Reflect

Congratulations on completing your project! Before closing the book on this learning experience, create space to gather feedback, reflect on your experience, and share learnings with other educators.

Feedback
Consider facilitating a focus group or distributing an anonymous survey to your learners to gather feedback on their experience. Review the objectives of your project, and use their feedback to understand how the experience you designed met those goals. The questions you ask your learners can be specific to the characteristics you designed for. For example:

Student agency

• What parts of your project feel most unique or special to you? Why did you pick those parts?

Real world authenticity

• Before we started this project, what did you think of [topic]? What was your experience with [topic]? How has your thinking changed?

Improvement areas

• If we were going to do this project again, what would you do differently? What would you want me to do differently?

Highlights of the experience

• What parts of your project are you most proud of? Did you share about your project with your friends or family? What parts did you share?

Future work and opportunities
Take time to review the feedback from your learners and to reflect on your experience. Use these guiding questions to support your reflection:

• How can the learnings from this project be used to create future opportunities for making?
• How did this project support you in learning more about your learners and community?
• How did this project help you create new relationships or deepen existing relationships?
• Given the feedback you received, what would you do differently?
• What were your highlights as a facilitator?

Amplify your learnings and experiences
Your experience and learnings while designing this project has the opportunity to inspire even more educators to engage their learners in maker-centered learning. You can share your experience by generating a project guide to help other educators replicate your project and learn from your design experience. The Maker Learning @ Home cohort members created their project guide using this template. In addition to generating a project guide, you can also share your story by writing a blog or sharing on social media. For example, using the hashtags #MakerEd and #MakerLearning on Twitter would be one way to engage the broader maker educator community.

You might also consider presenting your learnings at a conference or other educator networking event. There are maker focused conferences, such as the Nation of Makers Conference or Maker Ed Convening, and informal opportunities like Edcamps or Maker Educator Meetups where you can connect with educators to share your experiences.