What Were We Thinking? Bringing Making and Design Thinking to Professional Development

• In Event: Thinking Beyond a Maker Movement in Teacher Education

Abstract

Purpose:
The overarching question guiding this paper is how might an immersive professional development approach impact an educator’s current classroom practices and workflows? Fullan (2013) observes there is little doubt that educators will experience many disruptive changes due to ever-changing economic, environmental and societal realities. The global achievement gap defines a gap between what a society’s educational systems are teaching/assessing versus the 21st Century skills and competencies identified for “conceptual age workers” (Pink, 2006) and active global citizens (Wagner, 2012). Designers and curators of learning are being tasked with developing, designing and maintaining personalized learning environments. Maker Day is a model of immersive professional development approach providing educators a facilitated experiential professional learning opportunity using design thinking and Making.

Theoretical Framework:
From a Deweyan perspective, the work of educators becomes selecting meaningful “kind[s] of present experiences that live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences'' (Dewey, 1916/1944, p. 28). Making is a pedagogical orientation (Authros, in press) and a mindset (Dougherty, 2013) integrating imagination, creativity and reflection through a constructionist lens (Papert, 1990). Rooted in natural sciences (Simon, 1969), human-centered design-thinking processes have become part of a popular lexicon in contemporary professional practices addressing ill-formed social issues (Kelley & Kelley, 2013). These broader uses of design thinking evoke creative thinking-in-action responses through three common iterative group processes: problem finding, brainstorming and prototyping (Seidel & Fixson, 2013). By participating in a Maker Day and adapting the Maker Day Toolkit (Authors, 2015) to content and context, educators have the capacity to develop, design and maintain an instance of a 21st Century personalized learning environment involving individual, small groups and whole-class activities.


Methods, Data Sources, and Procedures:
Design-based research (DBR) has emerged as an approach to study learning, instructional strategies and tools in context through a systematic design (Barab, 2006). The study includes four data collections. First, researchers observed the educators during the Maker Day. Next, the participants completed an online survey including demographics, current practices and classroom planning used before attending the day. Third, the educators provided a description of changes in their classroom practices. And finally, researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with the educators.

Results:
Analysis of surveys and interviews has informed three major iterations to online open access resources, to prototyping and required materials, and to support educators taking Making and design thinking into their classrooms. To date, the researchers have gained the numerous insights while supporting educators as they endeavor to change their classroom practices.

Scholarly significance:
Given the ubiquity and connectivity of mobile technologies, experts imagine by 2025 people will tap into information so easily it will flow through their life like electricity does now (Anderson, Rainie & Duggan, 2014). This study suggests theoretically-sound, pedagogically-driven immersive professional development may provide the potential for educators to re-introduce creative thinking-in-action to students by guiding them through a “continuity of experiences” (Dewey, 1938/1997) informed by flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). Additionally, initial findings suggest that through this immersive professional development approach and its accompanying resources, educators may expand students’ learning pathways to STEMx knowledge domains.

Authors

• Deb Carter, The University of British Columbia - Okanagan

• Susan E. Crichton, The University of British Columbia