Creativity

               
 Creativity, in the class, is often times thrown around aimlessly with no real structure. You ask, “How can creativity be structured?” The answer is simple by implementing a number of essentials which motivate students to a certain level of both creativity and innovation. In the realm of education, no teacher has to stand alone because technology makes it easy to reach out to other educators and gleam from what they do in the classroom. However, creativity is limited because of the fear of being wrong but nevertheless it can be fostered and improved.
         In Peter Reynolds article titled Six Essentials to Foster Creativity and Innovation in the Classroom,” he emphasizes some factors that will enable students to use technology more freely.  They are: Blank Page Software; Graphics Tablets and  Pen; Time and Freedom; Mission; Love and Leadership. The gist of his argument is students can be taught how to be creative using technology and not using technology which needs to be the case because both are critical to develop students and motivate students to complete task exercising creativity. However students should first experience the love of a teacher and see the teacher modeling creative behavior.

         If teachers get in a runt about how to incorporate creativity in the classroom, there are websites where other teachers share their lesson plans. The website I was told to explore is titled Better Lessons. This website is loaded with  a number of elements teachers will benefit from which includes not only free complete lessons for grades kindergarten thru twelve grade but a chance to create an entire curriculum. On this website, teachers  are given the option to upload lessons or use lessons from the site to create the planned curriculum. There is also a section called “my Questions” where teachers can post questions and colleagues answer. With every lesson plan there is space to leave comments, view the number of times the lesson plan was explored and downloaded. Better lessons provides an array of lessons for specific areas within a specific content.  If a teacher decides to use this website to plan their curriculum, with the click of a button, they can create a schedule. It is very easy to navigate through Better Lessons. The lessons are created by teachers from all over. The one crucial weakness is absence of common core standards. I do understand every instructor submitting lessons may not feel the necessity to include such details and that is certainly at their disposal. I am just glad to find a website where teachers can work together to build from one another.         Although, there are a number of resources to help teachers create and maintain creativity in the classroom, there are a number of reasons why creativity is not welcomed in the class. For starters, it is hard to grade creativity because creativity is individualized. Each child has the potential to display creativity different. As a teacher, it is much more easier to have a box and grade how each student stayed in the box. Another reason is the amount of time and possibly resources, it takes to cultivate a heavily creative classroom, whether it is project presentations, a piece of literature students are more familiar with instead of  the same text taht have been in the classroom year after year. Creativity emulates change. Most of the ways of teaching are done the same way year after year. Greater than change or time consumption or the risk of resource exhaustion, is the fear of being wrong.
            Sir Ken Robinson in his presentation "How school kills creativity," clearly states too many people are being educated out creativity because there is only right and wrong. Truthfully speaking, there are a number of grey areas in life and those areas can only be explored when a person is afraid of being wrong when they step outside of the box. One of the most profound quotes from the video is "if you're not prepared to be wrong, than you'll never come up anything original."  Applying this quote, I can't help but to think about the rapper Nicki Minaj, who to me, is one of the most creativity artist to ever be in the rap industry. Simply because she wasn't afraid of being wrong. She changes the texture of her voice, has some of the craziest hairstyles, music video appearances. Although, she went to

I do. We do. You do.

              I interviewed an 8th grade student who acknowledges and appreciates the large usage of graphic organizers because it enables her to quickly remember the material in English. The reason being is the graphic organizers are visuals that highlight only the information that is useful oppose to including irrelevant information. She also points out the teachers effective usage of “I do. We do. You do.” She admits how she likes the teacher being more interactive in the learning process and not just the teaching procedures. “We get to see how the teacher really knows her stuff when she is able to show us how to do the work and answer the questions we have as we complete the assignments.” This way of teaching enables the teacher to engage in classroom management which means her classmates don’t have the same chance to “act up.” Her advice to begining teachers that will help students to remember information better is constant review. “Even if we seem like we know the stuff already, my teacher goes over it again and as a new teacher you won’t know to keep going over it.” She emphasized teachers especially new ones think test grades are measuring sticks for what students remember, “but they’re not.”

                In comparing, her response to a teacher’s last week, I noticed the same  response. The teacher admits, she thinks it has a lot to do with the content enhancement training that is a direct result to the changes in the education system due to the introduction of common core and the modules. Not only does she enjoy completing the anchoring tableand the other organizers to help students semantic memory but her students as well. The students are engaged and participate. The teacher finds students have less challenges when asked to recall the material anywhere from 1 1/2 weeks to 2 weeks.