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Leadership and Maker Learning: A Conversation With Pam Moran and Ira Socal

Source: Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers

“Kids today need the chance to design, create, and communicate, all highly desirable competencies in this century. Our study of how children learn has led us to create maker opportunities as a pathway to contemporary experiential learning.…We see kids all the time who find learning becomes important to them through their maker work and that content suddenly starts to make sense.
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In doing so, they naturally experience social-emotional learning through empathic design and collaboration with peers and experts.”

From Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools, co-authored by Pam Moran, Ira David Socal, Chad Ratliff

Editor’s Note: This is an extended article from the monthly Make: Education Newsletter. Get the latest from thought leaders in maker education in your inbox by signing up at makezine.com/join.

This month we’re speaking with two giants in maker learning and progressive education: Dr. Pam Moran, educator and former superintendent at Albemarle County Public Schools in Virginia, and her colleague Ira Socal, the former CTO and Innovation Officer at ACPS.

Pam began working at ACPS in 1986 and led the district from 2006–2018. Ira joined the district as a member of the leadership team in 2013. It’s notable that Pam’s first year as superintendent coincided with the launch of the first Maker Faire during a period in which federal education policy was defined by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and teaching to the test. By the end of Pam’s tenure in 2018 makerspaces were ascendant in the national conversation and increasingly recognized as a way to once again elevate hands-on, interest driven learning and connections to community.

Traditional conceptions of school and institutional education do not typically align with a maker learning practice. Much has been written about the factory model of education, and the inequities and economic expectations that underpinned its tracking systems, but for the maker-minded, Pam and Ira’s book, Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools, is an exciting work. Along with their colleague Chad Ratliff, an entrepreneur, district leader, and Lab Schools principal, Pam, Ira, and ACPS leadership team worked creatively and iteratively in service of kids, teachers, and communities to push back on this precedent, developing new systems and examples for delivering education.

As they outline in their book, they began as listeners and observers, guided by these key questions:

What do you see when you look at your school?
What do you see when you look in a classroom?
What do you see when you watch children in the playground, or on a street, or in a park? What does learning look like? What does growing up look like?

The results of this approach led them to a powerful conclusion: “Once we are able to see clearly what is happening with children in our schools and outside of our schools, we will then be on the path to learn how to take rapid, yet deeply considered actions to change the educational system we have inherited.”

Maker learning figures prominently in the priorities and design work Pam, Ira, their colleague and co-author Chad Ratlif put in place in ACPS. Read what Pam and Ira have to say about big picture thinking, letting teachers and learners lead, and the spread of maker work.

Make: Equity is a big, important word. You use the phrase “All Means All” in the opening of your book and you describe how you and your team took this idea to heart listening, watching, and trying new things. How have making practices helped you and your team develop a vision and plan for implementing equitable values-based learning and education?

Pam Moran: We decided along with a number of other educators in our district who were invested early on in creating maker education as a learning path that we could not let maker education become a focus reserved for just some learners. Instead, it became a design imperative that all learners be afforded maker experiences in our schools. This did not occur without growing the expertise of educators, providing resources to develop spaces and stock them with tools, and supporting strategies to ensure equity in participation by children of color, girls, and children with economically disadvantaged homes.

We began by creating spaces that were accessible to any learners in our schools who had an interest in learning to make something that they wanted to make. We also wanted to ensure that those spaces were not destinations that few educators would use with classes or allow individual learners to use. That’s why we built mechatronics labs in middle and high schools and music construction studios, maker spaces, and design labs in high school libraries.

We also worked to add maker spaces into middle and elementary school libraries and their multipurpose spaces. By locating our maker spaces near educators who could become champions of maker education, we found that there were teacher-makers everywhere. It didn’t take them long to start engaging children in maker work who traditionally were in intervention classes or under-presented groups such as females. Our initial team members valued that maker work enrich the lives and learning of all children and that led to changes in how our libraries ran, the kinds of opportunities students enrolled in career and technical education experienced, and shifts in classes from arts to history.

Make: Women as Maker Educators is another slice of the equity conversation. How do gender and identity relate to maker education and the ambition of learning systems (within school systems)?

PM: We have been fortunate to have incredible women in schools all over the school district who helped lead implementation of our maker education pathway. In many cases, they were makers in their personal lives and willingly helped us create test bed and prototype maker spaces and opportunities. Early on the librarians in one high school became champions of the maker movement in their school and the library to the point of having to address kids who were skipping class to be in the library where there were multiple maker spaces — a hacker space, design lab, music construction studio, game design area, and help desk where teens were able to assist with some of the maker tools available for use there.

The librarians in that school worked with teachers to figure out maker project focus for everything from math to history. Their work spread almost virally across the district to other librarians who began to add a variety of maker materials and tools from glue guns to 3D printers to sewing machines, and so much more into their libraries including maker resources that could be checked out to classes or even students for use with maker-infused work.

In many ways, women led the way in Albemarle from teachers who worked in the STEM wheelhouse to art teachers who morphed into STEAM educators. One of our favorite stories of a female role model was a French teacher whose father was a career shop teacher. She had learned to use shop tools literally at his knee. She turned two adjoining classrooms (we took down a wall of course) into a makerspace extraordinaire and it became one of the most popular classes for any student to take in that middle school. I can’t think of one school who didn’t have a female educator step up to and actively help us build out maker learning in every one of our schools. Because we didn’t attach maker work to any particular program but made it part of every and any class, we were able to provide multiple opportunities to build what we described as a maker mindset across all our schools. And, we never saw gender or identity as a barrier to making. Another favorite story is about one of our young high school teen makers working in a summer credit recovery program, “Design, Build, Launch.” She designed a suspended swing seat with a writing surface to use in classrooms so that kids could swing and work.