Windward School Design and Maker Class Colloquium

This week I spent two days at the fabulous Windward School in Los Angeles for their third Design and Maker Class Colloquium. It was great to reconnect with and/or meet awesome teachers. This event seems a bit under the radar as it’s pretty small, but Windward goes all out to bring in great speakers and vendors. I went to their first event a few years ago, met Gary Stager (Invent to Learn) , Liam Kennedy (ISS Above) , Coco Kaleel and her parents and so many other inspiring makers. That event motivated me to travel out a few days to the Bay Area Maker Faire in 2016 which really rocked my world. Windward’s campus is state of the art and they generously gave me a special price as an LAUSD teacher. It’s not possible for me to replicate the small class size and huge budget of an elite private school, but I still try to provide the best educational opportunities to my students.

Although this summer has already been my best ever what with the Exploratorium Teacher Institute and Space Camp, I really wanted to check this out . The “Making” starts right with the name badge which we were invited to bling up like this.

The Keynote speaker was AnnMarie Thomas, creator of Squishy Circuits and director of the Playful Learning Lab who came shot out of a cannon with her passion.

I was eager for more so I followed her to the first breakout session where she shared her work with the band OK Go. I had seen some of their videos that take the Rube Goldberg thing to another level, but I was missing out on a larger body of work. AnnMarie is working with the band to create resources for teachers that will launch soon on their sandbox site. If you’re a teacher, check it out and fill out their survey.

Many of the breakout sessions were led by Windward teachers, but other schools like Archer, Marlborough, Valley Beth Shalom, Marymount, Echo Horizon, Wildwood, Crossroads and others were represented.

It’s hard to choose sessions when you want to be everywhere at once. I chose to attend a session on Teaching Safe Woodworking Tool Use with Cathy Hobart from Manhattan Beach School District, Barb Noren from the reDiscover Center , a maker space in Culver City and Jenna Ervin from the Imagination Workshop at the Kidspace Museum in Pasadena.

I got lots of great ideas from this workshop, including learning about ToolKid tools. Some day I’m going to need to know this stuff.

For the final session of the day, I chose something about assessing “soft skills” in Problem Based Learning because that is something I think about quite a bit. If we don’t figure out a reasonable way to assess the process of making and learning, we will be stuck with multiple choice or the new fangled “adaptive online” tests to measure student learning and ultimately teacher quality. I was a bit of a fish out of water on this one as I have apparently outrageous ideas like measuring “joy” and letting students assess themselves.

The next day was more of an extended workshop day with two sessions. For the first one I went to Design Thinking with Puppets and it was quite a bit of fun.

Then I learned to make a fidget spinner in Adobe Illustrator and then lasercut print it from Max Nishimura and Jenn Zanoria in the Windward Create Studio.