Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond: The best activities in classrooms develop a lot of skills at one time, both cognitive and social-emotional. As we talk a lot about the complex thinking and problem solving that people need to be able to do in today’s society, in order to do that, you need the capacity to self-regulate, to manage your time and your emotions. You need the capacity of executive functioning, to organize how you approach things, to be metacognitive and reflective about your work. These things are developed in certain kinds of work simultaneously.

Cynthia Robinson-Rivers: Creative problem solving is a skill that we want our kids to have, and the makerspace is the place in the classroom where we’re cultivating that skill in our kids.

Carly: I’m supposed to make something, and it’s like supposed to help people, or like help fix a solution.

Teacher: All right, so let’s go to your design.

Carly: She’ll get your approval, so then you can start getting your materials and making.

Cynthia Robinson-Rivers: When you give kids autonomy and choice and really hands on materials, you have them applying the learning in a way that helps them to gain deep understanding.

Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond: If you give children a project to undertake, a passion that they have, that they want to find the answer to, they need to be able to organize themselves. They will be using critical thinking and problem solving, and as they undertake these tasks, they’re building both the social and emotional foundation, and they’re also building the cognitive abilities to demonstrate their learning.

Cynthia Robinson-Rivers: It’s almost second nature to them that you keep working on something.

Student: I had to turn this a little. It means it was going the wrong way, because it’s supposed to go in the middle–

Cynthia Robinson-Rivers: We send the message in everything we do that struggle and making mistakes are ways that you can learn. The makerspace is a physical place and an approach to problem solving that really lends itself to that notion of practice being important. As you work harder on it, you change it and improve it, it gets better.

Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond: Because of that, they will feel empowered, with a growth mindset, to continually get better in their learning.

Student: So time to take, times things apart.

Student: It’s called makerspace, but we call it take apart, so we can take it apart.

Cynthia Robinson-Rivers: When everything we do is building independence in kids, building their ability to be self-regulated, then you can release to time and interest areas where kids can go to the makerspace and stay there as long as they’d like, because you’ve built that ability to be self-regulated while doing that autonomous work.

Student: I’ll hold it like that.

Student: No, I got it. This is like a lever.

Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond: We see children as little as three years old spending thirty, forty minutes working on a project, regulating themselves, because it’s an environment that both teaches them how to do it, and is positive and affirming.