Our Makerspace is on the Move!

A gathering of our school professional learning community (PLC) was organized by our school administration (working closely with the TLLP team, with TLLP and SIP goals in mind) for early December, 2017. We were fortunate to have the coordinator of the OCSB’s ‘Leading and Learning’ department as our workshop leader, with input and resources from other members of the Leading and Learning team. The focus of the day was Makerspace, which was an exciting moment for our TLLP project as it marked an important next step in the evolution of our school’s learning environment changes.

Our TLLP team had completed some work on learning environment changes earlier that same week, repurposing carts and school materials while also incorporating items from our TLLP budget. You can read about this process further in a separate blog post to come! The creation of four Makerspace station carts, as well as curating and creating activities is a process that necessitates a whole-school approach. While some teachers already feel comfortable using design thinking with their students and supporting other teachers in this journey, others may be engaging with the process for the first time - trying out or designing their own Makerspace activities. This process was facilitated by our workshop presenter’s creation of a slidedeck that included multi-disciplinary Makerspace tasks to try out collaboratively. We were given the opportunity to rotate through tasks at each of four stations (Invention / Construction Zone, Audio-Visual, Lego, and Robotics). At the end of the rotations, teachers had time to think about curriculum links and the types of activities they might like to use with our own students. These ideas have been added to the slidedeck and this growing document will be a testament to our growth as educators as our school community engages more deeply with a maker mindset shift.

As a next step, our TLLP team hopes to further investigate the idea of SEL-centered makerspace tasks that prompt students to think more deeply and critically about their emotional regulation as they express their creativity. One specific example of such an activity asks students to reflect on their SEL knowledge and create a house structure that reflects one of the zones. For example, if the student group chooses the red zone,they must consider what a ‘red’ structure would look like. Students must think about the feelings that fit with that zone, and how those feelings mesh with the big ideas of strength and stability of structure. Social-emotional learning may also be integrated into future Makerspace activities with the use of student self-assessment in terms of their feelings surrounding collaboration, creating, and goal-setting. As we continue our book study of Launch (Spencer, Juliani, 2016) our engagement with the “Launch Cycle” (page 54) will hopefully appeal to our colleagues who are moving along on their own Makerspace and SEL journeys.

~Katie