Educator Resources

Maker Educator Books

Understanding by Design 
Grant Wiggins & Jay McTighe

Wiggins and McTighe discuss some fundamental principles of instructional design that shift the focus away from individual activities to focus on broader “enduring understandings.” This shift often brings meaning to activities that may sometimes seem arbitrary or disconnected to students. By using what they call “backward design,” instructional designers can focus on the outcomes of learning first and work backward to design instructional experiences to get students there. This text also introduces the concept of “essential questions,” questions or prompts that help students uncover misconceptions or gaps in their understanding which can provoke curiosity for a learning task.

Checking for Understanding 
Nancy Fisher Douglas Frey

This text introduces strategies for using formative assessment in the classroom. In order to effectively differentiate instruction and to create tasks that match students’ ability level, teachers must first know where they are starting from. Teachers must continue to check student understanding as they progress through a unit to be able to make adjustments as needed.

Teaching Reading in Middle School
Laura Robb

This is a great overview of the Workshop Model of Instruction. While its focus is on reading instruction, the tools and strategies can easily be adapted to any PBL classroom and any content area.

Mindset
Carol Dweck

Dweck has long argued that how a student views his own success is a key factor in his future learning success. A student who believes he is successful because of natural talent will tend to take fewer risks and will respond negatively to setbacks in his learning. Conversely, a student who believes he is successful because of her effort will be more likely to take learning risks and to view setbacks as a natural part of the learning process. This is very closely related to what Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in Outliers.

Punished by Rewards
Alfie Kohn

Kohn has studied student motivation for decades, and his work has led him to the conclusion that grades are actually doing damage to students and the way that they learn. Extrinsic motivators, argues Kohn, de-motivate the student behaviors most closely aligned with learning.

The Global Achievement Gap
Tony Wagner

Pedagogy based on constructivist theory often gets a bad rap because it can be viewed as lacking rigor. When the agenda is determined largely by the student, disengaged students take this as an opportunity to set the bar very low for themselves. Additionally, many teachers have a very difficult time assessing work that is creative in nature in a way that seems equitable. One of the things I like about this book is that it challenges us to look at rigor through a lense that holds students to very high standards, which they participate in setting.

Getting Started in Electronics
Forrest Mims

This is a been a standard primer for introductory electronics for many, many years. It’s every bit as good today as it was when I first saw it.

Invent to Learn
Sylvia Martinez & Gary Stager

This book is a great overview of constructivist theory and its intersections with design, invention, and fabrication.

Make: Electronics: Learning Through Discovery
Charles Platt

I really like the way that this book gets into some of the fundamental workings of different electronic components in an easy to understand way.

Getting Started with Arduino
Massimo Banzi

This book comes with some of the Arduino starter kits. It’s written by the inventor of the Arduino board and is a great basic introduction to Arduino, microcontrollers in general, and a variety of concepts related to working with microcontrollers.

Adventures in Raspberry Pi
Carrie Anne Philbin

This book is a great, step-by-step introduction to many features of the Raspberry Pi microcontroller.

The Invent To Learn Guide to 3D Printing in the Classroom: Recipes for Success
David and Norma Thornburg & Sara Armstrong

This is a short, but very good introduction to 3D printing concepts. It offers a basic overview of several popular and free design tools and gives you some great ideas for beginner projects.

3D Modeling and Printing with Tinkercad -- James Floyd Kelly