When setting off toward a new project, it is important to finely craft the project prompt. We might do well to consider Martinez & Stager's (2013) project considerations when planning:
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Purpose/Relevance: Will the project be personally meaningful?
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Time: How long will each project take? Is this enough time for students to explore and create?
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Complexity: How does this project combine different ways of thinking?
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Intensity: Does the project sustain student interest toward creating and refining their work?
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Connection: How will students connect and make use of peers, experts, tools, etc. in the project?
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Access: Which tools, instruments, etc. will students have access to? Do they need access to others? In what ways can tools scaffold their thinking?
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Shareability: To what degree are students able to share their work? How will they share it to and elicit feedback from their peers?
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Novelty: Will the project be interesting and provide students will new insights that are important to them?
Martinez and Stager (2013) suggest that good prompts are stated briefly and are ambiguous enough to allow students to answer a prompt in their own creative voice. Wiggins (1999) also supports the notion of leaving creative prompts relativly open and free of extensive teacher constraints.
Design-based prompts: Barron & Darling-Hammond (2008) note "that children learn deeply when they are asked to design and create an artifact that requires understanding and applications of knowledge” (p. 45). Martinez & Stager (2013) discuss the power of "making" with its product-centric thrust in their discussion of Papert's "constructionism." The design-based approach encourages students to not only create a product that exemplifies their understanding and take- aways from certain experiences, but also to dialogue with the product and other members of their design team as they refine their work in a way that is dynamic and organic (Rathgeber, n.d.).
Building on these ideas, for our experiences, let's focus on this design-based, problem prompt: What kind of self-explanatory, interactive installation controller can you create using Scratch?
How can projects and pilot-testing fit within your classroom? What are the pedagogical considerations for empowering these concepts in an arts classroom? In this section, we will explore some of these concepts in a broad manner. Broadly, because no single, static methodology or process would work universally for all classroom settings. Any process that a group follows will be unique to the group, project, and/or even day. A teacher should not impose any artificial process upon students (or even themselves) and be sure not to clutter the workspace with unneeded vocabulary and definitions of process points (Martinez & Stager, 2013).
In this section, we will discuss the following:
Projects
/pilots & ped
Group work allow students to not only socially construct knowledge, but also to experience and refine the skills of collective intelligence and distributed cognition. These two skills are essential to modern collaborative work in and out of school (Jenkins et al., 2009). Consider empowering students to self-select their groups (Kaschub & Smith, 2009) and to limit groups to three to five members to ensure that all students are actively participating, avoiding social loafing, and feeling that their ideas and contributions matter.
Barron & Darling-Hammond (2008) suggest that it is often useful for students involved in group work to have roles to fulfill. During initial experiences, the teacher may specify roles. As students become comfortable with group composing, the class can generate the roles themselves. Possible group roles might include (Rathgeber, n.d.):
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Scribe or recorder: Jots down important musical ideas and/or takes down reflections.
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Producer: Helps group members remain on task.
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Engineer: Handles all technological duties.
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Resource manager: Keeps track of resources used by the group.
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Researcher: Looks up solutions to group challenges via media, other groups, and teacher assistance.
Groups
"Any design model starts with an idea and cycles through planning, making, testing/ feedback, adjusting, and then back around to making again" (Martinez & Stager, 2003, loc. 1769-1770). These design cycles and their associated pilot-testing process allow students to not only consider more than the self-expressive aspects of their design-based works, but also the user end of the equation. This allows for dialogue on multiple levels (Birringer, 2008). The cycles of design, testing, and revision can occur incredibly fast or take a great deal of time. Many times, the cycles happen naturally as part of the creation and inquiry process. It can be very useful to build in spaces for student creators to elicit feedback from learning community members and others outside of the classroom. I informally refer to these as pilot testing, thought some tests involve elements of beta, white-box, and even black-box testing. Below is a model of the iterative design process. Notice the loop of rest/revision/design that stands in between the initial design and the final shared work. There is no way to know how many cycles a project or group will require. However, an educator must know when to encourage further testing or when to suggest that testing ceases with a specific group (Martinez & Stager, 2013).
Testing
What is the role of the facilitator or educator in a classroom empowered by design-based project work? The simple answer is that "it depends." A facilitator in these situations might fulfill the following roles:
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Questioner: Asking groups and members questions to not only see where they are at, but also to encourage them to approach things from different perspectives. See Allsup and Baxter's 2004 article, "Talking About Music: Better Questions? Better Discussion!" for some great ideas.
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Problem poser: Similarly, the facilitator helps students find problems and also provides students with reframing problems to work with.
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Instructor: Students may sometimes need direct instruction on how to use certain tools. Oftentimes, these situations emerge from student work and can be handled through mini-teaching. See Alex Ruthmann's 2007 article, "The Composer's Workshop: An Approach to Composing in the Classroom," for a great discussion of an adapted use of Calkins' "Writer's Workshop Model" in a music classroom.
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Model: An educator can act as a modeler of thought processes for students to try out.
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Manager: A facilitator might take on the role of resources manager; stocking shelves, hunting down tools, looking for quality tutorials, etc.
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Fill in: Occasionally, an educator might need to fill in for a missing group member or provide another set of hands when needed.
These are just some roles that a facilitator might take on. In the end, we have to do the job that is laid out in front of us and adapt to the needs of the students at any particular moment, without getting in their way.
Facilitator
Assess comes from the Latin work assidēre, meaning "to sit beside" (Mirriam-Webster online, 2014). The role of assessment in the classroom, especially in design-based work, is essential to helping students move beyond their current ability levels. Assessment occurs through posed problems and questions as much, if not more, than through traditional tests and rubrics. Yet, when students are "testing" their works, what assessment tools might we consider?
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Unobtrusiveness: Martinez & Stager (2013) suggest that the tools we use to assess should be as unobtrusive as possible. We might do well to consider how we can embed assessment naturally in the learning process via reflection and other metacognitive processes.
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Hybrid apprach: Höök, Sengers, & Anderson (2003) note that arts works that involve interactive user interfaces should be evaluated in a way that draws on arts criticism as well as human/computer interface assessment processes. We could consider how students could use this approach in assessing their own work and then use the reflection they generate for evaluation.
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Multidimensionality: Barron & Darling-Hammond (2008) relay that project work requires the use of assessments that are "multidimensional, representing the various aspects of a tack, rather than a single grade, and should be openly expressed to students and others in the learning community rather than kept secret" (p. 66). In these ways, assessments are placed out in the open as a way to establish professional norms and expectations of a project, rather than punitive or linearly focused rules for students to follow.
Assess
