A conversation with artist and maker educator Matt Zigler
Matt Zigler is the author of a new book for educators titled “3 Modes of Making.” He talks about imitation, modification and innovation as three different modes of student projects, which develop different maker skills. Matt is an artist and educator who has been running the makerspace at Bullis, an independent school in the DC area. He brings a background in art and creative practice to the makerspace and his school. it’s not that every student is going to be an artist but every student should develop a creative practice, regardless of subject or area of interest.
Schools have typically not been very good at developing students who are creative thinkers and doers, but this versatile capability is increasingly valuable now and will be more so in the future. This capability can be developed in a makerspace, given a supportive environment and educators who engage students in a creative practice, as Matt describes in his book, and help them become makers.
Buy “3 Modes of Making” on Makershed.com: Print – PDF
Transcript
Dale: Welcome to MakeCast, I’m Dale Dougherty. I am here with Matt Zigler. Matt is an artist and educator who’s written a new book for us called Three Modes of Making and we’ll be talking about that book today and his experiences as an artist and educator and how he’s brought that to a makerspace at a school. He’s talking about things in a new way, maybe for some of you.
The Role of Makerspaces in Education
Dale: I wrote a piece on makered.org last week and talking about how some maker programs start as a club, some as a class. There’s kind of a third category for a makerspace is a hub where a lot of things happen both in and out of that hub, but you’re not just working with students, you’re also trying to train other educators in this model.
What Matt’s book, I think, has a focus on the process. of making, and how do you lead that as an educator or as any adult working with kids on this. Rather than teaching someone, I use a coach model quite a bit in my thinking — how do you coach kids to make? How do you help them? What are you trying to accomplish there? The second thing that Matt I think covers really well is that some teachers are very scared about is when you give students the opportunity to do projects. How do you manage that? How do you think about it? What kinds of projects are they going to do?
When I heard Matt give this presentation at the Make: Education Forum, I thought he’d really nailed something that nobody had really talked about before. For some projects, the goal is to imitate something that exists or perhaps follow instructions that someone else shared with you. Second was imitation to modify something. And the third he calls innovation, which is really to do something new, original and ideally something that has value to other people. Matt, welcome to Make:cast. It’s good to see you.
Matt’s Journey as an Artist and Educator
Dale: Tell us a bit about your background and where you are today.
Matt: So my background is I’ve been a teacher really since I got out of college. I’ve been, I was an art teacher for most of my career. It’s coming up on half of my career. I guess that, that will shift and then eventually. Did a little bit of administration and then all got into makerspaces in a small independent school in North Carolina was my first experience and then got hired to run the Bullis School BitLab, which Bullis is an independent school outside of DC. They were building a $23 million STEM building and the biggest chunk of that was a makerspace and a Fab Lab.
They created a position to just coordinate that space. And I was lucky enough to get hired to do that. So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last seven years. And it’s really been a great opportunity to try to look at creativity and how to help kids learn how to be creative and what creativity is.
From a thing that’s pretty new. And, with art. I love art and I enjoy doing my own art, but you’re hemmed in art education with a lot of history, a lot of best practices, a lot of this is how you teach art, sort of stuff that’s out there. In the makerspace, it’s very free.
There’s not a whole lot of that out there at the moment. And it gives you a lot of opportunity to work with kids and a wide array of different types of projects and see creativity in all of its different ways. And that’s really been the most exciting part for me.
The Importance of Creativity in Learning
Dale: Teaching creativity is a kind of problematical phrase, in a way.
Matt: Definitely.
Dale: And it’s really something you’re trying to bring out or help kids discover and give them opportunities to touch that. And I think an art teacher has such an interesting background for this. Some people balk at doing art in a class, right? And others love it, right? And you have those two poles, you’re trying to get them to engage in the experience and not the outcome and not to judge that label artist or things like that. Even just like musician, these are things that maybe you grow into that, but you don’t start off calling yourself an artist or musician, you just start doing it.
Matt: Yeah, there’s a famous quote from Picasso that every child is an artist and the trick is just how to remain one as you get older. Replace the word creativity with artist in that and I think it’s even more true. You don’t have to spend much time around young kids with whatever they’ve got around, a cardboard box or some crayons. They’ll just start building or making and that’s an impulse that I think we all have and things get in the way, particularly when you get into high school, I think that really 8th grade, 9th grade, things become very regimented in education and trained out of us to be creative in a wide range of fields.
People tend to assume that’s what art and music are there for. It’s so that there is some room for creativity in the schools, and it doesn’t belong anywhere else. And I really disagree with that. In my work in the makerspace, as you mentioned, as a hub, I have students and teachers coming from every content area with creative ideas of projects that they want to do. It’s hard to imagine a field that doesn’t involve some opportunity to be creative and the people who are able to find the creativity in their jobs, enjoy those jobs more and often have greater opportunities within those organizations because they are seen as people who can come up with ideas and pursue them. Being able to really talk about creativity and creative process for students and have them see the value and practicing that in high school so that they could apply it to whatever their area of interest is in life. That way you don’t have to feel like, oh, I’m supposed to be an artist when I come out of this class. That’s not the goal
Dale: I really like the word practice; it’s something you do in sports, but music and other things, but more importantly, rather than being told to practice, it’s discovering your own practice and how you do things, how you think, and that’s the essential part of creativity.
It’s like how you approach a problem or how you even think about yourself. And I really appreciate that often art education tries to make a real connection to the person, the student, in a way that sometimes I think science doesn’t. Science is a subject; it has information; it has facts; it has theorems. We’ll test you on that, right? Rather than, science is a way of thinking. Science is a way of looking at the world and interacting with that world. I’ve always felt like art teachers could help science teachers become better by moving them off of that subject and more towards the experience of the thing.
How do we know these things, right?
Matt: It’s funny that you bring up science. Both my brother and my father, both PhD biologists. I remember way back when I was starting to think about this book and some of this stuff that went into it, I asked them, can you remember an experience that you had in high school that inspired you to want to become scientists and neither of them had anything from school?
Their interest in becoming scientists came from things outside of school. My dad grew up on a farm and he became interested in animals and zoology and there was no experience that he had in school that said science is really interesting. You might want to pursue this.
It was like a thing he had to do and the real inspiration came from outside influences, which is sad. I feel like it doesn’t have to be that way.
Dale: No, it doesn’t, but I will say that they can usually trace it to some set of experiences they had, whether they’re in school.
It usually wasn’t, I had a great textbook in the seventh grade. But sometimes it can be an inspiring teacher.
Matt: Absolutely.
Dale: That opens the door. I’ve talked to makers, scientists, it was something they were exploring on their own. They were curious and they found an area that.
They just couldn’t stop thinking about it and that led them, back into school or into education in ways that they might not have been there.
Matt: Yeah. How do we improve the odds that they will have that experience or an experience in school that they can think about when they’re in college deciding what it is that they want to do. I think that projects really are that thing because like you said rather than give the generic science curriculum, if you allow them to pick a topic that they want to do scientific experimentation on, now they’re applying these scientific skills, the methods, the experimentation, collecting data on something that is actually interesting to them. Ideally, that’s real life.
Dale: Yeah, as I say, you make it personal. And and it’s something that unlocks their motivation, which I think is the key thing. Suddenly it’s theirs.
The Three Modes of Making: Imitation, Modification, Innovation
Dale: How did you come up with this framework for the three modes of making?
Matt: I really was thinking about my own experiences as a young artist and how I learned things and the different types of activities that the best teachers that I had gave and what I gained from them. You brought up the question of like teaching creativity.
How does that even work? It’s hard to point at somebody doing something and say, Oh, they’re teaching creativity. The kids are being creative. That doesn’t mean that I’m necessarily teaching them to be creative. So really what I think you’re talking about is facilitating an environment where creativity happens and then you talk about what’s happening.
And that’s the best way that you can do that. And so I, there’s always times when you’re copying other artists or you’re copying other work that you’re seeing and the goal of that. is to try to understand what that artist did so that you can decide, which parts of that artist’s style or subject matter are things that you want to incorporate into your own work.
And then, obviously you don’t want to copy all the time. At some point, you need to go out and look at things that are out there and start to modify and bend them to your own tastes and add your own spin on things. And then finally, once you feel like you have. All those tools in your toolbox, then you can go out and start to experiment and try new things that may fail because you don’t know the outcome ahead of time and that’s what in the makerspace would use that word innovation and so I saw that happening so clearly in the types of activities that people were doing in makerspaces and teachers that I was talking to were trying to get at And it seemed like it is helpful to be able to point to certain skills that are better, that are easier to practice in those different modes. If you’re just saying everything is making, and these are the skills that we’re practicing when we’re making, it’s hard to pinpoint times when you can talk about like, how do you set a good goal? Setting a goal when you are trying to come up with something that’s brand new is very different than setting a goal when you are trying to learn a specific technique.
When you’re able to point out those differences, you can more easily pinpoint how you can talk to students about how do you set a good goal, what is a measurable goal, or when you are making a blueprint and modifying an existing piece of furniture, or building something for a specific part of your living room.
Then that’s different than if you have to sketch an idea for something that you don’t know the dimensions of, you don’t know the constraints for yet. So by thinking about things in terms of imitation, learning specific skills, then modifying the world around us to make it our own and then innovating to come up with new ideas to solve new problems.
It allows you to target different practice, practices in creativity that students can lean on later on when they’re doing those things on their own projects.
Implementing the Three Modes in Classroom
Dale: You start with that model and you really break it down as how to build a class or a set of experiences around that. Talk to me a bit about how that looks like from a teacher’s point of view. I want my kids to do projects, which I think is fundamental to any kind of maker class or makerspace you have. So how do you make that happen?
Matt: Basically when in my school, we work in trimesters. We have nine months to be with a group of students obviously different schools do it different ways, but I tend to think of it in terms of two thirds of that time is working with me as the teacher directing a little bit more. Here’s maybe a menu of options that you can try if you’re interested in learning this tool; here’s a project that I want you to do, follow this tutorial; if you’re interested in learning this tool, here’s a project, and really having them very quickly in a week or so go through that imitation experience. I’ll be honest the hardest one for me is imitation.
My natural mode is innovation. I can come up with idea after idea, but when I have to sit down and follow a step by step tutorial, I am horrible. I have bad patience; I jump ahead; I skip things because I assume that I know what I’m supposed to do. When I was a kid, I’d throw the manual out when I got the toy, or whatever.
So there’s some skills there that are really important to learn, and so we make sure to do that. Then we’ll do a very quick modification project where students will find an object that they want to personalize. So it could be something that they want to engrave on, or it could be something that they want to change its shape or redesign the colors. That could be a digital or physical project. We really focus on measuring. On making good diagrams to really understand that object as clearly as we can so that you can know what you can do with it, right? You can do some things with certain materials, but not with other materials. And so I have students again, a limited set of of objects that they can look at to try to figure out how they want to modify it or improve it in some way. Then we take a couple of weeks to generate ideas. We don’t necessarily go into the innovation process right away, but we talk about how to generate ideas, how to think divergently, how to evaluate those ideas, and then what would you do to start?
If you had to try to go down this path. What would you try to target as your first challenge essentially? And then we take the last third of the class, of the time that we have, and I let them work on any of those things, continue them, or even come up with something new, but applying those skills that we practiced during those earlier phases.
In the midst of that, we do a lot of reflection. So we do a lot of visual thinking strategies where students keep a portfolio of not just pictures of the projects, though those are certainly there, but really more documentation of what they’re thinking as they’re doing it. So why did you pick this particular process to modify this thing?
Why? What was your goal? How would you measure whether your goal was successful? Have a wide array of visible thinking strategies, some that I’ve created and that are in the book and some that I use from like Project Zero to get students really to engage those mental muscles, which they’re going to need when they actually start working on the project that they want to pursue for three, four weeks at the end of the class. Really cram a whole lot in at the beginning to just do some drills, if we’re talking about practices. So we’re doing a lot of drill work, we’re getting our footwork right we’re setting that groundwork, and then give them that opportunity to actually put it into practice before the course is over.
Dale: Often thought about that as starting with a kind of boot camp of sorts. Here’s some basic skills you need to know. Then, some of them you’re going to want to develop a little bit further and be able to do something that’s not simple.
Matt: And it’s impossible to predict exactly what. They’re going to see things that are around them. They’re going to find things online and you can’t cover all of the possible materials and tools and everything in a few weeks. And so really what you want to give them is some skills to then go out and figure out how to solve the problem themselves with you as a facilitator.
It can be a little, it can be a little, daunting at times when you got 16, 18 kids and they’re all picking different projects. But if they understand that there’s a YouTube video that’s going to walk them through how to learn this particular skill and they can spend a couple of days doing that and then apply it to this thing that they really want to make, then they’re gaining some agency in the situation. They’re empowered to figure it out for themselves. Oftentimes, I’ll have students, say that I have a question so that, I usually have them put their names up on a board if they need my help and I’ll rotate around and maybe a third of the time I get to the student and say, Oh, no, I figured it out.
I’m like. That’s the dream right there. That’s perfect.
Dale: Self directed learning is a wonderful door if you can open it to students because then they have really discovered the power to learn on their own and solve problems and advance not waiting to be taught or someone telling them what to do.
It’s also the power behind creativity in a way.
When I saw your presentation, you had a PowerPoint and now you have, what is it? About a 175 pages or so book. You had to develop a lot more to, to flesh that out. What was new that you had to really work on there for yourself?
Matt: I created a lot of, maybe not created from scratch, but I thought a lot about the different visible thinking methods that we use, a lot of the different ways that I have students visually represent their thinking.
I have Google Slides just full of things that I’ve tried, some of which I think worked pretty well, and some of which didn’t really illustrate what students were thinking about very well at all, but I think it was an opportunity to look through all of that and evaluate for myself which of those seemed the most effective, which were not effective, but probably could be with some improving and it’s been really helpful.
The sort of interesting thing about the timing of it all is just that, it has lined up with the actual school year that I went through. I teach three courses and they’re laid out as one course in the book, but there’s like an introductory maker class, which I just described.
Then I teach a trimester class called “Making for Social Good,” which really the idea of that class is designing things for others. We give kids a lot of opportunity in the makerspace to make their things for them, which it’s easy to know what it is that you want in an object.
But it’s a different skill to be able to interview and talk to somebody else and really gain some empathy and help understand what it is that somebody else wants. Those are a separate set of skills that we spend a third of the year on. Then I have a more advanced class and that’s where we focus primarily on the innovation project, where they will take– could be that idea that they came up with before, and they spend the entire trimester just working on that one project through a series of iterations and prototypes.
And as I was going through those different parts of the classes and writing the book and hitting those different parts, I was redesigning some of those portfolio elements and the ones that I think work best ended up in the book, which was very helpful to be able to come up with.
Dale: Are those classes different grade levels or?
Matt: They’re all mixed high school classes. A lot of freshmen end up in those classes, but but yeah it’s a nine through 12 high school class. Which is great, I think the kids appreciate it because I often don’t know what grade they’re in because it’s just this group of kids that show up. The younger kids benefit from having some of the older kids around and it helps mix some of those those grade level challenges that you can get.
Dale: But year to year, would you have any of the same students? Like next year, would you have some of those students still in the maker classes?
Matt: Yeah, I will occasionally have a student who’ll take one, their freshman or sophomore year, and then they’ll take the others later on. It’s relatively rare when I have a single student that goes all the way through all three in the same year.
Dale: Talk about assessment.
Assessing Creativity and Learning in Makerspaces
Dale: You spend a little time on that in the book. It’s one of these things that it’s not a multiple choice test that tells you whether you did well in the class. But, again, going to art and other areas, we don’t give an artist a multiple choice test to find out whether they did well, so it’s really just applying a different framework than what we’ve typically applied in things like math.
Matt: Yeah. The type of assessment that I really hope people get away from, I don’t know that a lot of maker educators use it, but that idea of a checklist of things to include in your project. That’s an attempt to do that sort of multiple choice. If you do all these, check all these boxes, then you get 100%. That’s really limiting because it’s essentially encouraging students not to try new things, because if they get really interested in something different and they waste their time and they don’t do this really simple thing over here, then they actually may have done something amazing, but they didn’t check off all the boxes.
Rubrics are a big part of obviously assessing any kind of creative, subjective work, meeting expectations, exceeding expectations. I have been using the last few years a method where I will lay out what I think the basic expectations of the project are.
If you’re doing this, you should be able to show that you are able to do fairly accurate measuring. That you can record those numbers and then use them to design an object. Those are the basics and I hope that you will go beyond the basics. And so if you do the basics, then you’re in that like 80 percent range.
That’s that B range or whatever. If you challenge yourself, if you try something more complex than what I’ve asked you to do, then you’re exceeding those expectations. You’re actually pushing beyond what I think you should be able to do if you left this class. And I think that has helped my students be able to focus on trying harder and trying something new because they know they’re going to get rewarded for it, grade wise, even if it doesn’t work out. Even if they try something and it’s not successful, if they’re able to show in their documentation, their visible thinking, they’re showing this is why I tried this thing.
Now it didn’t work out. Maybe next time I need to do it this way. But this is what I was trying to achieve. Those are risks, risk taking behavior that’s really important for creativity, so I don’t grade students on the actual product that they make. I grade them on what they’re able to describe how they attack the problem, how they thought about the problem, how they set up to accomplish this task that they have given themselves or that I’ve given them.
A big part of what I thought was important in the book was to try to give as much helpful concrete strategies for assessing students in the makerspace as possible, because I think that is an area where a lot of teachers struggle.
I would love not to have to give grades at all, but we are in a traditional education realm and you have to do that.
Dale: Part of this is figuring out how to give feedback in different ways, right?
Matt: Yes, definitely.
Dale: That’s why I think the adult, the teacher, the coach, whatever, has such an important role.
That goes back to basic writing or drawing or anything someone says you could do better, right? Push you yourself a little bit more, think about it a little bit more. Sort of encouragement rather than judgment.
Matt: When I was in high school, and I had an art teacher in my public school, and then I had an art teacher that I went to on the weekends, private art lessons, and I talk about this in the book, but the difference in those two educational experiences were remarkable, right?
One of them I would have loved to have not gone to my art class in my public school where it was very regimented like here’s what you were doing in this piece. Here’s what it needs to look like at the end. Then you stack them up whoever had the best technical skill got the “A” on down from there, versus going to my painting instructor on the weekend and okay, let’s go set up in this field and start painting and then in a half hour, we’re all going to pull our stuff together. We’re going to talk about each other’s work, right? There were no grades there, but there was definitely assessment. I could hear what my peers were saying about my piece. I could hear what my teacher was saying about my piece. I could respond to that and I could say this is what I was trying to do.
And but the difference there, you can’t just throw that into most high schools because I was there because I had chosen to be there. I had selected to spend my weekends doing this, so it mattered to me already. And when you’re in high school as much as kids love being in my maker class, some of them did not have many options.
They picked it because it was better than this other elective option out there. They’re not necessarily intrinsically motivated to do great work in the makerspace. That’s where the A, B, whatever does come in. In the end, you have to be able to boil it down to that. But a lot more of what I’m able to do through process portfolio is give a lot more feedback where I can it’s tricky when you have a lot of students, but being able to leave a video note or an audio note, just talking about what they’ve put in their portfolio and help them maybe see it from a different perspective or encourage them to elaborate in some parts of their thinking so that they can be able to express that. There’s the idea of we don’t learn by doing, we learn by thinking about what we did, which is true.
You can develop a habit and a rhythm by doing something over and over again. But if you want to be able to apply it strategically, you have to have thought about why you did certain things and whether it worked better, whether there’d be something that would work even better the next time.
Dale: That documentation that you brought up several times of process portfolio –not just here’s what I did at the end. But this is how I got there. Adults struggle doing that, of keeping notes and really taking the time and feeling that it’s worth taking the time to write those thoughts down.
Matt: It helps because I don’t grade them on their products that they make. I grade them on that portfolio. And often students will not finish the thing that, they have this big idea and they have three weeks to make it. And they think that’s a ton of time, but three weeks in one-hour classes is not really that much time at all. And so most of the time they don’t actually finish completely.
They may get 60 percent of the way there or whatever, but as they are documenting, they’re thinking about that process. And that’s what I’m actually grading them on. It relieves them of that worry of not finishing and it allows them to have the emphasis put on, okay, I’m gonna, I can do a really good job explaining what I’m doing, what I want to have happen and to be able to say, I don’t have the time to finish this, but if I do finish it, this is how I’m going to do it. Sometimes those kids come back and they finish it in their own time, which is always fantastic.
The Impact of Meaningful Projects in Learning
Dale: One of the things that I discovered, particularly in public schools, and sadly looking at students say, going to community colleges, really how few of them had the experience of really doing projects in high school.
I really feel that’s such an important thing for them to find out how they learn, how they work, to work in a group of people, doing those kind of things..
Matt: Maybe one step down the list of not having an opportunity to do projects is having all of the projects that you do be essentially meaningless. Part of what I think my job has really allowed me to do is, my job is much more like a librarian than like a traditional teacher.
I teach these classes, but that’s the only class I teach. So the majority of my day is working with teachers to help facilitate meaningful projects in their classes. And so we don’t do a whole lot of dioramas; we don’t bust out our shoe boxes and buy a bunch of stuff at the craft store, which can be fun and engaging for some kids. Not every kid loves doing that, but they’re not learning anything through that process because often what they’ve already done is done research, written a paper, handed that paper in, and gotten that diorama with no new information at all. So what I do is I work with teachers to help design projects where the students are actually showing what they’ve learned and ideally that is replacing a test or replacing a paper so that the student really buys in then, Oh, you mean, I don’t have to write a four-page paper about this. I can build this object that shows my knowledge that I’ve gained about this part of history or about the scientific concept or about this, this mode of language in my Spanish class.
Makerspaces. I think really one of the exciting new things that they can bring is being able to facilitate that for a school because teachers don’t have the time or the mental bandwidth in most cases to be able to design really meaningful projects that help students learn or help students show what they’ve learned. That’s just not what their time is able to be devoted to. To be able to have that librarian who can step in and say, I’ve got this idea for you. You tell me what it is you want the kids to demonstrate that they understand, and I’ll help facilitate this for you.
If makerspaces can do that, they become very sustainable in schools,
Dale: That goes back to that hub model discussion a bit, that it’s serving the whole school. It’s not just a separate program or activity.
I’m really happy to see your book in print.
Conclusion and Matt’s Vision for Makerspaces
Dale: I hope we can jointly get it in the hands of as many teachers. And you advise them how should you think about it is really important and how you organize that space and your goals in that space. Often people are getting assigned a makerspace without having much training in it. I think your book is a really good way — we have other books that explain 3D printing and CAD, and electronics, Arduino and that but you have a conceptual framework for the educator to apply to students using the makerspace and teachers using the makerspace in a broad way.
Matt: That certainly was my hope. As an art teacher, even at a small school where oftentimes I was getting kids in the class that really did not want to be there, I had to ask myself what is this kid who’s never gonna pick up a paintbrush after they’re done with my class, what can they get out of this? I’ve been thinking about that question for a long time and working in a makerspace has just made it so much easier to allow kids to really see the power of how creativity and creative design could be applied to whatever area that they’re most interested in and that it can really benefit them in the long run.
And so it’s been very freeing for me. Even though I love the art studio and I love working with students who really want to do art, but I want to make sure that everybody gets the opportunity to feel like they can apply their creative skills more productively towards whatever they’re interested in.
Dale: I think we get hung up in this career thing of what they’re going to be at the end of their education, not what’s the portfolio of skills they’ve developed and habits of mind and all those other things.
Matt, thank you for your time today. Really great to see you. I wish you the best of luck with this book and your work in the makerspace at Bullis.
Matt: Thank you. And I really appreciate the opportunity.
AmazonBasics Professional Mic 2-1: You can buy Matt’s book, Three Modes of Making, on Amazon or order it from independent booksellers or purchase it in PDF or print form on makershed.com.
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