Teachers’ Facilitation of Students’ Making and Maker Mindset in the Elementary Classroom

One of the essential pillars of maker education is the maker mindset, which is a framework of thinking, a can-do attitude, resiliency, and persistence in the face of challenges. In formal educational contexts, the teacher’s role is indispensable in nurturing the student’s maker mindset, but research is scarce on how teachers facilitate such a mindset in classroom settings. Through a multilayered analysis of video data (30 hours) from a longitudinal, open-ended, elementary school maker project implemented by two craft teachers, the study aimed to unfold teachers’ facilitation patterns to understand how maker projects, in general, and students’ maker mindset, in particular, can be facilitated in formal education. The macro-level analysis produced a temporal visualization of teachers’ facilitation actions, revealing the general patterns of their verbal and embodied facilitation throughout the project. Their facilitation was tailored to the students’ needs, shifting from an instructive to a more reflective facilitation. At the meso-level, four significant events were selected, each representing the facilitation of one of the maker mindset constructs: creativity, collaboration orientation, resilience/growth mindset, and willingness to tinker. Through a micro-level analysis of the selected events, specific facilitation moves supporting the maker mindset constructs were identified. The findings indicate that successful formal education maker projects require careful, timely, verbal and embodied facilitation, and that the maker mindset can be considered an interactional process that merges and evolves through constant interaction among students, teachers, and the materials and tools of making.