Teacher's Conference 2013 'Seven Ways to Promote Creativity in the Classroom' by Carol Read

creativity is to do with thinking differently thinking out-of-the-box and I think it's something to which we all aspire as teachers for ourselves as well as for our learners and it doesn't make any difference whether we're teaching preschool kindergarten primary secondary adults tertiary students or business the same things applies but at the same time I think creativity is not something that's always valued in the contexts and schools that we work in and here's the little story to illustrate this and this story is about a boy called Eddie at school and he's a bit of a misfit and he's a bit difficult and actually he drives the teachers mad and this is the kind of thing that Eddie does okay because one day the teacher and says to Eddie and well how many days of the week begin with the letter T and Eddie thinks and thinks and things and the teacher thinks oh come on come on and eventually Eddie says - and the teacher says well then what are they and Eddie says today and tomorrow and then the teacher says well here's a little maths questions Freddy I'll catch him out this time how many seconds are there in a year quick as a flash Eddie replies 12 the teacher looks yes January the 2nd February the 2nd March the second and so on the teacher thinks ok well here here's a little spelling test Eddie can you tell me please how many ds are there in Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer Eddie thinks and the teacher can see him computing in his head and suddenly goes a hundred and three and the teacher says how do you get that d-dad okay that that story is not my story it's a story quoted actually by Nick Owen in his book the magic of metaphor and it originally comes from a story by John grinder in the book called writing the educational conveyor belt and he actually uses that story to show how so often in educational contexts there is a culture of right answer affirm rather than thinking differently and being creative and creativity of course to do with new novel fresh ideas artifacts products solutions to problems or even the formulation of problems themselves okay and actually when we think of that we might like to look at this quotation here creativity that something that is increasingly needed in our educational context that we work in and if you read this quote here you might think yes this comes from a book on digital literacy digital skills in the 21st century I'm not going to read it out but the importance of creativity I think there it's obvious but in fact it's not from a 21st digital literacy skills book it's by Jean Piaget and this was in an interview at the end of his life towards 1980 there's just one thing that I've added to that quotation and that is the word the word and women because unfortunately although were almost 90 percent female audience here we weren't kind of in in the running in those days and the end of the 19th the 1970s but I think what Piaget was saying then is just as relevant as it is today I think we sometimes think because of the digital revolution it's because of technology that we need more creativity and indeed it it's true that technology provides us with the tools and the indiv and the possibilities for individualizing our learning and our students learning and leading to more creativity but this is something that has been important for many years and to start off with what we need to have is engagement engagement of our students that this for every teacher is the starting point and engagement is to do with that involvement and intensity of learning that leads to observable progress that the lovely quote by Griffith and amber and bears that talk about engagement as being the fertile soil from which sustainable learning grows so it's to do with that emotional intensity and involvement and when we have that of course that leads on to flow flow which I'm sure many of you will recognize if the concept developed by csikszentmihalyi originally in the context of working with sportsmen and to do with sports performance and flow is to do with harnessing the emotions in the pursuit of a task and a particular outcome it's that kind of internal feeling I want to do this I can do this I'm going to succeed this motivation from the inside it's the kind of thing that actually years ago when my own daughter was at school she would say to me mummy I'm on a roll with my essay okay so motivation from the inside rather than the carrot-and-stick of rewards and of course when we get that kind of flow this is the most fertile environment for creativity for creative thinking as I said to do with the creation the novel the fresh original ideas outcomes products artifacts and I would say that that is one side of creativity and the other side of course is that those products and outcomes are valued within the context that they are produced okay so seven pillars of creativity and this is what I would like us to have a look at now and these I think are relevant for all of us as teachers no matter who or where we're teaching these seven pillars are my take on it if you like from the literature that I've read so I'm sure and that you'll have things that you would also like to add so we may end up with you know 21 pillars by the end of the day after you've been to all the other lovely sessions at this conference okay pillar number one is to do with building up positive self-esteem if our learners feel insecure if they're lacking confidence if they don't feel that they have it in them to do the kinds of tasks and activities that we ask them to do then this is not going to be a very conducive environment for creative thinking and when we think of self-esteem I think we need to think of the five components of self esteem those which are very well known and but we'll just sort of reiterate them anyway first of all a sense of a sense of security okay I feel safe in this learning environment a sense of identity I know who I am here in this context a sense of belonging I belong here a sense of purpose I know why I'm doing this and a sense of competence now of course and a sense of competence I know I can do this now of course there are masses and masses of things that we can do to promote self-esteem in a classroom context and just think that are probably very familiar to you the idea of think-pair-share which was actually first developed by pork again in 1994 the idea that you give your learner's an opportunity to think about something to share it in a private context with someone next to them with pears and then to share so it gives the rehearsal opportunity and things to do with learning routines we know what we do in this environment and actually if you're familiar with the work of Joan Jerome Bruner learning routines not only create that feeling of safety but also actually move learning on considerably things like having a negotiated and contract for learning we can also do little activities to get our learners feeling positive about themselves and their identity so actually before we just have a look at that and looking at this which will be very familiar this is Maslow's pyramid from 1943 ok and these days some of you have probably seen the thing going around on Facebook that has actually Wi-Fi at the bottom underneath all those needs ok but in a school context physiological NEADS are the children did the children have breakfast have they got water and have they had enough sleep is the sun shining straight in their eyes and so on safety needs do they feel safe in this environment are there are there rules and procedures in place to ensure safety and of course these days we would also include Internet safety in that social needs do they feel valued do they feel respected do they feel cared about have they at least one friend in their environment that they're in esteem needs we've talked about the five components of esteem and then at the top of the pyramid this self-actualization which includes of course the creative potential so we need to have all of these in place and self-esteem is certainly one that we as teachers work with crucially but that lovely say a quote in Jane Arnold's book on effect that parents have the key to children's self-esteem but teachers have a spare one okay so let's have a look at a couple of activities of the kinds of things we can do and this activity in magic combs at the beginning of the year it's actually a lovely activity to do and what this gets our students doing is thinking about the positive qualities in themselves so what you may like to do is either give the learners or get them to draw themselves okay a comb with the different prongs okay with enough prongs for their name okay and then to think of their name for example my name's Carol so I'm going to start with a C there and I'm going to think of a positive adjective positive notice not negative that describes me gonna think CC Carol kukaku mmm caring maybe ok so then I'm going to write it there ok we don't have time to do the whole activity but with the person next to you could you just now think of the first letter of your name and a lovely positive adjectives to describe yourself off you go off you go okay if you don't mind if you don't mind I'll use my I use my tambourine to bring us back together which I actually use with my children as well okay so what we do with our lovely magic combs we can make a beautiful display on the board and so on and actually if we're not feeling good about ourselves we just get our magic combs and comb our hair okay and it makes us feel much better so a little activity like that another generic one which is wonderful for self esteem is circle time and I would like to say here that very often anything with circles we're immediately thinking preschool and primary but actually the circle time is a wonderful way of creating self-esteem creating that sense of belonging that sense of identity that people are listening to you and I'm showing you this because it is generically it works right from preschool where maybe we're saying I like ice cream or ice cream you know we may even be doing it at word level through to primary through to secondary you know for me the the worst things about global warming are dot dot dot we can also use it in a teacher education context for example the most important principle in teaching young learners is dot dot dot okay so the the basic rules of circle time is that you complete a sentence and you take turns to do it round a circle and if you've got nothing to say you say pass and if you can't think of what you want to say in English you say it in your own language and if you're doing it with children who need something physical to mark the term taking in the circle and then you pass a ball or something else like that around around the circle okay so circle time another and little activity there so self-esteem then pillar number one really important the second pillar model creativity yourself this is true of any skill and quality that we want to teach or build up in others we need to do it ourselves it's the same for example with respect with politeness in the classroom and with creativity as well and I think you know we can actually be creative in small ways it doesn't need to be the big creativity all the time but a lot of the little riru teen things we can just add a twist to and make them a bit creative for example lining up in a school context that's something that children do probably three or four times a day let's just give it a little extra trick why don't we line up in order of height from small to tall in order of month of birthday in order the other way round from tall we can think of different ways to line up the order of colors of the rainbow in what we're wearing and so on in terms of register you know often we have to take the register at the beginning of our lesson this is very time-consuming and it can also be very boring as well so let's make it into a little learning opportunity a lovely one that I learnt recently was where the teacher had the register and each student had the name of a country okay and when the register was read the teacher read out the name of the country and the students report respond with the name of the capital city okay and then they say changed countries and moved on so in that way actually the taking the register became a geography lesson the children when were learning the names of capitals we could do it for example in our ELT context with the names of animals and the response is the name of the baby animal so we have horse fold cow calf and so on we can be creative in the way that we mark our work our children's our learners work sometimes we do it sometimes they do it sometimes itself it's its self correction and so on we can also be creative in the way that we get children children's attention and actually get them to to be involved in the choice of how we do it you know do you prefer that I use it or shall I just sit my mouse off or when I stand like this you know I'm quiet and so on okay and classroom management we can be creative in lots of different ways here's a little example here using Nora noise ometer a noise ometer okay in our classrooms and which actually learners love this and you what happens when you do something like this is they end up being the managers of their peers and rather than you the other thing with creativity of course we want to have lots and lots of little creative ideas up our sleeves as we say in English here's a little one now adapted from that game you know the one paper-rock-scissors okay this is one to do with the expressions okay so can I just ask everyone to show me a sad face sad face lovely okay could you show me a mad face and could you show me a glad face okay lovely now could you just identify your partner okay and just turn your back slightly to your partner and I'm going to say in just a moment I'm going to say 1 2 3 and I want you to choose one of the paces faces and turn to your partner with that face everybody ready think of your face are you sad glad or mad 1 2 3 go okay okay lovely so you might have them you might have three three turns to see the score you get out of three and then of course actually we might have a circle-time I feel sad because dot I feel mad because okay and they could actually we could go on with that okay creative activities and what I wanted to choose for this session is something that works generically at different levels and so I'm going to show you here the idea of learning grids these work at all different levels except of course children who are too young to understand the concept of coordinates okay and this I've adapted from the Griffiths and Burns book on engaging learning and learning grids are a wonderfully flexible tool for us to use no matter who or what we're teaching and the way that they work is like this and you work in pairs okay and you have a dice with numbers on preferably ones like these which don't clutter and make a lot of noise in the classroom they're made out of foam or paper okay and so what we do in pairs is that the learners take turns to roll the dice one for the horizontal axis and one for the vertical axis and they land on a square and do something with it now this one is a landing grid for creating a story okay and of course before this happens there probably will have been input of another story for example say detective story genre that the learners have been working on and so what they do is work together they take turns to throw their dice for example you know the first learner say 3 and the second learner throws and gets a three so where they landed heart so then they have to think of the opening line of their story with the word heart or that has something to do with heart okay for example they think together anything when when she saw the man in the doorway her heart stopped for example okay and then they go on okay you haven't got dice but with your partner now would you just like to one of you choose a number on the horizontal axis the other one a number on the vertical axis see where you land speech bubbles direct speech questions a question in the story and make up the next sentence of the story okay off you go [Applause] [Applause] my tambourine not working very well okay we can't spend more time on that and much as I'd love to because we need to race on but I think you can get the idea and of course your students cheat if they land on a square that they can't think of anything for their story but I don't mind if that if they cheat if actually what they're engaged in is producing the story so learning grids powerful for stories they're powerful for many other ways a little example now with learning grids used for clear ok content and language integrated learning that a lot of you are involved in I know and so in this grid we it would work in the same way so once you've taught the children the idea of grids they immediately know what to do but here you would land on two different bugs imagine that you've been doing you know in your content lesson you've been learning about different kinds of bugs you've been classifying you you've been learning the features and what the students would then do is land on to bugs and compare them so it would be both the X and the y have got wings and both the the ladder and can slide for example or it could be more complicated than that you know the X is is good for Gardens whereas the isn't so you can see the kind of potential there and the task would be defined by the teacher okay I want you to come up with ten comparisons between these insects and what happens with this grid there in terms of motivating learning which is all this conference is about you have this kind of randomness in where the dice is going to land this leads to curiosity if everybody in the room wrote a story using the previous grid that I just showed you all the stories would be different so this kind of gives it an extra dimension it also presents a challenge okay and the students are working together genuinely cooperatively and in the case of here of course we're recycling their knowledge and what they've learnt about these little animals but in the case of the story they're using their imagination and creativity okay so learning grids something that something there another thing to do with generic activity types that I'm just going to show you very very quickly and it's based on this game Top Trumps okay which I've got a little set of cards here you can't see them but there's some examples up there this is a trading game that was popular in the UK years and years ago and it's had a kind of it's being rediscovered and these are examples of cards actually you know specifically for elt learners but where the creativity comes in and these cards by the way there are loads of different activities that you can use with them but what happens here is that you have the various categories and criteria for each animal in this case for example you know you have weight at Birth a hundred and thirteen kilos in the game and the students divide the cards between them and a partner or in or within a group they turn their cards face up and choose a category that they think is the highest they then say you know wait a hundred and thirteen kilos and if no one else has an animal which has that weight they win all the cards okay that's fine that's a game and you can exploit the little Tec where the creativity comes in is when we actually get our students to think of those categories and design the cards themselves not with all that text you might do the text separately but so for example remembering back to the the bugs and insects that we looked at just a little while ago the learners may decide the categories appeal colorful good for the garden dangerous and so on and they give the ratings out of 10 and then play the game so that can be again it's something that's generic we can use it in many many different contexts we could use it with clothes for example food all kinds of different things but the students have that creative input ok pillar number three we need to move on quite fast here I hope this isn't going to make you too hungry pillar number three to do with offering choice okay when our learners have choice this not only helps to foster a sense of responsibility and to develop learner autonomy but it also gives them it also gives them a sense of ownership and a willingness to go that extra mile to be creative themselves I like to see choice on a continuum we can offer our students micro choices very small choices or macro choices very big ones depending on the context that we're working in micro choices might for example be to do with who we work with not every activity but for some might be to do with the order that we do the tasks or activities in our lesson if we have an activity menu for example that actually the students can choose the order if we do a project with them that they can be in charge of how they present that project are they going to make a poster they're going to use PowerPoint and so on those kind of little choices to macro choices which most of us actually can't do most of the time but the macro choices would be to do with actually what informs the syllabus so if you like those of you familiar with Dogme you know choice about the pedagogy and the curriculum and of course choice for those of us who work in classrooms with young young learners choice is a very key thing in behavior management actually rather than you know and we avoid confrontation through using choice for example you know if students are playing around with a mobile phone that they're not supposed to be doing during this particular part of the lesson it's not using our devices or anything like that the typical thing for the teacher to do is go up to the child and say you know you're not allowed that give it to me now and immediately you create a potential conflict of course you're going to win because you're the teacher you're the authority figure but actually a much better policy is to give the child the choice you know you're not allowed that what would you like to do would you like to put it in your bag till the end of the lesson or give it to me okay of course what the learner will choose to do is to put it in their bag but you have saved face and avoided humiliation so offering choice a hugely important pillar moving on to our next pillar and this one is so crucial using questions effectively as teachers we actually tend to ask far too many questions you know the some research that says we're asking questions 70% of the time and we also have a terrible tendency to answer our own questions because we can't bear silence and the minute the students realize that they know if I just wait you know she'll she'll answer it okay the other thing is that the typical questions that we ask tend to be of the kind I RS which stands for initiation response feedback the kind of typical thing you know what color is her jumper red very good okay now that kind of question checks the color of course but it closes down and thinking however we won't rule it out altogether because as Van Leer says in his in his book those kinds of questions can be really important for building confidence for encouraging participation particularly with our very young learners but the important thing is that we don't want to just stick on those kinds of questions and we need to use questions effectively to lead children to higher thinking skills okay here's something very familiar for you Bloom's taxonomy of thinking skills from remembering and recalling at the bottom to understanding and through applying to your own context analyzing evaluating and creating and they typically tend to get divided into two types of thinking skills we have the lots okay which stands for lower order thinking skills and the hots which stands for higher order thinking skills okay and actually we can see these are just some examples I'm not going to read them out in terms of our you know the tasks that we give our learners to do the kinds of textbook materials we use these are kind of typical words that we associate with each kind of thinking skill okay so the first three remembering understanding and applying are more to do with surface facts and forms whereas the higher order ones are more mentally demanding and also involved metacognition that when we're using those kind of thinking skills we're also engaged in thinking about our own thinking if you like of course there is overlap here by the way don't think these are you know rigid categories for example the words why and how might equally apply to analyze but of course the challenge for us as teachers as language teachers is to lead children from one kind of thinking to another and I just like to show you what I mean generically in relation to a story so that we can see how we as teachers through the use of questions guide our children to or our learners rather I keep saying children but learner to thinking more effectively okay so at the bottom there remember the typical WH questions associated with recall identification of vocabulary of what happened in a story through to understand why what's the main idea okay so we lead on to that to applying what would you do you know if you were Little Red Riding Hood what would you do and so on okay um analyze so a little example there I mean there are plenty of others this is just a sample to show you um how it might work so classifying the characters in some particular way that's relevant to the story evaluate evaluating the story which part of the story do you like best why okay and of course the last kind of thinking creating where here where we create for example a new ending to the story and I think it's very important for us to say here you know with the advent of clear with so many of us working on content and language integrated learning in our classes you know there is a lot out there at the moment on developing higher-order thinking skills but we do need a balance we have to remember we're working with foreign language learners and lower order thinking it sounds as a lower order it sounds as if they're a bit inferior but actually they are crucial and vital as well we need a balance of both and we need to be able to lead our learners from one to another another lovely way of doing this these are actually and commercial dice but we can either make our own or these wonderful little dice but I've had for years just with key wh-questions you don't need dice like these you can make them using paper but they're a wonderful you know for turn-taking after a story and getting learners to ask their own questions because ours asking questions effectively is part of the story but getting the learners to do so as well is the other part okay let's move on rapidly now to making connections okay making connections and seeing things differently okay which think the relationships between things which helps us to which helps to generate ideas and lead us to creative thinking so making unusual connections for example a little activity that's very nice is if you have a bag with different words inside okay and the students take three words from your bag and make a connection between those words another very nice activity to get the connections is to get our learners thinking metaphorically okay and we'll just have a little go with this now I'm going to say part of a sentence which I would like you to complete okay you can do it with your partner and I'd like to hear some answers to this okay a conference it's like a party because dot dot dot off you go okay any idea any idea shattered conferences like a party because lovely fantastic okay what about this one a school is like a circus because okay off you go and the idea any idea anyone willing to share an idea okay wonderful did you hear that okay school is like a circus because teachers sometimes act like clowns okay wonderful okay lovely metaphorical thinking another kind of thing that we might do you know that typical activity that you even get in exams and things like that odd one out okay you know that odd one out one well a nice way of getting and learn is to think you know creatively it's to give for example here just for fruit flashcards and they have to say the odd one out this could also be linked to clear you know if they've been learning about growing things and thinking differently so one child might come up you know a peach is the odd one out because it has a stone not seeds okay grapes are the odd one out because they can be purple and green okay strawberry is the odd one out because it's the only one with the seeds on the outside for example okay so little activities like that that are promote creative thinking and the last one of these kind of making connections I thought I would bring this frisbee you know twenty years ago this time twenty years ago I was starting term at the British Council young learners Center in Madrid and I think at the end of the summer term before somebody's bright idea had been to give all the children frisbees with lovely British cancelled dots the idea is they would play on the beaches with them over the summer and all come to classes okay so we had these to give with our children and I thought hang on I'm not going to just give these out and the I so I followed an idea and an activity in a book in Rob one of Robert Fischer's books teaching learners to think a career you're thinking idea and I got the children these were seven and eight-year-olds to think of all the things you can do with a frisbee of course this was also a lovely practice of can okay and very good for vocabulary work because they had to use their picture dictionaries to come up with the right vocabulary so I'm just going to give you 30 seconds now okay how many things can you use a frisbee for with your partner off you go okay any ideas would you like to call out any ideas just call out play okay that way okay that's great you've got this you got millions okay we have a plate we have a tray any other ideas just one from a hat wonderful hat any other a fan oh yeah oh yes lovely fan any others okay fantastic and of course actually you know our children live in the real life so actually what my children always said was you could use it as an ashtray and you could also use it to beg okay but all kinds of other things as well and actually this activity I've done with many things since a paperclip a plastic cup a coat hanger and it produces some wonderful creative results here's an example here with the frisbee and but I'm actually going to show you my very very favorite still to this day this is a little seven-year-old boy and this is the idea he came up with for the frisbee isn't that wonderful okay and you know that that makes me think you know that so often our learners are so much more creative than we are they just need those opportunities and you know what they also need they also need time as this little video shows [Music] [Music] I'd say about that video I was very very tempted to send it to my publishers recently when I was working on a project but in the end I decided not to but I would also say one other thing about about this as well but actually too much time can also induce lethargy so and actually there is nothing like a deadline for focusing the mind so I think we need to get the balance of time there ok moving on super rapidly pillar number six explore ideas and keep options open you know very often as teachers we tend to jump in with our own you know ideas our own judgments and that's mothers and what students have to say so we need to use strategies and techniques to open up their thinking I love the idea of they can open their brainstorming with all the typical questions you know that Rudyard Kipling poem I keep six honest serving men they taught me all I knew their names are what and why and when and where and how and who okay that's still as useful today as it ever was we can also of course use techniques such as mind mapping Tony Buzan this is something that actually and there's also wonderful software that you can use for doing this on computers as well and you can't just learn as need training in how to do this but it's a very wonderful way of built collecting and building up ideas together here's an example based on tigers very Elementary level but I was also safe for you as teacher if you're going to do this have a pre-prepared plan of the way the mind map will build up you don't need to stick to it because children will have their ideas but it will help you and then of course these can be used as a prompt for I'm not expecting you to read that but for the children's or learners and own own work and actually using mind maps I find is something that some children love and respond to I think the kind of visual spatial learners and the people who find a sort of linear order very dull and others really don't like it at all and it also of course depends on the text type that you're building up okay my last pillar encourage critical reflection because if we use all the kind of strategies and procedures that I've talked about to develop creativity we're not going to get very far if we don't also train our learners to think critically and evaluate their own performance and their own outcomes and this can be an integrated part of our activity and task cycles in lessons I show you this and very briefly up here and this is Belle Wallace it's actually from a book on teaching kindergarten learners but I think it's a model it's applicable for whoever we're teaching actually we identify the task I'm not going to read them all out but we go round the circle and we always look at what have I learned and how well abide um and why and so on that's clearly a message for me to stop that Bell I'm nearly there if you just one moment more okay another this is an idea a helping hand of reflective prompts I just like the kind of the visuospatial and the kinesthetic idea of this which you know you have the different questions and of course making it creative with our learners is when they are thinking about the reflective questions that they would like to ask themselves okay so thinking of creativity and bringing this all together in Robert Fischer's book on teaching thinking skills which I've mentioned already he has a lovely recipe for a happy class okay which you can answer I'm afraid it's slightly small but you can probably see it there you can see the ingredients and you can see the methods and I love I just love you know that the child has put their one kilo of discipline that that's what they actually want okay and also I love one really nice teacher grated you know so that everybody gets a fair share of the teacher something else that's very important well the reason I wanted to show you this is because creativity in a teacher education context is also very important every year actually for the last 20 years I've run a primary teacher education course for the British Council in Paris and when we get on to the session lesson planning myself and my colleague Gail Ellis the obvious task is to get our teachers to plan a lesson using the principles that we've taught them throughout the week however that's a really you can see people's faces oh no we don't want to do that why because there's not a real class that we're planning for and also because we all have slightly different takes and so what we've come up with is a task where actually they think of a recipe creative recipe for teaching effectively and creatively and I would just like to show you an example of one of these now which is delicious lasagna delicious lesson lasagna so would you like to look at the wonderful ingredients they're chopped challenge isn't it wonderful ok and you can see the method for making this delicious lasagna ok bake golden-brown the final thing and serve with kindness and understanding ok so actually my final message to you this morning is whatever lesson recipes you cook up creatively for your children make for your children your learners whoever it is you're teaching make sure that they're creative and delicious thank you very much [Music] you you

Channel: British Council Spain

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Keywords: British Council (Organization), Education (Word), teachers conference

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Length: 58min 11sec (3491 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 03 2013