Aspirations, not standards

Integrating MakerEd into education has to honor the expectation of benchmarks, if not standards. Even though I've been really plugged-in to social media for decades, I couldn't find a list of maker skill progressions anywhere. So, with the help of people all over the country, I made a Maker Skills Progression Google Sheet. It's a living document that still has some gaps. Please feel free to comment on it.

This rubric is a spectrum of mastery levels for particular skills. In other words, "Once you do this, then you can aim at this." It’s a tool for teachers to encourage progress, regardless of a specific student's starting point. It can be used for any age. For example, I’m probably a Level B in sewing and a Level D in soldering. We should not expect, let alone require, students to be all Es in all skills.

These aren't standards. (Not standards!) They are aim points and guides for individual classroom teachers. It should be perfectly acceptable for a given student to be a Level B in one skill and an E in another. The rubrics are strictly aspirational. Origami and 3-D design do not have to be for everybody.

Once students are at Level E, then that skill is just a tool they’re good with. After that, it’s totally about their content — what they make and its educational validity.

As a teacher, the levels let you know what quality level of craftsmanship to expect from a student. Theoretically, a student with B-level skills and a student with E-level skills could both get graded highly on a given project — if they have great content. Conversely, a student with E-level skills could get a low grade if they didn’t work up to their known level of craftsmanship.

It's a challenge to educate the profession that this is not a continuation of the way we’ve always done things. If a teacher is looking for standards boxes to check off, then we have not done our job right in educating them about how maker education works. Traditionally trained teachers often look for checkbox standards and we need to head them off. Early childhood development experts, physicians and occupational therapists can identify what specific hand-eye coordination and manipulative benchmarks are appropriate for a given age. Those evaluations lie outside of mainstream maker ed.