FTMS: A Framework for Making Learning Better (and Making Better Learning)
By: William Rankin
Tags: Education, Education Reform, Teaching, Learning, Project Based Learning

FTMS: A Framework for Making Learning Better (and Making Better Learning)

How Follow / Tinker / Make / Share goes beyond the ordinary to help learners grow

Image adapted from a photo by leroy bargas on Unsplash

To be honest, this didn’t start out to be it’s own article…. It’s actually the second half of this one which sets up everything you’ll read here. But when that article approached the irretrievable tl;dr limit of 4,000 words, I was wisely advised to split it up. If you find yourself wanting more setup, a quick trip there will help. Don’t worry; I promise not to go anywhere while you check it out. If you already read that or don’t feel a trip back there is necessary, great. Let’s get on with the show….

If you’ve arrived here, it’s hopefully because you’re either a fan of learning-by-making or are learning-by-making curious. As I’ve written previously, this approach is an important antidote for the stultifying and toxic mix that passes as ‘standardized learning.’ However, despite a raft of research and supports for integrating challenge-based, service, and maker learning, many teachers and schools are hesitant to incorporate these approaches — at least for most learners. Perhaps those in elite schools or ‘accelerated’ programs will get a chance to experience learning-by-making, but most learners simply won’t.

That’s a shame.

When it comes down to it, this isn’t because most teachers are uncertain of the benefits of learning-by-making or haven’t heard colleagues sing its praises at conferences. It’s because they just don’t have the time necessary to develop and integrate projects in an already overflowing schedule. And the pressure of standardized exams makes adopting this approach seem even less advisable. Giving learners information to memorize for the test seems so much more expedient.

But it’s also less likely to ‘stick’ — and it takes dramatically more energy from teachers to keep the wheels turning. Schools that have embraced project- and challenge-based learning, on the other hand, have seen dramatic improvements in almost every measure — often to their own surprise. If schools can just overcome the initial friction, learning-by-making proves itself every time.

That’s one of the main reasons colleagues and I designed the Follow / Tinker / Make / Share (FTMS) Framework. By giving teachers a flexible, robust structure that works for in-person or remote teaching, regardless of the discipline or age of the learners, we hope to smooth the path for integrating learning-by-making in schools — and beyond. Those of us who have used this framework to guide learning have found we spend far less time trying to overcome learners’ inertia and more time doing what we love about teaching: guiding, engaging, and interacting. As we see with other forms of project-based learning, the educational, disciplinary, and community benefits of using FTMS are far-reaching.

So how does it work? Like this:

Follow · This beginning phase uses step-by-step procedures and direct instruction to provide learners with the foundational experience of creating a ‘platform’ project. The remaining phases build on this platform, shaped, supported, and ‘sheltered’ by it. The Follow project provides learners with the opportunity to ‘undo’ and start over should something go wrong during the Tinker phase, and that can help learners feel safer to explore and experiment in the later phases. Projects here may not seem too different from the projects many teachers already assign — and this makes the FTMS framework relatively easy to integrate into existing learning contexts. The first important difference is that ‘platform’ projects in Follow serve as a beginning rather than an end. In this phase, a teacher might give learners step-by-step assembly directions, illustrated with images or diagrams and supported by basic materials. Or a teacher might give learners a research framework that outlines how to gather specific information from sources. Or a teacher might provide a skeleton for gathering and preparing media — movie clips, sketches, parts of a document, etc. In every case, the purpose of this first phase is to help every learner participate in producing a functionally or structurally similar ‘platform’ project. This shared initial experience will also serve as the basis for forming a community, which leads to two other critical differences between ‘platform’ projects here and the sorts of projects teachers traditionally assign. Crucially, the project here is not a ‘test,’ so learners are encouraged to use whatever resources they need in order to complete it: asking for help from fellow learners, teachers, or others or seeking information or resources online. All of these are helpful ways to jump-start community. The final difference is the most significant of all: ‘platform’ projects in Follow are designed to incorporate multiple gaps or ‘stubs’ — unfinished aspects that will invite multiple kinds of experimentation during the Tinker phase. This is vital for generating ‘specializations,’ making learners’ diverse choices and experiments into a valuable community resource. This diversity also makes the community more robust and flexible. Key words: follow, assemble, copy, collate, mimic, repeat, do, gather.

Tinker · This phase builds on the Follow phase’s platform by encouraging learners to experiment in small ways, providing for initial exploration and personalization. Learners aren’t thrown into the deep end of having to create their own projects and don’t find themselves bewildered by the challenge of the ‘blank page.’ All they have to do here is make small alterations to the details already included in the ‘platform’ project — perhaps building into one of the gaps or ‘stubs’ intentionally left in the ‘platform.’ “What happens if I change the positive values to negative?” “What if I change the transitions between the clips and reorder them?” “Would adding another LED make this better?” “What happens if I move the support 3 cm further toward the edge?” As they make these small changes, learners begin to test and extend their understanding. The small adjustments and low-level refinements are the beginnings of what Piaget called ‘schemata’ — the nodes of internalized understanding that characterize knowledge development. This phase offers learners a chance to see and understand the relationships between core functions and structural elements by watching how incremental changes affect them. At the beginning of Tinker, every learner’s project should look and work nearly identically; after this phase, everyone’s project should look and function somewhat differently — although similarities will persist. In this phase, teachers might ask learners to “adjust,” “modify,” “see how,” “try,” or “repurpose,” but they should also welcome learners to take their experimental tinkering in whatever direction they choose. And some learners will go beyond these small changes, incorporating new functions, building new structures, or applying the project to new situations. As long as they’re basing their work on the ‘platform’ and exploring and developing understanding, they’re on the right path.

The diversity of their approaches in this phase makes learners more valuable to the community. One learner might focus on structural changes; another on usability; a third on aesthetics. Since all projects have the same starting point, anyone can incorporate or adapt the changes others are making — and can seek help based on the diverse expertise being developed. So the Tinker phase isn’t just about making little changes and trying small experiments: it’s also about forming what the Wenger-Trayners call a ‘community of practice.’ As such, this phase asks learners to think about and articulate what they’re doing, forming interpersonal and communication skills as they develop expertise. Describing to others why they’ve made a choice and what they see as useful is equally critical for constructing knowledge, fluency, and ‘literacy,’ so evaluation and articulation form an important second prong of the Tinker phase. Asking learners to evaluate and explain — and then to incorporate what they’ve heard and seen from others as they explore, expand, and evolve their own projects — is a central part of tinkering. The key is to support learners as they begin personalizing projects to fit their own interests and growing knowledge. In other words, they transform the ‘platform’ to fit their needs rather than transforming themselves to fit its parameters. Key words: change, extend, reorganize, play, propose, modify, repurpose, explore, translate, try, evolve.

Make · Some educators may view this phase (and the next) as less necessary or relevant, but they’re vitally important for learning and developing agency. Having acquired a core level of knowledge, skills, and experience in the Tinker phase, learners are now ready to try out their ‘mental models’ through self-directed application. In this phase, they do so by designing new features, building new resources, or solving new challenges, beginning the process that characterizes mature engagement with a discipline or knowledge domain. To engender this level of independent practice, teachers should help learners focus on larger challenges rather than basic construction or incremental changes: “invent a solution to transport water between two points without evaporating,” “design a sensor pack to help athletes train,” “make a documentary about local civic issues,” or “use your research to create an assistive solution for someone with limited mobility.” Learners might address a challenge of their own choice or might all be asked to address the same challenge, but in either case, the teacher should provide support rather than direction. Critically, the Make phase should build on the knowledge, skills, and concepts developed in the previous phases while introducing significant expectations for learner self-direction, creativity, and agency. The preparation and elements introduced in earlier phases should lead to this new project. This makes the FTMS framework ideal for introducing learning-by-making into a formal learning context — an opportunity for learners to apply their expertise to real-world challenges. Because of the Make phase’s emphasis on self-directed creation, this stage also offers the first real opportunity for teachers to assess learners’ skills, abilities, and knowledge. In the Follow phase, teachers could only really assess how well learners followed directions — a very low bar. In the Tinker phase, the guidance and scaffolding built into the ‘platform’ provided limited insights into learners’ ability or mastery. Projects generated at the Make phase, however, demonstrate a range of important factors associated with independent practice: depth of knowledge, synthetic ability, skill level and fluency, conceptual understanding, adaptability, and organizational skills. All of these function as valuable indicators for project-based assessment, but they’re also key factors in learners continuing to incorporate and use their knowledge in their daily lives outside of the learning context. Key words: invent, solve, imagine, create, design, build, establish, fashion, make.

Share · The final phase is designed to emphasize collaboration and communication, situating learning through both social and metacognitive activities. This phase offers learners opportunities to evaluate the choices they’ve made in the Make phase through critique and review by others, mirroring and closing the feedback loop begun during Tinker. Here, learners might receive feedback from fellow-learners and teachers within their learning context or from those outside — perhaps even people from other cities or countries. The Share phase is far more than “show and tell,” however. In this phase, learners might submit their projects to a competition, providing opportunities for assessment under fabricated or real-world conditions; they might critically compare their projects to others that address similar challenges; or they might combine their projects with others to create a ‘mashup’ of best features, to address a challenge more robustly, or to respond to a more significant challenge. Critical thinking is essential in this phase, and learners can be encouraged to develop and consider criteria for assessing their own efforts and the efforts of others as part of their work here. A teacher might design a special ‘obstacle course’ to test projects — or better still, might have learners do so, articulating why they designed the obstacles they did. A teacher might encourage learners to evaluate all the features of projects to produce a single ‘best-of-the-best’ project, encouraging learners to establish assessment criteria and argue for why one feature should be chosen over another. Or a teacher might simply have learners demonstrate their projects to one another, asking them to compare and contrast their various solutions. “Post your project to an online community and record others’ responses to it,” “see whose project performs best in this trial challenge,” “choose the features you would include if you were going to manufacture this project,” and “design criteria experts could use to evaluate similar projects” are all ways to encourage development of social intelligence, collaboration, and metacognitive evaluation in this phase. Given these activities, this phase also lends itself to performance and content evaluation, offering teachers an active means for assessing the understanding, applied skills, self-regulation, and interpersonal skills of learners. By integrating assessment into project-based creative practice, teachers can gain a more accurate sense of learners’ knowledge and fluency than that afforded by more traditional, information-based assessments and tests. And the experience of real-world critical practice better prepares learners for evaluative experiences when they use their expertise outside of the learning context. Key words: compare, consider, coordinate, collaborate, compete, combine, evaluate, assess.