Thinking Tinkering: A Teacher Podcast Series

Thinking Tinkering Podcast & GUIDE

Picture of Practice by Agency by Design Oakland 2017-2018 Teacher Fellows Susan Lee and Katy Ailes

“The thing that stands out is that people are really joyful at the end of the meeting.” Susan Lee

“Now I have the tools to lead professional development. We used the Parts, Purposes, Complexities thinking routine with teachers to plan curriculum. It was so rich and deep and it only took 15 minutes. People were like, ‘Why have I never taught it this way before?’” Katy Ailes

Katy Ailes and Susan Lee are Lower Elementary teachers at Park Day School in Oakland. Both in their second year of the Agency by Design Oakland fellowship, they decided to focus their inquiry work on leadership & coaching. Because they wanted to have a greater impact at their school site they ultimately chose to implement an opt-in professional learning community. To document this process and share the work with others, Katy and Susan created a podcast series and a flow chart guide, to share how they used Agency by Design ideas to shape and create rich learning opportunities for their colleagues. 

Thinking Tinkering Podcast Series

“And it made me feel very connected in a heartfelt way, to the people I work with, because we weren’t just meeting our minds, we were meeting other parts of ourselves, our souls, our hearts.”- Park Day School Teacher Participant

Episode 1

Susan and Katy discuss how they arrived at this project and the history of maker-centered learning at Park Day School. They interview Ilya Pratt, a member of Agency by Design Oakland's Leadership Team, and the Director of the Design+Make+Engage Program and Innovation Workshop at Park Day School. Ilya describes the developmental and multi-sensory educational approaches used at Park Day, and the roots and evolution of maker-centered learning at the school, and how these connect directly with the Innovation Workshop. Katy and Susan then go on to talk about the development of the professional learning communities, and the strategies and challenges of implementing them. 

Episode 2

Susan and Katy explore what happened during the maker meet-ups they implemented, and hear from teachers about the impact of these workshop on school culture and students, and on their own professional learning. Susan and Katy review thinking routines and how they can provide language and framework for maker-centered learning. Teachers at Park Day then describe what they have learned from the thinking routines and how the maker meet-ups have changed their perspectives and approaches. 

Episode 3

Susan and Katy reflect on how they've worked to bring maker-centered learning to the forefront of how teachers think or re-think their curriculum, and thoughts on how they hope to continue to move forward. Susan and Katy learned that the meet-ups can provide a common ground for everyone to work together when collaborating and planning, and that thinking together in the meetings enabled agency in teachers in a new way. They noticed that participants left meetings happier, lighter, and inspired. Susan and Katy also walk through the logistics of setting up the meet-ups for teachers interested in creating their own at their school. They discuss questions such as: How do you bring in administrators? How do you bring in colleagues who don’t feel like they connect to this kind of work?

Does your school engage in discussions around Maker-Centered Learning?

In addition to the podcast series Katy and Susan also created the resource below for other educators and school leaders thinking about bring maker-centered learning to their school site. This flow chart is an invitation to explore new ideas and resources and was presented at our 2018 Culminating Event, where a number of workshops and activities also explored how to ignite maker-centered learning at your school site. 

"I engage in maker-centered learning because I think it is important to empower children to have agency, to know they can do something about problems they see in the world.  Maker-centered learning is important because it develops children's mindfulness around the complexities of our world and the systems within the world.  I have never seen children more curious, invested and inspired than when they dive into a maker-centered project that matters to them."

Katy Ailes
First Grade Teacher, Park Day School, Oakland

Katy Ailes teaches first grade at Park Day School, where she has been teaching for 3 years. Park Day is a progressive school and our mission centers around social justice and supporting children to see themselves as change makers. She is in her 11th year as a teacher, and has also taught in public schools in New York City and in Sacramento. Katy’s other passion aside from teaching is ballet and she still dances and teaches ballet in the Bay Area. 

"Maker-centered learning allows access points for all students. It empowers students to think critically and creatively. It also helps foster students' abilities to collaborate, problem-solve and to look closely at their own work. I love that it builds positive self-esteem and "can-do" approaches among my students."

-Susan Lee
2nd Grade Teacher, Park Day School, Oakland

Susan Lee is a teacher at Park Day School working with inquisitive and enthusiastic second graders. Her hobbies include reading, writing and baking. 

Many Experts in the Classroom: Redirecting Authority

Many Experts in the Classroom: Redirecting Authority

Picture of Practice with Agency by Design Oakland 2017-2018 Teacher Fellow Mallory Moser

Mallory Moser is the 11th Grade Graphic Design Teacher & Media Academy Director at Oakland International High School, which serves English language learners from around the world. She completed her second year as a Teacher Fellow with Agency by Design Oakland this school year, and decided to focus on the instructional practice of redirecting authority to drive her inquiry and learn how it would affect the dynamics of her classroom. To learn more about maker-centered learning instructional practices read more in Chapter 2 of Maker-Centered Learning: Empowering Young People to Shape Their Worlds. 

Mallory showing her students around a camera at Oakland International High School

Ask any educator who teaches a class of 25 or 30 students what their biggest challenge is, and they will most likely point to the fact that they cannot possibly reach every student with the individualized instruction or support they need. How can we change this?

My inquiry question into this issue was “How can I set up structures in the classroom that will help me redirect authority and promote an ethic of knowledge sharing?” The goal was to eliminate the many voices calling for my help, and instead have:

1) A group of students who were trained to be co-teachers
2) A place in the classroom where struggling students could see who they could ask for help
3) Language frames to support both the experts and those in need of help

Students at OIHS working together on an interview. 

I began by training a small group of students in each period to learn specific skills so they could help other students film interviews. Filming an interview requires many technical skills - from the setup of cameras with full batteries, empty SD cards and charged microphones, to location scouting and making sure the video was in focus with good composition, lighting and background. I took the time to train 4-5 students in each of my classes who could circulate to help the 3 or 4 groups that would be out at a time. I put their names on the board in an “Experts This Week” table, and would put helpful language frames in slides that I would leave up during work time.

Students self-selected to be experts in each class. Some of the students who volunteered were not the students I expected (mostly because they weren't the highest level English speakers), but all of them wanted to deepen their understanding of how to use cameras and help other groups in that process.

After the small sessions, these experts had a much deeper understanding of how to set up interviews than their classmates. My classroom went from the image on the left below, to the image on the right. 

The classroom went from this....

...to this!

You can see a classroom of frustrated students and an overwhelmed teacher in the first picture. After the intervention and inquiry, students were helping one another, learning from each other, and ultimately mastering content through the act of explaining and teaching each other.

Through this experience I learned that training a few experts means that there are more teachers in the room - which was a huge relief! I felt like I was able to help students individually with their messages and the content because the experts were helping with set up. Additionally, having experts move around and support other groups led to much better final products, and I was able to focus on the groups of students that were struggling and really needed my support.

Putting in the little bit of extra time and energy to establish systems that redirected authority away from me and back to the students was well worth it. This inquiry was a total success for me (minus a couple of students that didn’t take the role as seriously as I would have liked), and I’m already thinking about how I can teach experts in every unit to help with the lift of technical support and skills.

"Encouraging students to engage in the making process teaches them problem-solving skills that go beyond the discrete (and quickly obsolete) technical proficiencies of any given software program. I think failure, communication skills, teamwork, and problem solving are universal criteria for building successful teams and products, so I try to support the process of making as much as the development of a final product."

-Mallory Moser
11th Grade Graphic Design Teacher & Media Academy Director, Oakland International High School, OUSD

Mallory Moser is a Bay Area native and is passionate about art, education (policy and practice) and activism. After working internationally in education microfinance and education technology, Mallory decided to change careers and step into the classroom. She loves teaching and working with teenagers, and finds this work to be highly creative because there is always a new challenge around the corner. This is her fourth year teaching at Oakland International High School, which serves newcomer refugees and immigrants, representing over 30 countries from around the world. Mallory teaches media skills to 11th graders - from basic computer skills to photography, graphic design, video game development, coding, and movie making - and is  also the Media Academy Director.

A Maker Mindset Identity

A Maker Mindset Identity

A Picture of Practice by Agency by Design Oakland 2017-2018 Teacher Fellow Lillian Ortiz

Lillian Ortiz is the Making/Arts/Design Teacher at Lodestar, a Lighthouse Charter School in Oakland. Lillian participated in the Maker Identity inquiry group in this year's Agency by Design Oakland fellowship. Below she shares with us the core tenets of her classroom practice that develop students' mindsets and identities. 

Just as traditions and ethnic cultures bring rightness and meaning to our lives, an education that offers opportunities to develop a maker-mindset and practice can solidify a student's relationship between making meaning and applying oneself towards achieving a goal. Making meaning (at the most profound human level) is where purpose and values take form, and the development of personal responsibility is where focus and productivity are practiced and sharpened. If you imagine a school environment where students are invited to engage in what matters most to them, developing this relationship between purpose and autonomy can bring enrichment, harmony, and happiness to the lives of every student at their schools, in their homes, and out into their communities. Add to it a creative process by which students can solve real-world-human-centered problems that reflect personal choice; the outcome is a maker-mindset identity.

The qualities of a Maker-Mindset includes tinkering, exploration, creativity and discovery — all of which can happen anytime a student is faced with a problem. The problem can be about solving something simple (e.g. drawing what’s in your imagination or telling a story) or complex (e.g. designing an ecosystem, redesigning your room or making a model of a robot). The value that they are creating something better is inherent in this problem-solving process; thereby catalyzing a student’s optimism and engagement!

The process can start out very abstract with ambiguous discoveries along the way. When a student engages abstract thinking and is not always certain what the process might reveal next, they are strengthening their intuition muscles and capacity for intellectual and emotional expansion. Did you know intuition is a skill? Of course, there are analytical ways to find out if you are moving in the right direction if you pay close attention and notice changes in patterns.

A student may create different versions of an idea — iterate and innovate — by asking more questions. During this process, a student may also master tools and strategies while developing a point-of-view. A Maker-Mindset is a creative process that expands intelligence, deepens connections and promotes a love for life and learning! Creativity is a human learning process that promotes critical thinking, collaboration, investigative skills, visual and oral skills and physical skills. From my perspective, when a student develops a Maker-Mindset they are cultivating their capacity for creativity and agency by sharing inspirations, appreciating beauty and diverse thought. In my classroom, we call this Maker-Mindset “Make, Break and Celebrate” where students create solutions to problems that matter most to them, create generative dialogue, deepen relationships with others and with themselves and build a better world. 

As a teacher fellow with Agency by Design Oakland, I learned skills to add to my Design Educator toolbox and honed strategies that support students to develop their Maker-Mindset through collaboration with peers and the encouragement of
co-critique and co-inspiration. 

"I lead with a 'making mindset.' I set up prompts to discover what students are curious about and what matters most to them. Once I learn about their interests and inquiries, the stage is set to identify themes, patterns and probe further into dialogue around their curiosities and ideas."

Lillian Ortiz
Making/Arts/Design Teacher, Lodestar, a Lighthouse Charter School, Oakland

Lillian Ortiz became interested in education when her child was born and she saw making as a natural inclination and ability within all of us. She leveraged her background in industrial design toward facilitating her child’s love of learning, discovery and agency through making. Lillian eventually found her way into her current role at Lodestar as the K-3 Making/Art/Design teacher. Lodestar serves the needs of English Language Development to support immigrant/refugee families and is also a microcosm of the beauty and challenges that stem from within the community. She believes that her community has learned that in order to be successful, they need to include learning needs that cultivate learning, empathy, understanding and connection across race and cultural difference.