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Monday, May 28, 2018

Book Review: Rosie Revere, Engineer


For a while I've been eying several books that would help support STEAM or Maker activities in the classroom. Rosie Revere, Engineer has been one that I've wanted to get for a while, so a few weeks ago, I ordered it off of The Book Depository. The story itself is a very nice tale of a shy girl who used to create a lot of creative and different inventions, but has been silenced because of the reaction of a family member. She learns later, from a family member that it's not about getting things perfect on the first go. This fits in perfectly with both the idea of Growth Mindset and the Design Thinking process.

There is a lot of potential for this book to lead into many different learning opportunities and ideas. It would be a great way to start a project where children build or create something.

But that's not all. There is also a companion book, Rosie Revere's Big Project Book for Bold Engineers, which gives an incredible amount of ideas to build upon the first book. You can find it at The Book Depository as well.


Though the book is primarily meant for individual children (it has many places for a child to draw or write) it can easily be adapted for a whole class to get them thinking in new and creative ways. As an adult, I was personally excited about the things in this book and potentially trying some of them on my own.

In the book there is a good deal of supporting information about engineers and engineering, as well as some advice about organizing your own "treasure" so that you can make your own inventions. There are also some step-by-step instructions to make a few different creative things (a small catapult and a solar oven).

The genius of this book does not end there though. There are also many real world challenges where the book asks readers to try to solve a specific problem in their own creative way. It also highlights the importance of "flops" and making mistakes.

At 94 pages this definitely is a recommended purchase for any classroom trying to bring out the creativity in children. It not only encourages children to build and invent things, but it gives them a few different methods and tons of inspiration.

There are a few other books in this series, so perhaps look for the reviews of those in the near future.

Sunday, May 13, 2018

TED Talk: Adam Grant - The Surprising Habits of Original Thinkers

A long time ago I downloaded the TED Talks app on my tablet but in all the years it's been on there, I've not actually used it. The other day I opened it up, which caused it to start giving me some suggestions. I've watched a few of them in the past few days and here's one I feel is worth sharing.

It's all about what Adam Grant terms Originals - that is creative thinkers. He tells a story of how he missed an investment opportunity that would have paid off immensely for him because he didn't recognize that the ones who offered it to him were going to be successful.

A big part of the talk is how (moderate) procrastination can lead on to more creative responses. he says (and it's backed by his research) that if you put of completing a task it gives you more time to think and more time to come up with more ingenious solutions or responses. I found this to be very empowering as I do tend to be a person who procrastinates (and in fact, this blog post is a semi-procrastination from working on one of my Coding Across the Curriculum videos), but I also tend to come up with creative solutions. It's nice to see the connection between the two. It's also nice to be able to support those children who (again, moderately) procrastinate with their work - to give them time to think and mull over ideas. 

A second idea that he discusses is the idea that original people are full of doubt and fears. What is different however, is that the doubt is not self-doubt, but idea-doubt. That is, that original and creative people doubt that ideas will work, but don't give up on solving any problems. Many people doubt themselves so much that they don't even put ideas forward. This is not what originals do. He discussed the fact that you can (almost) predict the creativity of a person based on the internet browser they use (I'll let you watch the video to find out more on that though). The argument with that is not that your browser makes you creative, but the way you choose which browser you'll use reveals a lot about your mindset (so just changing browsers does nothing, I'm sorry to say to you Internet Explorer and Safari users - whoops, I just ruined the surprise).

The final point that he makes is that creative and original people produce a lot - and that a lot of it isn't their greatest. Most people who have done great and amazing things have got their because they tried many, many things. It is through those attempts that eventually they have discovered new and original ways of doing things. This ties into the whole idea that failure and mistakes help you grow (also doing an online course where this is being stressed - more on that when it's done).

Here's the talk below. It's definitely worth 15 minutes of your time. If you are one of the people he is describing then this can be very empowering. If you are not, then it can give you some insight into how you can be like that AND how you can recognize those people who are. 


Monday, May 7, 2018

Organizing an ILE (Part 3)

One of the challenges (or opportunities) that exists when teaching and working in a large space with many learners and many educators is that sometimes the children don't get to know all the other children. In a massive group, surprisingly enough, the same children tend to work with each other when given the choice.

As learning coaches, when we saw this we weren't too sure that this was the best for our learners. We wanted them to develop social skills that would enable them to work with anyone. We also wanted our learners to be able to reflect on their work, with someone who was a safe friend (or even a critical friend).

So we came up with the idea of having learning buddies. The idea was that whenever we had the whole group of them together, they would be sitting with their buddy. If we asked them to discuss anything, it would be with this buddy. So we made a list, which we started rotating every week and thought it would go smoothly. I guess by now I should know that nothing every goes smoothly. Some of our learners were doing as we asked and trying to have conversations with the correct buddy. But others were bringing their buddy with them and sitting next to their friend and talking to their friend. There was a lot of frustration.

Our initial thought was to put a forced seating plan in place so that they couldn't sit by their buddy. But cooler heads prevailed and we took advantage of a day when half of the learners were out testing to run a mini design thinking workshop. We identified the problem to the learners and we examined why this particular response was occurring.

The overall theme to the responses was that they didn't know their buddy and that they were more comfortable with their friends. Some of the buddies were goofing off so they wanted to make sure they talked to someone. We identified that the main problem was that they didn't have enough time to get to know there buddies. So we framed our How Might We question as:

How might we get to know our learning buddies better so that we talk to them and not our friends? (it may not have been exactly this wording).

From there were had the children do a crazy eights activity to come up with some possible solutions. Each child picked their favourite and pitched it to a partner. Each pair chose their favourite in that group and then pitched it to another pair. This continued until we had two ideas facing off against each other.

To be honest, all of the ideas were pretty good, but I liked both of the final two the best. The first was to have the buddies interview each other and the second was to have the play a game together. We combined both and changed the turnover rate between buddies. So every two weeks when they got a new buddy, there was a list of questions to ask each other AND we gave them a task to complete with the buddy. Those tasks were things such as: make a secret handshake, make something out of 10 lego pieces or design a logo for you and your buddy.



Things went a lot more smoothly after this. I can't say whether or not that was due to the fact that we did some interventions or the fact that the children were actually heard and empathized with (which is a big part of a design thinking approach). Either way, as the term went on, we as learning coaches did notice some interesting interactions and a growing sense of community amongst the learners. This effort was only a small part of our larger efforts but the idea itself AND the trouble shooting we did with the learners clearly has had some impact on the way our habitat runs.