My new position as a STEM teacher is everything that I’ve always wanted — open and flexible, with ample opportunities to infuse creativity into the classroom. All summer, I’ve been working on creating a developmental progression of where I want students to be in their learning after each year that they’ll spend with me, from Pre-K to 8th grade. For weeks, I spun my wheels without getting much traction.

Despite having a steady stream of ideas about activities and projects, I eventually realized that what was lacking was an organizational frame, some specific capacities and skills that would function as the overarching goals for all of our work in STEM class. Fortunately, I’ve been immersing myself in reading about making and STEM all summer and, in Maker-Based Learning: Empowering Young People to Shape Their Worlds (Clapp, Ross, Ryan, & Tishman; 2016), I finally found the framework for which I’d been waiting.

Maker-Based Learning is a book born of work done by the Agency by Design working group at Harvard’s Project Zero. Throughout the book, the concept of maker empowerment is presented as an overarching goal of maker-based learning. The authors define maker empowerment as “A sensitivity to the designed dimensions of objects and systems, along with the inclination and capacity to shape one’s world through building, tinkering, re/designing, or hacking” (p. 98). In other words, students who are empowered as makers recognize the designed nature of our world, see objects and systems around them as malleable, and believe that they can act as Makers upon their world. This is exactly what I want for my learners and what I couldn’t articulate myself.

Clapp et al. argue that the necessary steppingstone to maker empowerment is developing a “sensitivity to design” and then offer a set of three capacities that help facilitate this sensitivity — looking closely, exploring complexities, and finding opportunities. Here’s a graphic from the Agency By Design website that explains each of these capacities.

After encountering this framework and coupling it with Engineering Design ideas from the Next Generation Science Standards, my developmental progression almost wrote itself. I was able to clearly picture what I want a kindergartener to be able to do in terms of looking closely versus what I want a sixth grader to be able to accomplish in that domain. What excites me most is the way that these capacities offer opportunities for noticing growth — while “maker empowerment” or “sensitivity to design” feel dauntingly broad for someone who has to note student progress, these three, interrelated skills are things that I can clearly monitor as I capture and document student work.

Perhaps most significantly, finding a framework closely linked to my overarching goals for my STEM class will help me keep my focus more panoramic, rather than zoomed in on one project at a time — hopefully yielding alignment between my end goals for my students and the activities transpiring in our classroom each day.

As Julianne Wurm writes in Working the Reggio Way (2005): “It is not a question of right or wrong answers, but of determining what you really believe about children and education, and then making sure that all of the millions of decisions you make as you work with children reflect that vision to the best of your capacity” (p. 13).

When I was teaching second grade, I would always use themes to organize our learning activities. Over the years in my classroom, we studied bees, trees, inventions, holidays around the world, advertising/media literacy, robots, and Antarctica. These themes helped my students by providing multiple exposures to vocabulary, content, and ideas as we explored our topic across different subject areas.

As I think about my new role, I’m contemplating what themes might offer to a STEM classroom. Specifically, I’m wondering whether to pursue a whole-school theme, a theme for each group of learners, or to forgo a theme altogether. Here’s a bit of my thinking about the benefits and pitfalls of themes in a Makerspace/engineering setting.

Benefits of Themes:

• Help learners make connections and introduce them to important ideas they may not encounter on their own
• Offer increased cohesion between projects tackled by different students
• Provide a jumping-off point for learners who may not respond well to a completely blank slate
• Help stimulate observations and conversations about projects between different groups of learners
• Connect learning and making to the real world

Pitfalls of Themes:

• Can be constricting if too narrow — students may not be able to find an entry point into the theme that relates to their interests
• May prevent students from stumbling onto other ideas or content of interest through natural pursuit of their own ideas
• More likely to lead to students trying to create products to meet a perceived expectation instead of considering what they want to make

As I consider my role as a teacher of students in Pre-K to 8th grade, I am drawn to the idea of having a whole-school theme, as learners in different sections of STEM class could witness the thinking and creating done by others thinking about a similar topic. I am also particularly interested in the potential of the authentic audiences that a theme would create — students would be able to design products to be shared with another group of learners. A theme could also streamline my content delivery and help spark a common conversation that could happen across groups of learners, rather than every group doing something wholly different.

To me, the linchpin of a theme’s success in a setting that aims to foster creativity and innovation is flexibility. I want my theme to be a source of inspiration for my students to dwell in possibilities, rather than a restrictive block to their thinking. Naturally, this leads me to think that broad themes would be best — presently, I am leaning towards Sustainable Planet, Inventions, or Robotics. I would love to hear suggestions of other themes!

On Tuesday night, while watching a Youtube Live event hosted by one of the great folks at Go2Science (https://www.go2science.com/), I was struck by a comment made regarding the Go2Science materials, which I’ll do my best to replicate here:

“Feel free to take the materials and rearrange them and make them your own. We know we’ve made a good lesson when you can can take it and make it your own.”

This insight struck me because it illuminates a vision of what a curriculum could be. It’s a thought that I needed articulated three months into the implementation of new curriculum materials that have been introduced in my district. These materials do not espouse such an open-source or teacher-empowering stance and it’s caused quite a philosophical struggle for me as an educator.

As a teacher whose favorite part of the job (other than the kids) is curriculum development and creating learning activities, I’ve been fortunate to grow into my practice as an educator in a district where the directives were to use curricular resources as just that, resources. For five years, I’ve been pulling ideas and inspiration from a host of sources and combining them together to create what I believe are rich, meaningful, and integrated learning experiences for my students. The act of creating a mosaic from all of these sources allows me to flex my creativity muscles and is, for me, almost spellbinding. Many of the other aspects of the job often feel like chores, but I’ll happily spend an entire Saturday engaged in designing curriculum.

Most significantly, I’ve relished the opportunity to create materials that respond directly to my students’ interests and current needs. All teachers know that in any given classroom there are a wide range of skills and diverse personalities; for anyone who has spent an extended time in a classroom, the idea of a one-size-fits-all approach seems both irresponsible and irrational. Yet, one-size-fits-all, with subtle changes for “differentiation” continues to be what the big education publishers proffer and is, unfortunately, the turn that we appear to be taking in my district.

Last year, during the curriculum exploration phase, I had several conversations with folks at school about how mass-produced curricula are market-driven, responding to the latest zeitgeists and repackaging the same old stuff in newer, flashier packaging. And, when looking at national publishers, we’ve seen in films like “The Revisionaries” that states and districts with the largest budgets often get their needs and requirements enshrined in the packages offered across the country. It hardly makes sense that my students in rural Maine should have their educational experiences dictated by the pursestrings thousands of people thousands of miles away.

At any rate, I now have in my classroom a 750-page, two-volume phone book of math activities and worksheets for each of my students that is supposed to guarantee “Common Core Success.” And, it’s been a struggle to grapple with balancing directions for implementation with the boxes of resources that I’ve developed and tested. It’s hard to rectify trading conceptual understanding for shallow coverage and to extinguish all the work I’ve done to teach kids that math isn’t just about the right answer with solution-focused worksheets. For now, I’ve struck the balance of using the curriculum to loosely frame what I cover, picking and choosing those activities that make sense as resources, but not being afraid to use a tried-and-true lesson that I know is better.

These small actions are allowing me to teach while retaining my conscience and allowing me to keep focused on my vision for what quality curriculum is and could be.