Before beginning my extended 10 week practicum, a big question came to my mind about implementing creativity; is the implementation of creative and inquiry based learning going to be as easy as it sounds? The answer, as I have discovered, is no. There is so much that goes into providing students with hands on, experiential lessons. There are teachers out there who are able to provide this type of learning, and my question to them is, when is the last time you slept? I have tried to make my lessons fun and engaging for my students by using a variety of activities, modes of learning – kinaesthetic, auditory, written, exploratory, and I have to say, planning one lesson with exploration and experimentation in mind is tough. Hours of preparation go into these lessons. Now, I am not sure if this is because I am still brand new, or if it is always like this, but one thing I have discovered, with the help of my school advisors, is balance. Balance is a key factor to doing anything well. As much fun as our students have with hands on learning, doing the occasional worksheet is not a terrible thing! I have learned that in order to give my all, I needed to take a step back and realize that it is better to do fewer grand activities that are meaningful, rather than trying to do too much just for the sake of it.

I recently taught a science unit on light and sound, my first big theme of my practicum. I worked very hard at making my lessons fun, and experiential, but my main focus was – “is it meaningful?”. One particular day, a few students answered this question for me; a parent of one of my students came in and, looking at our inquiry “Wonder Wall” said that “this was the first topic her child had been excited about in a long time”. What? Are you serious? I thought my day had been made right then and there, my heart was glowing and I was so excited that I have engaged a student in a topic enough that they wanted to go home and tell their parents about their learning! Yes!! But my joy didn’t end there, later in the morning, another student was being taken out by their parent for an appointment, this student said to their parent “I need to be back this afternoon for Ms.Oreziak’s science lesson”. Just try to stop me from smiling from ear to ear after a comment like that! Other little comments popped up as well throughout the weeks, “are we doing science today Ms. Oreziak?” followed by groans if the answer was no and cheers if the answer was yes. The moral of why I am writing about this, is that no matter what, when you make a lesson and topic engaging and meaningful, students will understand that learning is actually fun, it is not simply “work”. Teachers need to work at engaging their students in a variety of ways. Routines get boring, it’s important to change things up, especially in the third term.

Moving forward, I need to maintain balance in my lessons. I am still a big advocate for promoting creativity and inquiry into the teaching and learning process, I think it is paramount to student engagement. Something that I have found to be a real challenge in implementing inquiry based learning is that it is easier to do when students can be independent. By this I mean, they are able to read, reflect, and research on their own. As a TC with a class of kindergarten and grade one students, my goal has become – teach students HOW to ask questions. My mentality going into inquiry was – come up with a question and explore it. Explore it how? If students come up with a big, overarching question, that is fantastic. Teachers can use that question to guide their teaching and help to create a theme within a unit. That way, we can explore the question within our lessons, as a class. Students that are 5,6 and 7 years old are not (for the most part) able to independently explore their questions in a formal manner.

I can feel myself questioning my practice on a daily basis, after some experience, I am curious to see how my inquiry topic evolves.

Today I was able to take part in a living inquiry where I was able to discuss a variety of inquiry topics with other teacher candidates. I always appreciate an opportunity to brainstorm with others and learn what they have experienced, it really helps me grasp my own topic better.

The first group I met with discussed the topic of Inquiry Based Learning where I met with people who had a variety of topics, all relating to inquiry in the classroom. My main takeaway from this group was the fact that in order to expect meaningful inquiry from our students, we need to be willing to take the time to teach them how to ask meaningful questions. Students may come to us with curiosities, but teachers are the ones who need to show them how to explore their questions in a way that really benefits them and their learning.

The second group I met with discussed Active Learning, in this group we tried to talk about why we had an interest in active learning through play and experience. We had a fairly common consensus that we wanted to incorporate meaningful, hands on, active learning because our students are sitting and often disengaged for a large part of the day. When our bodies are active, our brains are active, we are having fun and almost tricking ourselves into learning. I am really interested in making play time/centres more meaningful. I am looking forward to creating a centre where my students can explore current themes and topics at a fun and informal level. Having discussions of them as they explore and assessing their learning in as an observer. I think that by doing this, as a teacher, I will gain a better understanding of the concepts they are grasping.

I find having discussions helps me see a variety of points of view as well as share some ideas and resources I have found. We learn a lot through discussion, we see this with our students and I feel that it is important to practice what we preach. I am looking forward to exploring my new ideas further and am hopefully able to add a few new tools to my teacher toolbox.

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.

What do we think about when we imagine a classroom the promotes creative thinking? Providing an environment where students are free to think, problem solve and create can be difficult for teachers to accomplish. Many teachers are accustomed to the “traditional” classroom, one where students work at there desks, whiteboard up front and scheduled times for exploration and play. We need to provide our students with an environment where they can learn in a way that best suits them. How do we do this? Something that I think is important to be excited about what our students are interested in, in order for them to persue a topic they will still need us as their guide. We are still required to assess their learning, and assist them when they struggle. It is not necessary for us to be experts in every topic just in case a student has a particular interest. We do need to be willing to join them on their learning journey and show them that we are excited about the process. This will show them that regardless of the outcome of a project, learning is still taking place, students will build resiliance and perhaps strengthen their interest of a topic.

By using topics cross curricularily, we are allowing students to explore on a deeper level, of course, not all subjects lend themselves to this method, and we need to be willing and able to fill in where needed. As far as classroom management goes, I think that when students are engaged in their learning, they will be less disruptive and more focused. If they are able to express their learning in a way that best suits them, we will also see that they are grasping concepts and making connections in ways that might otherwise not happen.

When looking at motivation, it is important to as questions, my question is regarding intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation, in my mind goes hand in hand with creativity due to the fact that someone is creating, problem solving, exploring because the knowledge they gain is done for their own personal benefit. Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, can be a little bit of a trickier subject when combined with creativity. What is the driving force behind the lessons or the research? Is it to gain knowledge and know more about a topic of interest, or is it to get the gold star, the prizes and acolades? Does the reward become the purpose of the activity?

Bringing personalized learning into the classroom in the form of creative or project based learning in my mind, is a positive tool teachers can use to get their students to learn and retain information. If it is a topic of student interest, the student will more likely be interested in the lessons, in their research and want to share and teach others about what they are learning. When a student has something they are excited to teach, it means they are excited to learn. Motivating our students to want to learn and be at school can be a daunting task for teachers, how do we create lessons that are engaging? My idealistic nature tells me that the answer to this question is – let them explore what interests them and they will be motivated to learn.

What about those students who have trouble finding their creative flair due to the fear or failure? Might a reward system for that student be beneficial? By this I mean, encouraging the students to take risks, fail and be rewarded for their efforts rather than someone who is cautious and successful. When a students idea or project fails, what can we do for them that encourages them to keep trying? If doing something for the reward to learning isn’g going to be enough, perhaps a reward system should be implimented as a means of encouragement and motivation.

Reference:

Starko, A. J. (2014). Creativity in the Classroom: Schools of Curious Delight (5th ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Retrieved February 10, 2016, from https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=WVciAQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=how to incorporate creativity in the classroom&ots=PetEmz3qu7&sig=ECVxZvtigXL-BrLruHFkbnakRm8#v=onepage&q=how to incorporate creativity in the classroom&f=false.