这个思考模式通过让学生慢慢、细心地观察物件和系统中的细节，鼓励他们不止观察物件的表面特征，更重要的是了解其内部运作。
Thinking Routines
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Field NoteExploring the Role of the Arts in Maker-Centered Learning Experiences
Exploring the Role of the Arts in Maker-Centered Learning Experiences
Participants at the Arts Education Partnership National Forum consider the role of the arts in maker-centered learning experiences.
activities and practicesMapping Systems
Mapping Systems
The practice of mapping allows learners to build and demonstrate their understanding of the parts, people, and interactions that comprise a given system.
publicationsMaker-Centered Learning Playbook for Early Childhood Education
Maker-Centered Learning Playbook for Early Childhood Education
Since 2012, the Agency by Design research team at Project Zero has explored the promises, practices, and pedagogies of maker-centered learning in a variety of settings. This initial research produced a flexible pedagogical model that supports young people in becoming sensitive to design and seeing themselves as the creators of their worlds. Beginning in 2018, the Agency by Design research team began working with a cohort of early childhood educators in Hong Kong on a pilot study to adapt the Agency by Design framework for young learners. The result of this exciting work is the Maker-Centered Learning Playbook for Early Childhood Education. This playbook includes lessons learned from the study, pictures of practice, and a host of educator tools and resources designed to support the development of young students’ maker capacities while also nurturing other generative cognitive dispositions and habits of mind at this early stage of learning and development.
This resource is available in hard copy on Amazon.
thinking routines“联系互动” 的思考模式 (简体版）
“联系互动” 的思考模式 (简体版）
这个思考模式鼓励学生能够慢下来，仔细观察其中一个系统。通过这样帮助学生更好地认识具体系统里无论是直接或间接相关的人物，学生也会注意到系统里任何一点变化，也许都会有意无意地影响到系统的其它方面。
Field NoteMaker Empowerment: A Concept Under Construction
Maker Empowerment: A Concept Under Construction
Agency by Designer project Director Shari Tishman introduces the concept of “maker empowerment” as a potential outcome of maker learning experiences.
Field NoteA Take Apart Toolkit: What we learn from unmaking
A Take Apart Toolkit: What we learn from unmaking
This piece is the first in a series of Field Notes which can be read as a Take Apart Toolkit of sorts, including how to use Take Aparts to engage in deep analysis, to increase accessibility, to explore the complexity of less tangible objects and systems, and more.
Cracking the case of a computer always inspires a small gasp—an intake of breath that is part fear and part wonder. And it really is beautiful in there.
For that matter, so are the guts of a blender or a blow dryer or an FM radio. When I first started using Take Apart practices in the classroom, it was for the simple unwrapping of the incredible miniature landscape inside of the familiar objects that we think we understand most intimately. The view from the inside is a powerful and nearly instantaneous entrypoint into what Agency by Design names a sensitivity to design—that the world around us is designed and made by humans like us, and can be remade, too.
Over time, I came to think of a Take Apart a perfect first dip into maker-centered learning for learners of any age or context because it requires very little prior knowledge. When I’m guiding a group of learners, I like to ask: Look at the object in front of you—do you know its name? Have you ever used it? Most of us can stare down a clock with some level of confidence and firsthand experience. We have a connection to an object we recognize and ready access to what we already know about how it is used, some alternative forms it may have, and even some ideas about how it works. We have memories that may connect it to our home, the Kindergarten teacher who taught us how to tell time, the last clock we touched. A Take Apart has an emotional locomotion that is hard to resist.
A first, essential step is looking closely—slowly observing and reflecting on the whole. One of the key requirements of a Take Apart, and one that I share with learners, is this important permission: You will not be asked to put it back together. You do not need to preserve it. Once the clock is really Taken Apart, it does not go back together, literally or conceptually. It is a plastic rain poncho that can never be stuffed back into its perfect tiny pouch. When we unpack the parts and complications of the clock—when we explore complexity—our understanding of it balloons out dimensionally.
Permission to break things is a visceral release, and the small shock of cracking the case of a clock marks that crystal moment of transgression. “No going back now,” some learners might say, or “Is this what I’m supposed to do?” They have entered forbidden territory.
The real processing begins when learners' hands are deep in the guts of the clock and a flurry of questions and inferences rise out of their inherent curiosity. It can get wild in there, and conversations and observations help make order and meaning of what they find. I like to prompt, What do you see? What words or numbers can you find? How are things connected? How does it work to move the hands? As pieces start to come out onto the table, I ask: Sort them in a way that makes sense to you. Is it the way they fit together on the inside? Is it by size or color? What way explains the clock best?
When everything is out, when it is arranged as a representation of our understanding of the clock, it has changed irreversibly. It is broken, for sure, but it is also now physically and conceptually larger than it has ever been. Reflection can make visible how learners’ understandings of the clock and their thinking about it have grown. They can teach what they have learned, or explain a moment of surprise where what they thought they knew about the clock was upended. I often invite my students to consider the following: What was hard about taking it apart, physically or emotionally—and what does that mean? What was hard about explaining its workings? What puzzles remain?
Then finding opportunity becomes a natural next step. Often, learners will ask me if they can keep a piece of this clock. I might ask: Why this piece? What do you want to do with it? What should be thrown away, and what is just too interesting?
In the past year, the Making Across the Curriculum project at Washington International School has supported our faculty to dig into an exploration of what Take Apart practices might look like in a classroom. The curiosity and enthusiasm of students during a Take Apart is often the most obvious impact, but we are also trying to identify more subtle evidence of student understanding.
videosLooking Closely: A Capacity of Sensitivity to Design
Looking Closely: A Capacity of Sensitivity to Design
Students from King Middle School in Portland, Maine, explain the importance of looking closely in a maker-centered classroom.
Video by Alex Coppola
publicationsMaker-Centered Learning: Empowering Young People to Shape Their Worlds
Maker-Centered Learning: Empowering Young People to Shape Their Worlds
The Agency by Design guide to implementing maker-centered teaching and learning
Maker-Centered Learning provides both a theoretical framework and practical resources for the educators, curriculum developers, librarians, administrators, and parents navigating this burgeoning field. Written by the expert team from the Agency by Design initiative at Harvard's Project Zero, this book
- Identifies a set of educational practices and ideas that define maker-centered learning, and introduces the focal concepts of maker empowerment and sensitivity to design.
- Shares cutting edge research that provides evidence of the benefits of maker-centered learning for students and education as a whole.
- Presents a clear Project Zero-based framework for maker-centered teaching and learning
- Includes valuable educator resources that can be applied in a variety of design and maker-centered learning environments
- Describes unique thinking routines that foster the primary maker capacities of looking closely, exploring complexity, and finding opportunity.
A surge of voices from government, industry, and education have argued that, in order to equip the next generation for life and work in the decades ahead, it is vital to support maker-centered learning in various educational environments. Maker-Centered Learning provides insight into what that means, and offers tools and knowledge that can be applied anywhere that learning takes place.