Makerspaces in School

A Month-by-Month Schoolwide Model for Building Meaningful Makerspaces

Lacy Brejcha

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000494365
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Organized into an easy-to-follow, month-by-month plan for implementation, this book provides field-tested and research-based knowledge that will serve educators as they create and maintain a meaningful Makerspace. Although science, technology, engineering, arts, and math have made huge gains in the past decade, STEAM jobs are not being filled at the rate they are being created or needed. Makerspaces in School promotes innovative thinking in students that fills this need. Through Makerspaces, project-based learning provides opportunities for credible, legitimate, and authentic growth and development. This book will allow any educator to walk away with a plan to create a Makerspace in his or her classroom or a school- or districtwide model that works for many. Makerspaces are very fluid places—each is unique in its own way!2020 Teachers' Choice Award for Professional Development Winner

CHAPTER 1: AUGUST
What Is a Makerspace?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003236351-2

[A] space where kids have the opportunity to make—a place where some tools, materials, and enough expertise can get them started. These places, called makerspaces, share some aspects of the shop class, home economics class, the art studio, and science labs. In effect, a makerspace is a physical mash-up of different places that allows makers and projects to integrate these different kinds of skills.

—Dale Dougherty, Design, Make, Play, 2013

TARGETS FOR AUGUST

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• ♦ Define what a Makerspace is and what the word means to you, your campus, administration, and/or any other stakeholders. No two Makerspaces are the same.
• ♦ Brainstorm ways your Makerspace can help you cover state and local mandated standards.

You might be thinking, "What in the world is a Makerspace? What does this word even mean? Will this 'space' even help me cover state/locally mandated standards?" Creating a Makerspace can be extremely intimidating. I have done it—and it can be scary. In general, Makerspaces and making are subjects that people do not know a lot about or have not experienced before. But we can do this. We have to do this for our students. We have to change the way we provide enrichment and innovation to prepare our students for more. Our students will be competing for jobs that don't even exist yet, and we have to prepare them to be ready for this challenge.

Makerspaces bring joy back to learning. Anticipate and plan for students to be excited and actively engaged in your Makerspace. Get ready to move students from passive learners to active learners, and prepare to become a facilitator of learning yourself. Students will love Makerspace time. In fact, it might very well be the reason a student likes school on the days he or she gets to visit your Makerspace. I have had many parents tell me that on their child's Makerspace day, he or she is happier to come to school and has a better attitude in the morning overall.

I have written this book in a reflective way to create a guide of what I wish I had known before and as I began implementing a Makerspace. Hopefully, you can learn from my successes and failures —I have certainly had both!

Makerspaces bring joy back to learning. Anticipate and plan for students to be excited and actively engaged in your Makerspace. Get ready to move students from passive learners to active learners, and prepare to become a facilitator of learning yourself.

In general terms, a Makerspace is a place and time for students to create, tinker, learn how to do something new, be challenged, have fun, explore, problem solve, imagine, build, draw, write, make, work with their hands, think critically, be persistent, make real-world connections, and use technology. It is a very fluid space, and no two are exactly alike. If your students are making, you have a Makerspace. This type of learning supports the 21st century and—most importantly—beyond.

Bringing a Makerspace to your school will:

• ♦ allow students to be creative thinkers and makers,
• ♦ allow students to recognize that failures can lead to success if they are persistent,
• ♦ create excitement for learning,
• ♦ allow students to make products that all look different (not a cookie-cutter approach),
• ♦ allow students to collaborate and learn from each other,
• ♦ create ways for students to ask real questions that involve the real world,
• ♦ encourage students to pursue passions and wonders,
• ♦ create problem solvers,
• ♦ create endurance and grit in students to complete projects,
• ♦ expose students to materials they may have never used before, and
• ♦ encourage students to reflect as they use a problem-solving process.

This book will be very real and feasible, and the activities described are obtainable and realistic. I intend to be very real with you. So often as educators we sit through a workshop or training and come away with nothing that is actually practical to implement in our classrooms. This is not that type of book. My biggest annoyance in education is when my time is wasted—it's so frustrating. With so much to do already, I need practical ideas and inspiration. As I write this book, I am "in the trenches," working with students day in and day out. I get you; I am you! I go home so tired, just like you at the end of every day, but I know I am making a difference, as are you.

I am currently in my 16th year as a public school teacher. I graduated from Baylor University in 2002 and went directly into teaching. I currently run the Makerspace program for 300+ students in grades K-5.1 also am the gifted and talented teacher at the elementary level and the district GT coordinator and instructional technologist on campus. I am blessed with two amazing and highly inquisitive daughters, Brooke and Grace, and a very supportive and loving husband, Jim. My kids are still young and still have a lot of schooling to complete. I want them to be challenged, creative, innovative, and savvy with a variety of technology, and become expert problem solvers. I also have many wonderful coworkers, friends, and great administrators who listen and provide feedback as well. For that, I am forever grateful.

Q: What are some big takeaways (skills, mindsets, relationships) you've seen your students leave Makerspace with?

A: Students who struggle in regular classrooms thrive in Makerspace, and their self-esteem increases greatly. They realize they can do it . . . kids learn by doing that persistence pays off!

For the Makerspace program, I see all students in grades 1-5 once a week for 45 minutes. On their Makerspace day, students do not go to PE. Kindergarten comes every other week for 30 minutes. Students love Makerspace and look forward to coming. Before I took my current position, I will admit that I knew I needed more, and the students needed more. In my heart, I knew education was my calling and my passion, but I was reaching a point in my career when I was beginning to feel burnt out. But now I know: We can change education and make it better. We can make it more innovative, creative, and fun.

Getting Started

We ask children to do for most of a day what few adults are able to do for even an hour. How many of us, attending, say, a lecture that doesn't interest us, can keep our minds from wandering? Hardly any.

—John Holt, How Children Fail, 1995

As you begin to conceptualize your Makerspace in these first few chapters, I will provide you with field-tested and research-based knowledge that shows how Makerspaces can serve students (high, low, and middle achieving) and teachers alike. For example, according to one estimate, 65% of today's students will one day be employed in jobs that have yet to be created (as cited in World Economic Forum, 2016). Thus, we must teach our students to be creative inventors, entrepreneurs, and future productive employees. They must possess required trade skills and soft skills.

So many (read: most) of our students are bored every day at some point. That does not mean that, as educators, we are doing a poor job. I honestly believe that the vast majority of educators are doing the best they can. We have so much to teach and cover, so many students to account for, and so much to do, including writing lesson plans, accounting for students with special needs or those who require advanced content, developing Individuated Education Plans (IEPs) and behavior intervention plans (BIPs), and caring for students who come to school hungry or need someone to brush their hair or provide them with a toothbrush and toothpaste, etc. We are not just educators. We are advocates for kids, and you are just what your students need. Keep going, please! Our students urgently need you. You are enough, and you have what it takes to help your students start making. Rather than teaching the curriculum, teach your students, and the curriculum will follow. But as you begin to build your Makerspace, don't be afraid to fail. A Makerspace will require you to (1) take risks and (2) be prepared to regroup and switch gears when necessary.

Risk-Taking

If you are reading this book, it tells me you are looking for ways to provide your students with trial-and-error, constructive, experimental, and collaborative learning through hands-on activities. If you are not a little (or extremely) uncomfortable each year that you teach, you are not growing personally and trying new things. Risk-taking requires us to be extremely vulnerable and be willing to fail. You will fail some days, and you will soar many days. Let's agree right here that this is to be expected. It is okay. Just like I tell my students, "If you fail, if it doesn't work, if you get...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 August What Is a Makerspace?
• Chapter 2 September Why Are Makerspaces Important?
• Chapter 3 October Makerspace Planning and Wonder Walls
• Chapter 4 November Developing and Implementing Makerspace Activities
• Chapter 5 December Providing Assessment and Recording Standards
• Chapter 6 January Being Resourceful: Requesting Donations for Materials, Getting Helpers or Outside Experts, and Help ... We Don't Have Room for a Makerspace!
• Chapter 7 February Keeping a Makerspace Planned, Playful, and Purposeful
• Chapter 8 March Structured Versus Unstructured Makerspaces in a Classroom, Schoolwide, or Districtwide Model
• Chapter 9 April The Problem-Solving Process and Presentations of Projects and Challenges
• Chapter 10 May Technology Integration and High(er) Tech Materials
• Conclusion: Keep Making
• References
• Appendix: Additional Resources
• About the Author