Prepare classroom educators and school librarians to implement GID + Making in the curriculum

Based on our findings from the grant project, we are using the steps below to scale up GID + Making in our district. Each school site selects a team of educators - classroom teachers, school librarians, special education and gifted resource teachers to attend three GID + Making workshops.

Team Selection: PD

Suggestions to principals for selecting a learning team:

• Teams should have some commonalities. This could be the same grade level and subject areas. School librarians, gifted resource coordinators and instructional coaches must be part of the team.
• Successful teams are flexible, innovative, and willing!
• Use your school librarian to help select your team.
• Teams should have 2-4 teachers along with the educators listed in the first bullet.
• Make sure everyone understands the commitment and expectations.
• District administrators will visit teams as much as possible during the unit implementation.

Inquiry Model Professional Development

1. Before attending the GID + Making workshops, all educators and school librarians participate in inquiry learning training. In our district this is a three-day Guided Inquiry Design® (GID) workshop. Optimally, teams have experience teaching one or more GID units before they implement a GID + Making unit.

GID + Making Inservice #1 (3 hours)

1. Overview of GID + Making; Examples of previously taught units

2. Establish connection to district work and vision

3. Lessons learned by grant team

4. Relevance and future utility of Making and Design Thinking

5. GID + Making simulation activity

Each team:

1. Is given a large photo along with a concept such as innovation, waste, interactions, sustainability, or disruptions.

2. Brainstorms and sort questions, then develops or selects a complex inquiry question around their given concept. 

3. Researches and investigates their selected inquiry question using online resources.

4. Constructs a unique artifact from various low-tech materials to accompany and explain their findings. 

5. Shares their artifact and research with the other teams.

6. Reflects on the process: difficulties, surprises, what was learned, what new questions they now have.

6. Time for initial team planning on their inquiry unit; projected timelines

GID + Making Inservice #2 (3 hours)

1. Maker Mindset: disequilibrium and problem-solving, prototyping, process over product. Each team:
   1. Participates in a Maker challenge activity, working with unfamiliar resources, apps, tools and/or materials.
   2. Discusses, reflects, and shares their experience with the whole group.
2. Team collaboration time: standards, resources, timelines, responsiblities, assessment
3. Scaffolds for teams and for students: example rubrics, inquiry journals, prompts, etc.

GID + Making Inservice #3 (3 hours)

School Teams will discuss, share, and process these prompts using participatory techniques.

1. Share which of the learner projects you felt looked most like GID + Making and which felt like reporting.
2. As a team, how could you better support the Maker mindset among your learners?
3. What scaffolding did you implement to help learners develop deeper questions?  What would you like to try next time to support better questioning?
4. What tweaks can be made to rubrics that could help learners think deeply about their work?
5. How do learners brainstorm and discuss Making ideas and the Making process? How do learners reflect on their Making?
6. How was the Making process iterative and collaborative?
7. How do we help learners take ownership of their Maker work?
8. What support do teachers need from administrators in order to implement GID + Making?