly walks them through a process of productive co-critique that includes noticing details, noticing positives, and suggesting improvements.

An important part of supporting productive co-critique is giving students a clear lens through which to think about feedback (Figure 2.9). Susie Wise told us that when her students from the REDlab at Stanford University's d.school are engaged in a design project, she encourages co-critique from the perspective of the end user of the design under development. To do this, Susie has her students share their projects with one another and listen carefully to try to understand the intended audience behind a design; then, they examine each other's projects closely and try to vividly imagine how the design will work for the person or group it is intended for. What works well? Where are the potential sticking points? How can it be improved? By having students take the perspective of the end user, Susie makes sure that the emphasis of the critique is squarely on making a project better, rather than simply pointing out its flaws.

Whatever their strategies, maker educators share the basic goal of teaching productive co-critique, which means creating experiences in which students can give and receive genuinely useful feedback—feedback that is thoughtfully informative rather than unthinkingly judgmental. Obviously this goal is not unique to maker-centered learning. Plenty of teachers in all kinds of settings encourage their students to be inspired by one another's work, and to give each other thoughtful feedback. What is distinctive about maker-centered learning is that co-inspiration and co-critique play such a prominent role. Indeed, they are outward expressions of a fundamental philosophy of teaching, described next, that was shared by virtually all of the maker educators we have met.

Redirecting Authority and the Ethics of Knowledge Sharing

As every educator knows, teaching happens tacitly as well as explicitly. Teachers teach not only with words but also with the messages they send through the expectations, values, and norms reflected in the everyday culture of their classrooms. Distilled to its simplest formulation, the central idea behind teaching is to help learners acquire knowledge. Accordingly, much of the tacit messaging of instruction communicates fundamental ideas about knowledge—what it is, where it comes from, who has it, and what behaviors and responsibilities are attached to it. It is here, in what might be called the epistemology of maker-centered learning, that we find one of the root ideas that inform maker-centered teaching. It is the idea that knowledge can be accessed from many sources in the maker-centered classroom, most especially from the students themselves, and that maker-centered learning offers the opportunity, and responsibility, to take part in a system of knowledge-sharing.

Through our visits to various maker-centered classrooms and our conversations with maker educators, one of the instructional practices we heard about over and over again was some version of a strategy for redirecting students away from the fallback idea of the teacher as the sole and authoritative dispenser of knowledge (Figure 2.10). Jeremy Boyle, codirector of the Children's Innovation Project, spoke directly about this:

Jeremy makes an important point, but he also raises an important and interesting question: If teachers are not necessarily the authorities in the maker-centered classroom, then who is?

At the Mt. Elliott Makerspace in Detroit, Michigan, one approach to redirecting authority that Jeff Sturges favors is called the rule of five. When students ask him a question about how to do something, whenever possible he redirects them by saying, “Ask five people and average the answers, or bother somebody five times before they say, ‘Leave me alone.’” Jeff wants students to understand that with knowledge comes responsibility. When they have knowledge that others can use—knowledge of a skill, a procedure, a set of facts—they are responsible for teaching it. He is very clear about this with his students. “It is a very specific thing I say to them,” he explained. “If I teach you something, you've got to teach someone else.” This knowledge-sharing ethic translates directly into his teaching practice. “Because I'm sort of the leadership figure,” he said, “students are always coming to me, and I'm like, ‘Ask him. Ask somebody else. Ask the Internet. Ask me last. There are many different ways to find things out,’” he tells his students, “Google it, ask your friends, Google it many different ways, ask five different people.”

Many of the educators we spoke with practice some version of this technique. In Andy Forest's classroom in Toronto, there is a running list on the blackboard. Andy explained, “Students put their name on the board when they need to learn a skill. If students see something up on the board that they know how to do, then we'll get them to teach it to the other kids in the class. We try to encourage them to help each other as much as possible, and recognize that as a valuable endeavor.”

Steve Davee also emphasized the values dimension of knowledge sharing. “Learn a skill, teach a skill,” he would tell his students at the Opal School, and he views the redirecting of teaching authority as one of his key roles as an educator. Steve describes how he watches students closely, looking for a tone of voice or a body movement that shows a student is getting just good enough at a skill so that she is ready to share it with someone else. Then, when another student comes to him with a particular need, he redirects them to the student he has been observing. Steve sees himself as a conductor and a matchmaker, and he is clear that in playing these roles his aim is to explicitly communicate an ethics of knowledge sharing. What he wants students to understand, he explained, is that teaching others is “really a responsibility you take for yourself when you learn something.”

Not surprisingly, this strong emphasis on knowledge sharing resonates with the larger ethos of the maker movement. The resonance has to do with a belief in the value of sharing skills and ideas, a celebration of just-in-time learning, a focus on process, and a joyful participation in the maker community in which knowledge and skills are freely exchanged.

This section began with the question, What does teaching and learning look like in the maker-centered classroom? Drawing extensively on our conversations with educators, as well as site visits to various maker-centered classrooms, we have highlighted some of the characteristic instructional moves that educators tell us they make, along with the beliefs and ideas that animate those moves. There are surely important features of maker-centered instruction we have not discussed. But we feel confident reporting that, at the very least, the three broad features we have described are of concern to most of the educators we spoke with: (1) facilitating student collaboration whenever possible and in a variety of ways; (2) encouraging co-inspiration and co-critique among students, and (3) promoting an ethics of knowledge sharing by redirecting students' quest for authoritative knowledge away from the classroom teacher and toward other sources of inspiration and information, most especially the other students in the room.

Figuring It Out

If there is a hallmark activity of maker-centered learning, it is the process of trying to figure things out. It could be trying to figure out different ways of creating a ramp for a marble to roll down, or how to write code for digital animation. It could be figuring out how to take a toy apart, how to make a circuit, or how to build a model bridge that withstands simulated seismic quakes. The specific behavior students engage in to figure these kinds of things out varies. It might involve wiggling around parts and manipulating materials, or accessing information online. It might be finding someone who knows how to do something you want to do and getting them to teach you. It might involve cycles of trial and error, of iterating and prototyping, or simply the process of locating a set of instructions and following them step by step. The common theme across all of these varieties of figuring-out behavior is that each one involves choice and ongoing self-direction as the process plays itself out. Students who figure things out make choices about what they will do and try to find a solution, and then they use feedback from their efforts to inform their next set of choices. In this way, they are exercising agency in support of their own learning.

One mode of figuring-it-out behavior that maker educators are especially fond of is tinkering. Gever Tulley, founder of the Brightworks School and the Tinkering School summer camps, says that tinkering often begins when someone has a model of something that gets them started, but they know it is not right yet. So they play around with materials and experiment with different approaches until they arrive at what they want (Figure 2.11).

Tinkering is a form of figuring-out behavior, but it has its own emergent, often meandering character. In their beautiful book about makers and their products and processes, The Art of Tinkering, Karen Wilkinson and Mike Petrich of the Exploratorium talk about tinkering like this:

Maker educator Jaymes Dec of the Marymount School of New York juxtaposes tinkering to step-wise design thinking or problem-solving processes and believes that it sometimes best characterizes the work of scientists. “Talk to scientists, and they don't follow this scientific method the way it's taught in school,” he said. “It's a much more sort of tinkering and just trying things out approach. And a lot of the type of stuff that I'm trying to encourage kids to be comfortable doing is the type of stuff that scientists do, where they'll just try something out and see if it works.” Jaymes sees making as a “tinkering, exploratory, bricolage approach” and worries that overlaying a prescribed, step-wise problem-solving process onto maker-centered learning undercuts the excitement and whimsy of it.

So back to you and the superintendent. You have talked to her about the signs of maker-centered learning in action, and she begins her tour. What will she be looking for? For starters, she may look for students clustering in various configurations, sometimes working closely together on a project, sometimes showing each other how to do things, sometimes giving each other feedback and advice. She may look for teachers learning alongside students, and sometimes from students as well. She may also look for signs of students figuring things out on their own, often by tinkering with materials and processes. She may hear students saying, “Let's try this,” or “look at what happened when we did it this way,” or “maybe we should do it this way instead.” She may look for playfulness and experimentation, for persistence and iteration. She may listen for students voicing their own ideas, and watch for signs of them making their own choices about how to work through a challenge. This means, of course, that she may see lots of what is commonly called failure and problem solving—experiments and efforts that yield not their hoped-for results but informative feedback about how to keep on keeping on.

The superintendent knows that taken individually, each feature of maker-centered learning can be seen in other educational settings. Hopefully, what she will come to see as she tours your school is that maker-centered learning is an energizing context in which many of these features coalesce to add up to far more than the sum of their parts.

In addition to observing student behavior, as the superintendent tours your school she is also likely to notice that specific choices have been made about the physical spaces where maker-centered learning takes place. The following section discusses the environmental characteristics of various maker-centered classrooms, based on our site visits and discussions with maker educators in many of these unique and exciting spaces.

Tools and Materials

In his book The Maker Manifesto, Techshop CEO Mark Hatch includes “Tool Up” as one of his nine core tenets of the maker call to action.²¹ Indeed, considering what tools to have on hand in the maker-centered classroom is an important decision. In fact, one of the most popular questions we are asked by educators interested in bringing maker-centered learning to their schools or communities is, What kinds of tools should I get for my makerspace? Hatch takes the answer to this question very seriously. In his book, he devotes over two pages to listing out the essential tools necessary to support a maker revolution.²² Among them are extravagant pieces of equipment such as plasma cutters, sandblasting cabinets, powder coating systems, and a 4' x 8' CNC waterjet cutter. While we applaud the thoroughness of Hatch's tooling up list, we have come to find that powerful maker-centered learning experiences can take place in much more modestly equipped settings, with much simpler tools.

During a visit to the Innovation Lab—or I-Lab as they call it—at the Nueva School in Hillsborough, California, Kim Saxe, the director of the school's I-Lab and design thinking program, suggested to us that some of the most modest tools and materials are the most important ones. The Nueva School's I-Lab was designed in collaboration with students and faculty from Stanford University's d.school, and it includes some of the high-tech manufacturing equipment that appears in Hatch's tool up list. Nonetheless, during our visit Kim told us that a glue gun and some cardboard are often the most effective tools and materials in the space (Figure 2.13). What Kim suggested is that using simple tools to fix together inexpensive materials is often the quickest way for students to develop prototypes of their ideas—and that a great deal of learning takes place through the iterative process of down and dirty prototyping.

Similarly, during an early visit to Lick-Wilmerding High School in San Francisco, California, faculty from the Technical Arts department likewise downplayed the necessity of tools and equipment that are frequently associated with maker-centered learning. Lick-Wilmerding High School, founded as an Industrial Arts school in 1894, has a long tradition of training young people in woodworking, fabrication, electronics, and design. As a result, the technical arts classrooms look like clean, well-outfitted and maintained, professional workshops. And while the Lick Wilmerding technical arts faculty likewise have many of the gadgets associated with maker-centered learning, they are careful not to overemphasize them. “A 3-D printer is the sixth most important tool in a makerspace,” one of their faculty members told us during our visit, suggesting that although 3-D printers have their place, students can learn much more about making and fabrication by working with more traditional tools and materials.

Many of the educators we spoke with stressed that good work can be done with basic tools, but we also found that some of the educators we spoke with emphasized the importance of providing young people with access to high-quality equipment. During a visit to East Bay School for Boys, David Clifford proudly handed us the screw guns and drills in his school's workshop, which he said were the best that money could buy. David firmly believes not only that young people should have access to authentic tools and equipment but also that those tools and equipment should be of the very best quality. Working with high-quality tools not only shows respect for the young people who use them, but also supports the development of craftsmanship and the pursuit of quality work.

Storage and Visibility

Another popular topic discussed in many of the maker-centered classrooms that we visited was the importance of storage and visibility. When it comes to maker-centered learning, there are lots of things that need to be stored, including materials, tools and equipment, and student work. During a visit to the Brightworks School, school director Ellen Hathaway gave us a tour of the space, pointing out the importance of having materials on hand for whatever sort of project might pop up. One of Ellen's suggestions was to never throw away materials from past projects but instead to always keep old materials on hand because one never knows when they might be needed again. But holding on to so much stuff means that there must be space to put it. Ellen went so far as to suggest that a maker-centered classroom should have just as much storage space as work space. The Brightworks School has done an impressive job of holding on to stuff, without having the place feel cluttered and overcrowded.

In the maker-centered classroom, how things are stored has an effect on how accessible those things are to students. During our visits to Mt. Elliott Makerspace, Marymount School of New York, MakerKids, and many other spaces, bins of gadgets and materials were both well-labeled and reachable by even young students. Jeff Sturges and others emphasized the importance of keeping as many tools and materials in view and at the ready at all times. Jeff's philosophy is that the visibility of tools and materials in a maker-centered classroom sparks ideas and helps students make connections that they may not have made otherwise.

Conversely, across town at the HYPE Teen Center in the Detroit Public Library, Steve Teeri keeps all his maker tools and supplies in a large walk-in storage space, and just pulls out the tools and materials students need at a particular time. During our visit to the HYPE Teen Center, Steve described how this process works. “We have a former meeting room/study room which has been converted into our storage space,” he said. “We have racks of shelving and we have Sterilite plastic storage bins. We just keep all of our equipment and materials there, and we just pull out whatever we need to use for that two-hour workshop, do it over the course of two hours, put everything away, and put it back into the storage space.”

The HYPE Teen Center is a 4,000-square-foot space that is centrally located right next to the main entrance of the Detroit Public Library. The makerspace is just one component of the larger, multiuse space. Steve described how storing tools and materials in the way that he does is necessary to better integrate maker-centered learning into the greater work of the Teen Center—and to promote visibility on a whole other level:

Having just the tools and materials necessary for a particular project helps students focus—and it also helped Steve manage his tools and materials in a public space that receives lots of traffic (Figure 2.14).

Relatedly, another important trend we noticed during our various site visits was that frequently used tools and materials all had their place. Scanning through photographs we took reveals image after image of hand tools hung neatly on walls, often outlined in black Sharpie; transparent plastic bins of materials neatly arranged and clearly labeled; and other careful arrangements of clamps, screw guns, and chisels. Though maker-centered learning can frequently be messy work, sharing the responsibility of caring for equipment and establishing a system for storing frequently used tools and materials is a key component of maintaining a sense of order—and knowing where your tools are—in the maker-centered classroom.

Specific and Flexible Spaces

Yet another trend we noticed during our site visits to various maker-centered classrooms was the designated use of space as either being specified for a particular purpose, or purposefully flexible by design. Clear examples of specified spaces can be seen at King Middle School, the East Bay School for Boys, and the Athenian School's maker barn. At each site, a clean space directly adjoins a messier workspace. In the clean space students frequently sketch out ideas, perhaps using paper and pencil or by working on computers; in the messy space, students work with large-scale tools and materials. Here, messy is not exactly the right word, because the workshop spaces at all of these sites are frequently cleaned, but they are indeed spaces where sparks fly and sawdust builds up while students are at work. This is not to suggest that no making happens within the clean space. At the Athenian School's maker barn, for example, the 3-D printers and laser cutters are kept inside the clean space, and frequently materials that are cut or welded in the messy space are then assembled in the clean space. But the feel of each is certainly different. One obvious distinction between the two spaces is the necessity to wear safety goggles in the messy space—which are not required in the clean space.

Though not having the same clean space/messy space divisions, many other maker-centered classrooms we visited had specific spaces designed for specific purposes. At Lick-Wilmerding High School, certain workshop spaces were designated for woodworking or metal working, and other spaces were designated for electronics or jewelry making. The tools of each of these spaces matched their designated purposes.

Though many maker-centered classrooms we visited compartmentalized their workspaces based on the types of tools present in different workshops or separated the clean and the messy aspects of making from one another, other spaces combined everything in one flexible space intentionally designed to be constantly redesigned. One example of a flexible space is the Brightworks School. While the school certainly has designated areas for working with different tools and materials, the majority of the space is composed of simply framed structures that can be taken apart and rebuilt over and over again, based on students' current work demands. Students at Brightworks are given agency to design their own studios, which are referred to as treehouses—partially because many of them incorporate actual logs and tree branches and partially because they are often two-story structures that provide students with a bird's-eye view of their learning environment.

Earlier in this chapter we mentioned that we are often asked by educators and administrators eager to bring maker-centered learning to their schools and communities the question, What tools do I need to have in my makerspace? Based on our conversations with maker educators and our site visits to various maker-centered learning environments, we have come to understand that, contrary to Hatch's Tool Up list, there is no single set of essential tools that are used in the maker-centered classroom. Tools, technologies, and materials ought to be aligned with the thinking and learning goals in the classroom; in other words, the physical space and materials should support the maker-centered learning objectives—not the other way around. In fact, we often respond to the question, What tools do I need to have in my makerspace?, by suggesting that the most important tool to have in a maker-centered classroom—and the place from which to start—is a framework for thinking and learning. In later chapters we offer one possible framework when we turn to addressing the third guiding question of this book, What kinds of educational interventions can support thoughtful reflection around maker-centered learning and the made dimensions of our world? But first, in the next chapter we discuss what the Agency by Design team has come to believe is one of the most important promises of maker-centered learning: providing an opportunity for all students to develop a sense of maker empowerment.