With schools being closed, I find myself picturing students and classrooms as I miss the routine of a school day. As I read about making, tinkering, and engineering this week, my mind kept thinking about what I typically see as a visit the 35 classrooms in my school. That got me wondering….  Is there any common ground between the Maker Movement and Common Core standards? Even Invent to Learn author Gary Stager is quoted in a 2014 Remake Learning blog as saying that the two are “incompatible.” While I can picture students fully engaging in the joy of learning with experimenting, designing, and inventing, I also see teachers struggling to cover all the Common Core standards that are assigned to each grade level. But does it mean that these ideas can’t work together?

I started my own inquiry by wondering if there are any vocabulary these two ideas have in common. I search and found the 27 words most frequently found in Common Core. The words are organized by depth of knowledge (DOK) levels and include: compare, contrast, describe, demonstrate, develop, infer, summarize. On the more complex level, the words are: analyze, cite, evaluate, assess and argue. I also found the 38 most common words in the Maker Movement and it includes: craft, design, hack, interface, invent, iterate, flow, make, model, play and tinker. So I did not find any verbatim vocabulary in common.

Following up that thought, I wondered if I could find commonality between the purposes of both movements. In the Maker Movement, “Learners are empowered to connect with everything they know, feel and wonder to stretch themselves into learning new things (Martinez and Stager, 2013, p. 32). It is a theory about how learning takes place, not a curriculum or a pacing guide. The purpose of Common Core standards is to give all student in the United States the skills they will need to be successful after a K-12 education. It is neither a theory of learning nor a curriculum.

The purpose of a formalized education program has always been to prepare students for the future. While the history of public education might have started as a way to prepare workers during the Industrial Revolution, it has evolved to an understanding that a successful adult needs more than a factory job. I think both Common Core and Maker Movement proponents could agree that a truly successful adult can navigate anything they encounter by using critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

So that leads me to wonder if a connection can be made in the way we use the information presented from each idea. If teachers are fluent in the overarching ideas and language of the standards in their content area, could they find a way to allow students to have choice, use imagination, experiment, and take risks?

Perhaps the answer is that when teachers themselves engage in making, tinkering and engineering with the Common Core standards, the result is a compatibility of ideas that truly prepares students for the unknown of the future.

Reference List

Martinez, S.L. and Stager, G.S. (2013, May 7). Invent to learn: Making, tinkering, and engineering in the classroom. Constructing Modern Knowledge Press.

https://remakelearning.org/blog/2014/09/22/the-common-core-meets-the-maker-movement/

TeachThough. https://www.teachthought.com/the-future-of-learning/language-of-the-maker-movement-38-terms-for-teachers/

https://osse.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/osse/publication/attachments/Common%20Core%20Key%20Terms.pdf