"Figuring it Out" as Making-Centered Learning

What does Figuring it Out look like for students in the classroom?

The easiest way to answer this question is: don’t give learners an answer.

What would it look like for you to not share the answer with students/learners but instead to respond with a question? Or maybe you already do this and the question is, how do you shift into Figuring it Out more deeply?

“Figuring it Out” as a learning tool is important because the most persistent challenges we are collectively grappling with as a society need thoughtful, creative, adaptable problem solvers.

When we give students the answer, we  take away a learning opportunity that could support them to become the thoughtful, creative, adaptable problem solvers we need.

But wait, before we dive in, who am I? I’m Aaron and I have been around Agency by Design Oakland for almost a decade now. I have been an Oakland resident for over 20 years, am a partner, a sibling, and my kiddo is a sophomore at Oakland High.  I have taught science, making, and robotics to high school students in San Lorenzo and Oakland, worked with many OUSD educators as a thought partner and coach, and I love being here, in Oakland, working with learners and leaders of all ages.

As someone who has been part of the maker-centered learning world for some time, I am now focusing on the question:

How can liberatory,learner-driven practices we’ve developed in maker-centered learning communities be applied outside of maker-centered spaces?(And where is it already happening?)

Image of orange, hand-drawn abstract shape with handwritten question in orange: “Questions: Where do we go from here? Next year planning?”

For example, what does it look like to apply maker-centered learning practices … 

• in a non-maker English or math classroom, or 

• in the visioning process for a non-profit, or 

• in the process of redesigning a workspace to be more human and more justice oriented?

In other words, how can we shift towards spaces and cultures of Figuring it Out? I’m sure it is not surprising, but each one of us has to figure out our own path into liberatory teaching and facilitation. 

When I started teaching, I learned about inquiry-based science and math teaching. Creating the inquiry-based classroom I aspired to was a continual practice. I improved every year I taught, with some learnings coming quickly and some taking months or years for me to understand. Every day I printed out the lesson plan I had typed out and wrote  “Less me, more them” on the top as a constant reminder to center my students more and more. While I didn’t feel the change from one day to the next, looking back after a year, two years, or five years, I could see more of the ideas and momentum of the class coming from my students.

Ways I supported students “Figuring it Out”:

• Understanding that “Figuring it Out” is a continuum - sometimes students learned through a cookbook lab, sometimes through a guided inquiry, and sometimes through an open inquiry.

  • Reminder: Just because students aren’t figuring out everything doesn’t mean they aren’t figuring other things out

• Focusing on where I wanted students to grapple with new ideas or skills and structuring the rest of the lesson or unit to support that focus.

  • Example: If students are going to grapple with measurement, I used a collaboration structure and vocabulary that were familiar.

• Noticing new opportunities for learning based on what was happening in each class and making them visible to students - and - working with students to bring the new opportunities they found to the whole class.

  • Example: when students are dissecting an object using Parts, Purposes, Complexities, they often discover parts of their object they don’t understand. Digging deeper into the design, science, engineering, and manufacturing of these components presents many learning and peer-to-peer teaching opportunities.

• Balancing student interest with frustration so students continue to dig in deeply and don’t give up.

  • This could look like: circulating and listening to group conversations and then sharing a small nudge or a question when needed by pointing at an idea the group recorded that is rich for exploration and saying, “huh, that idea is interesting, have you all talked about it yet?” and walking away.

What will you change tomorrow in a space you are facilitating so there is “Less me, more them” to shift power and create a space where learners are building agency?

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Photo of Aaron Vanderwerff

Author’s Note: I believe when we are all able to live into our dreams – relationships & connections will flourish, and together we will be able to solve our world’s unsolvable problems. In order to bring this world to reality, I work with facilitators, leaders, and organizations to align practices with values and to build human-centered communities focused on agency and belonging. By shifting power, this work contributes to a more just and equitable future.

Please reach out to Aaron at vanderwerff.aaron@gmail.com if you are interested in working together to move us towards our collective dreams.

Culture & Climate: A Fellowship for the Soul

By: Alia Ghabra, Programs Director

What happens when you pause to remember your middle school experience? Do you close your eyes and feel a smile crinkle around the corner  of your mouth and the edges of your eyes? Or does your heart start immediately palpitating as memories of bullying and othering storm your mind? This year, Agency by Design Oakland has partnered with OUSD’s Middle School Network to transform students’ middle school experience and cultivate a new narrative: one of joy, one of humanity.  

How do we create spaces of belonging and joy for our students - where we stand in shared humanity with them?  These spaces need to be modeled and experienced as adults first - so many of the adult spaces we are a part of are riddled with white supremacy culture: be on time, produce work even if you are tapped out, do not embrace complexity and questions - come up with answers and solutions.  AbDO created this space for educators, a space where people could feel human, could bring their whole selves into a professional learning community space and not feel extracted from.  We are all here for the kids AND we are humans and have our own needs as well.  

“I am reminded when I come to the fellowship that there are people who not only believe in humanizing education, but also those who are courageous enough to name the systemic change required for sustainable change.”

— Culture & Climate Fellow

Educators are magic. So much responsibility is put on educators - to be a part of every committee, to go above and beyond your work hours, to sacrifice your boundaries in order to serve.  We have all felt this pressure.  And it is often hard to find spaces within education that are free from this pressure and the expectations that are put upon us.  

Research shows that when you do not feel psychological safety, you are less likely to learn. When you feel joy and connection, you are primed to learn.  When you play and make, you are experiencing joy and connection.  This is how we orient ourselves to our adult learners as well - joy, experience and connection - are all essential building blocks to learning and being able to push one's thinking. 

This year has been full of ups and downs as we all learn how to do this work better, and in a different way.  The fellowship has leaned heavily on the work of National Equity Project and practiced using liberatory design cycles for equity, as well as Street Data, a town-based book about more human forms of data. Armed with these tools, Culture & Climate teams composed of teachers, social workers, Assistant Principals, RJ workers and therapists, from Montera, UPA, Roosevelt and Westlake, have conducted three design iterations starting with empathy interviews, to investigate joy and belonging at their schools sites. With this data, teams were able to iterate on different ideas to address cultivating joy at their sites.

Sound interesting? It is! 

We welcome you to join us at our exposition of learning  from these incredible middle school teams, and check out their learning journeys, how they have grappled with failure, and reframed those as opportunities for learning and creatively pushing forward.  At the Expo, you will learn about Agency by Design Oakland, hear ignite talks and listen to student panels, as well as get a chance to experience interactive displays from our middle school teams.

Join us at the Culture & Climate Expo on April 26 from 5 - 7 at the cafeteria in Montera Middle School to celebrate an amazing learning year. Please RSVP on Eventbrite.  Food and drinks will be provided. 

Is your school site interested in sending a team to be a part of next year’s OUSD middle school fellowship? If so, contact Alia at aliasuad@gmail.com.  

Looking at Systems: How Oakland Leads with Mutual Aid

By Susan Wolf, Disruptor-in-Residence; Facilitator/Coach, Agency by Design Oakland

“Mutual Aid exposes the failures of the current system and shows an alternative. The work is based upon the belief that those on the front lines of a crisis have the best wisdom to solve the problems, and that collective action is the way forward.” 

Dean Spade. Mutual Aid Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the next).  

Notes on finding opportunity, imagining how mutual aid could become responsive to harmful school systems. By Reina Sofia Cabezas

In late January, teachers, students, families and community in Oakland discovered district intentions to close and consolidate schools. People began to mobilize to voice their outrage and concerns about the process and the impact upon schools on the list, which the data clearly indicates, serve predominantly Black and Brown students and families. 

The collective action witnessed in the weeks that followed leaves us with a certain degree of hope. A critical mass of concerned and angry folx organized. Students took to the microphone at board meetings and organized walk outs. Two beloved educators staged a hunger strike that lasted for 20 days. In all my years I have never seen this and it moved me deeply. In my experience, teachers are always on the front lines caring deeply for the youth that they serve. Filling in for what is missing and dreaming beyond the fiscal crisis, which is always at hand.

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When we look around our city we find examples of how Oakland leads with mutual aid. 

Town Fridge @townfridge; 16 community fridge locations for food access.

Homies Empowerment independent grassroots community-based organization in East Oakland.

Onmi commons “is a community center run in a spirit of radical generosity, by a volunteer collective, where everybody is a leader. Home to nine Bay Area collectives with a shared political vision of more equitable commoning of resources and meeting human needs over private interests or corporate profit.”

M.H. first (Mental health first) @MHfirstOakland part of Anti Police Terror Project : “Our purpose is to interrupt and eliminate the need for law enforcement in mental health crisis first response by providing mobile peer support, de-escalation assistance, and non-punitive and life-affirming interventions, therefore decriminalizing emotional and psychological crises and decreasing the stigma around mental health, substance use, and domestic violence, while also addressing their root causes: white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism.”

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What would mutual aid—for teachers by teachers—look like?

During a daylong systems thinking workshop, we dug into Mutual Aid with our Agency by Design Oakland Teacher Fellows. After reading Mutual Aid: Non-Hierarchy in Practice, by Tammy Gan from the Bad Activist Collective, we used the thinking routine word-phrase-sentence to summarize key ideas.

Notes: Linh Linh Trinh

After sharing our word, phrase, sentence with table groups we went on a Location Hunt in pairs, looking for additional context and evidence of Mutual Aid. It was particularly compelling walking around the Park Day Campus, which, unlike the majority of Oakland Public Schools, is a lush, resourced independent school with an abundance of green garden spaces and imaginative nooks for sitting, playing and exploring outdoors. 

Afterwards, we dug deeper into the interwoven systems, collectively mapping our understanding using the Parts, People, Interactions thinking routine. We made connections with existing systems, and the people who interact with them, to envision better ways to meet our immediate needs, while transforming conditions that might serve to protect and take care of each other. We considered: 

• What are the parts of the existing school system that could benefit from non-hierarchical mutual aid? 

• Who are the people involved with identifying needs and responding to needs? 

• What are the interactions between the parts and the people?  

Mapping/listing Parts, People, and Interactions to better understand the potential with the complex system of Mutual Aid.

For the final phase, connecting mutual aid with school systems, we moved towards finding opportunity by imagining beyond our current systems. 

Imagine if is a thinking routine we use to move our thinking forward, toward possible solutions or toward future actions. 

How might we envision and value small and larger non-hierarchical support systems for ourselves, together, that are Effective, Efficient, Ethical and more Beautiful? 

• In this fellowship

• In our classrooms

• At our school sites 

After some collaborative thinking and dreaming, teachers transferred their big idea to colorful posters. Topics envisioned included redesigning food systems, or giving students more food choices in spaces that were more community friendly. Ideas included broadening lunchtime into community meals where students participate in the growing and preparation of food and continue to build community when breaking bread. Other versions of mutual aid “for teachers by teachers” included intentional structures for planning that moves across grade levels and school sites, allowing teachers to know a student’s learning history and their families better. 

Thinking about how to change the world together is an essential skill. It is humanizing and empowering. By practicing within our areas of influence we can learn how to mobilize making smaller changes with great personal impact, so that we can then expand outward into larger communities and topics of concern.

As I reflect upon the recent outpouring of mutual aid that I’ve witnessed over the past two months, in relation to OUSD’s proposed school closures, I am particularly struck by the love and aid surrounding the educators who went on a hunger strike. 

The support for Moses and André took many shapes. An altar with flowers, notes, and artwork, a DJ playing in the afternoons, chalk art, performances by indegenous peoples, local musicians and dance crews. Venmo accounts were shared, allowing the support web that surrounded them to purchase necessary items. It was clearly a moment in time where collective action took over to support and demand that the current process and system be reevaluated and disrupted with the truth and needs of the people. 

Susan Wolf is an artist, caregiver and educator.

“I am always practicing. How to take care of my spirit and body. How to age gracefully. How to be a good friend, an anti-racist, and advocate for equality and change. And most recently, how to step into a complex dystopian future without losing my heart or mind.”