Category Archives: Teacher Leadership

MAKE

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As Solnit (2013) shares in in The Faraway Nearby, “to become a maker is to make the world for others, not only the material world but the world of ideas that rules over the material world, the dreams we dream and inhabit together.”

What are you making? What are you sharing? What’s your story?

MAKE is a collection of creative and intellectual works (artifacts, stories, poetry, photography, ethnodrama, and research) by a team of teachers engaged in the art of making meaning together. We welcome you to join us in our journey, “let us take what we have learned from our courses and from each other and fly on eagles’ wings to (s)p(l)aces beyond our imagination” (Stuart, 2016).

Download MAKE from iTunes:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id1093003369

Authors: EDCP 508 Collective
Editor: Paula MacDowell
Publication Date: March 13, 2016
Format: Interactive, multi-touch eBook

Lessons in creativity from The Little Prince

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The big lesson of The Little Prince: (Re)capture the creativity of childhood

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Questions for creative teachers

How do you nurture and sustain a culture of creativity in your classroom? How do you support and encourage your students to be curious and feel empowered to solve problems in unique and innovative ways?7494885_orig

Give me an example of creativity in your curriculum and pedagogy. What have you done lately that’s creative?

How do we foster innovation in formal education institutions? What are the barriers to creative learning methods and practices in your school?

How do you respond to Margaret Wheatley’s assertion: “The things we fear most in organizations – fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances – are the primary sources of creativity?”

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How do you challenge your comfort zone?

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“A person’s license to create is irrevocable, and it opens to every corner of daily life. But it is always hard to see that doubt, fear, and indirectness are eternal aspects of the creative path” writes Shaun McNiff (1998) in Trust the Process: An Artist’s Guide to Letting Go. He also teaches that “the education of imagination involves giving up what I call ego control. It (creativity) requires an inclination to step into the unknown as well as the ability to persist when there is no end in sight.”

What is the goal of education?

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Image Credit: Adam Fletcher

Creative curriculum & pedagogy

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How do we make a teacher great?

How do you want to be in the classroom?

Why is teaching one of the most highly contested terms you will encounter?

How might teachers integrate hands-on, heads-on, hearts-on, and feet-on learning — body, mind, soul, action — curriculum, pedagogy, creativity, and emotion with cognition?!

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Welcome to EDCP 508

This course offers graduate students a space to create and a community to explore empirical and theoretical ideas about creativity in curriculum and pedagogical design. Our six modules include critiquing scholarly readings and TED talks, expressing and challenging viewpoints, building upon each other’s work, and experimenting with hands-on learning activities.

Students will engage in this course as instructional designers, content creators, and thinkerers working together on personally or socially meaningful projects. Learning involves defining educational problems and generating creative solutions, brainstorming, bodystorming, mindmapping, prototyping, observing, empathizing, evaluating, and experimenting with diverse ideas, materials, and perspectives. The operative word for this course is CREATIVITY: participants will be supported to develop creative leadership skills, increase creative confidence, become more creative listeners, take intellectual risks, push boundaries, question assumptions, expand research possibilities, and exercise ingenuity.

Students will benefit from a multimodal learning environment and creative instructional strategies (e.g., design thinking challenges, role-playing, and storyboarding). We will make and deconstruct learning artifacts using open-ended materials, develop prototypes for innovative classroom learning environments (on-site and online), evaluate educational apps, build and program robotics, ignite imagination through coding, be inspired by guest presenters, and have fun learning by collaborating and creating.

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