CHAPTER 4
B u ild H o w D o W e C r e a t e a S o lu t io n ? C lo se e n o u g h fo r th e a te r w o rk .
This is the part students have been waiting for and most teachers (including me, even now) have been secretly worried about: the build phase. The ship is at sea. The sails are billowing, the oars churning. Prepare the trash cans and warn the custodians because the learning is about to get messy in here. This chapter details how to run the build phase of the design process while also doing the work of school, including formative assessment. Saying students will build is easy, but actually having students build in a productive manner is not, and we will address that in this chapter. Take from this what works for you, and change it to meet your needs. Build from what I’ve built. This is the essence of being a design-minded teacher.
Le t G o o f C o n tro l The build phase of the design process is the scariest part, especially for teachers who are not used to stepping well back from their students while they work. I’ve spoken to many teachers about implementing design in their classrooms, and I’ve seen jaws tighten, pupils dilate, and hands shoot up with a full slate of clarifying questions ready to go. Their concerns and nerves are understandable because when I do it in my class, as I have done for years, I still get nervous about how it’s going to go. Build-based projects in the classroom are an exercise of trust in your students and require a lot of not knowing what will happen; the latter may be unusual for teachers who organize their lessons down to the minute. Build-based projects can work for you too. Teachers get lots and lots of messages about the need to control the classroom, from handing out papers to getting everyone’s attention to walking through the hallways in certain ways (Marzano & Marzano, 2015; Wong & Wong, 2018). However, aiming for a controlled classroom when eight groups of students are spread about the room, each building something different, is simply too difficult. This is a time you don’t want to simply rock the boat; instead, let the students rebuild the boat as they build their projects. 53
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