DATE: April 24, 2021 | 8:00 AM HKT (90 minutes)
TITLE: Making Learning: The Follow, Tinker, Make, Share Framework
FORMAT: Online
COST: Free for EARCOS member schools

Description: Neuroscience points to the benefits of learning-by-making (constructionism), but teachers and school leaders sometimes struggle with incorporating this method in their learning environments. Most of us simply aren’t trained in these kinds of learning approaches. Handily, the ‘Follow/Tinker/Make/Share’ framework (FTMS) is designed to ease this process, giving you a practical approach for successfully incorporating project-based learning, service learning, or maker learning in your school — regardless of whether you’re meeting in-person or remotely. And you can use this framework regardless of the discipline you teach or the demographic of your learners — you can even use it for professional development.

How does FTMS work? It begins with direct instruction (‘Follow’), with learners creating a flexible ‘platform’ project on which the later steps of the process build. They then proceed to guided practice (‘Tinker’) where they explore, test, and refine their understanding by modifying existing features and elements in this platform project. As part of this process, learners explain their choices, evaluate the changes others have made, and explore ways to integrate what they’ve seen or to make additional changes. These first two steps prime learners for independent practice (‘Make’), where they demonstrate their skills and understanding by building, exploring, inventing, and problem-solving, creating a new project that address a personal or local concern. This third phase also offers a genuine context for situated performance assessment. Finally, at the fourth and final stage, learners engage critically and perform authentic assessment by comparing their projects with those made by others, by submitting their projects to a competition, or by combining their projects with other projects to address a larger problem or to address the existing problem more robustly (‘Share’).

The first interactive session (of two), begins by outlining some of the research behind this framework for making and then introduces you to its structure (about 20 minutes). Then, using MIT’s Scratch programming language (a block-based coding language accessible to everyone — even non-coders), we start with a ‘platform’ Follow project and then Tinker with it, sharing our results to give everyone a feel for how the FTMS process works in practice (about 30 minutes). We conclude by launching a project designed around teaching in the age of Covid — the project that will form the basis for the second workshop as well. We’ll introduce a ‘platform’ process and then begin the Tinker phase, preparing you to develop a customized project for your school (about 30 minutes). An online portal will provide opportunities for discussion, sharing, and collaboration between the workshops.

DATE: May 8, 2021 | 8:00 AM HKT (90 minutes)
TITLE: Designing Learning: Building Follow/Tinker/Make/Share Projects
FORMAT: Online
COST: Free for EARCOS member schools

Description: This workshop will focus on the projects generated during the Tinker and Make phases, giving you an opportunity to share the projects (either formal or informal, school or community based, learner directed or staff-development directed) that you’ve developed for your own classes or institutions according to the Follow/Tinker/Make/Share (FTMS) framework (around 60 minutes). This second workshop is designed to provide every participant with a project that makes sense structurally, disciplinarily, and culturally within the contexts of your own classes and institutions.

During the concluding part of this workshop, we’ll offer a series of specific guidelines you can use to generate your own ‘platform’ projects and recreate FTMS experiences for your schools, colleagues, and learners. We’ll also offer opportunities to ask questions and comment on your experience of the FTMS Framework (around 30 minutes).

Many people attend conferences and witness energizing presentations and ideas, but leave with little that lasts or translates into their own milieux. Our goal with this two-workshop series is to give you a guided, hands-on experience that provides you with the support you need to make meaningful projects and a practical, productive tool that you can carry back to your institutions and really use.