Bringing my inquiry topic to life by facilitating a workshop for my peers really helped my ground my inquiry topic. Up until this point, it has been a lot of theory, reflection, article reading and imagining how I can implement creative thinking into the classroom. Today I was able to take some of my ideas and turn it into a workshop.

My first activity was some thing called “this is not…”, for this activity, I brought a scarf and everyone gathered in a circle and participated by saying “this is not a scarf, it is a…” and indicate what else the scarf might be. I chose this activity to start just to get everyone into a creative mind set, as well, I think it really shows that creativity can be incorporated in small ways. I think everyone enjoyed this activity and engaged in trying to come up with what the scarf might be. I had allocated about 5 minutes to this activity and was fairly close on my timing. Time management is something that I am trying to work on with my lessons, so having a timer beside me, helping me to visualize the time passing really helped me know when to wrap up the warm up.

Next I had everyone reflect on their favourite lessons, something that they felt engaged in at the time and got them to think of why they may have felt that way about that particular lesson, unit, activity or topic. I then introduced a few questions that had them think about their own classrooms, when are their students engaged? When are their students most creative (activities, time of day)? And how do they encourage imaginative and innovative thinking in the classroom, how might they promote it further? After a few minutes of Think Pair Share, I discovered that everyone had had a rich discussion and came up with some great ideas. I wished I had allocated more time to the sharing, but was happy with the participation. The purpose of this exercise was to have everyone thinking of their own students and bring the lesson to a practical place for everyone.

My final activity was one that I was really excited about. I had sent out a survey to everyone and asked them to indicate what they have an interest in and what they want to learn more about. I then assigned each group one of the topics and encouraged them to use the BC curriculum to come up with ways to incorporate the topics of interest in a practical and useful way. Again, I wished I had more time to get into the nitty gritty details of what this might look like, but everyone came up with some great cross-curricular ideas for how to implement each topic. The purpose of this exercise was to show that it is possible to incorporate the interests of our students into our teaching topics while still meeting expectations set by the ministry.

For this workshop I think that I expressed my objectives and expectations clearly and the group was receptive to my activities. I wanted to make the workshop as hands on as I could since I am encouraging creative thinking. I think that I managed my time well and allocated enough time to each activity. I did not get the feeling that people felt rushed during their Think Pair Share, I think we were able to hear from a large number of people who wanted to share. As I mentioned, I wish I had more time to get into the topics and curriculum activity, but I think that the 15 minutes allocated was enough for everyone to get a sense of the possibilities. I also decided to use a survey created on surveynuts.com and I used Prezi to create a visual presentation, I had never used either of these tools before, and wanted to challenge myself by exploring new tools. I think they both worked well and that my message was received by the participants. Something else I have been working on is my teacher to student talk ratio, I wanted to give the group more time for peer to peer discussion rather than hear me give another presentation on my inquiry topic. I am overall very pleased with how my workshop unfolded, the only critique I have is that I perhaps should have selected either the Think Pair Share OR the topics and curriculum activity to focus on. This may have allowed us to gather some deeper meanings and opinions, however, I think they worked well together and provided some good pre-thinking time and activity time.