Resources: Effective Teaching
Teaching and pedagogy books that support maker education
- Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education – David Perkins outlines seven practical strategies that educators can use to create more authentic learning experiences.
- Engaging Children’s Minds: The Project Approach – By Lillian Katz and Sylvia Chard
- Young Investigators: The Project Approach in the Early Years – By Judy Harris Helm and Lillian G. Katz.
- The Project Approach: Managing Successful Projects (Book 2) – By Sylvia Chard
- Loose Parts – Three beautiful books on teaching with found materials by Lisa Daly and Miriam Beloglovsky.
- Choice Time: How to Deepen Learning Through Inquiry and Play, PreK-2 – Timeless advice for organizing classrooms for project-based learning and making by Renee Dinnerstein. Suitable wisdom for any grade level.
- Purposeful Play: A Teacher’s Guide to Igniting Deep and Joyful Learning Across the Day – Lessons, classroom setups, and helpful tools and charts to infuse play across the curriculum.
- Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools – By Pam Moran, Ira Socol, and Chad Ratliff. The book outlines how a large public school district implemented progressive project-based learning in all its schools.
- I Won’t Learn From You and Other Thoughts on Creative Maladjustment – By Herbert Kohl
Research
- Flipping the Flipped Classroom – This study found that students who were allowed unstructured time with a scientific simulation before reading the textbook or watching explanatory videos did better on tests than students who read the texts or watched the videos before exploring.
- Teaching for meaningful learning: A review of research on inquiry-based and cooperative learning – “Decades of research illustrate the benefits of inquiry-based and cooperative learning to help students develop the knowledge and skills necessary to be successful in a rapidly changing world.”
- Teaching teachers to integrate design and PBL into math and science – An action research project following elementary teachers who were learning how to integrate design and project-based learning into math and science found significant results: “Their students became active learners and problem solvers. Indeed, their critical thinking skills, as evidenced by their ability to pose problems, seek answers, and test solutions, expanded and extended to other curriculum units. Their confidence increased, as they had to take responsibility for their own learning, becoming capable of researching, and finding answers to questions they posed for themselves. The questions became more complex and interrelated. No longer were curriculum areas isolated; mathematics, reading, writing and science are connected through design. One of the most significant results from units centered on design is the benefit it has for inclusion students or students with special needs. All of the teachers who found that their inclusion students benefited from the experience, in ways they had not from traditional classroom learning activities, realized that the design process enfranchises a variety of learning styles, from the traditional academic instruction to the creative and eclectic.”