Chalon, I love your website. As a school, we’ve used it as inspiration for how we might organize student learning around tinkering, making, and hacking.

Our biggest challenge, like many public schools, is time. Integrating creativity and imagination into exisiting curriculum or creating our own takes time. Giving students space and the skills to be self-directed learners takes time (and takes supportive admistration, parent-base, and teachers).

Our second challenge is adults (in this case, teachers) who do not feel like they are creative and so struggle with supporting student creativity and the unknown. We’re supporting their grow in several ways — by creating space where it’s okay to take risks with an adminstration willing to support teachers in taking those skills (“yes, the new ________ wasn’t perfect but we learned this _____, this _____, and this _____ and your child benefitted in these ways”) and by engaging in low-risk, easy entry point making activities. These are especially important because often the teachers are taking a risk to do the activity, often they struggle (with lots of laughing), and are always proud of themselves when they persevere. They reconnect with how their students might feel when trying something new and start to think of themselves as makers, designers, and creators. They go from “oh, I am not an artist” to jumping into the activity and embracing the strengths they do have.

Tom and David Kelly’s book on Creative Confidence (especially the sections about Albert Bandura’s studies on overcoming phobias and overcoming adults’ fear of failure) helped us design activities to support teachers’ growth in developing their own creative confidence — confidence that they are bringing back to their classrooms.

We’re hoping that by providing opportunities teachers to be makers and to be creative that they will bring those mindsets around making (taking risks, learning from mistakes, trusting in themselves as creators) to the classroom and support students who may not feel creative.