Creative Teaching for the not-very-creative...
Interesting stuff on creativity in lessons knocking around twitter this morning, following an incisive post from Alex Quigley on trying to make practical use of the thinking of Sir Ken Robinson. Before I start going on, I would point out that all of the below is only how it seems to me, as an English teacher, and, well, as me...
In the early years of my own teaching, I tended to feel troubled with a sense that my lessons were a little bit lacking when it came to creativity, that my planning missed the creative spark with which I could ignite the fires of learning in the kindling minds bobbing expectantly in front of me (ahem). I suffered from a sort of 'creativity-envy'; an abiding belief that I just wasn't creative enough myself to devise the sort of imaginative and engaging activities which would (in that mildly-alarming edu-phrase) 'grab them' and, through sheer fun and adventure, ensure that they loved to learn.
This nagging anxiety prodded me to action at times, usually by attempting some ill-advised and spectacularly unsuccessful activity in an attempt to stimulate a creative 'vibe'. Without wishing to dwell, and with some trepidation lest the below ends up on a 'dumbing-down blog of shame' somewhere, these included such highlights as:
- A project where students created their own band / musician (student at the time: "this is sad, sir"; me at time: "no it isn't"; me now: "actually, OK, I see your point...")
- Showing pictures of some mountains to groups of bemused students and insistently badgering them to let me know 'how does this make you feel?'
- A year 7 'sound-scape' about the Titanic, in which children attempted to replicate the infamous nautical disaster through generating an en-masse aural reproduction of, among other things, the sound of cutlery hitting the floor, passengers screaming, seagulls squawking etc
- Something long ago with papier-mâché that I can't actually quite remember the point of, only the terrible, terrible mess
Not to say of course that all of this was utterly worthless; I'm sure there was some sort of point attached, and lots of it was quite fun and diverting (not so much the mountains thing), but therein lies the problem. Because my understanding of how to employ creativity in the classroom was so crude - essentially just activities imported from art, music or drama - its main function was to act as a diversion from the learning which needed to get done; it was creativity as distraction rather than complement to learning. I was assuming an inherent value to being creative but not applying the skills of planning, structure and organisation which are needed to make it worthwhile. And when that happens, I would now argue, these sorts of activities can be actually damaging in the classroom, and not only due to the waste of time. There is a real danger that crude creativity can lead to confusion and unresolved ambiguity - a fundamental lack of clarity as to what the students are supposed to be doing and getting from it. The students who are able to cope with that are those from culturally-advantaged environments, who are best placed to make links, fill the gaps and make progress anyway, leaving the rest trailing ever-further in their wake.
So - is the suggestion that creative approaches to lessons in traditionally 'academic' subjects to be avoided at all costs? Well no... more that it has to be treated with care and expertly handled if the gains are to be real and the risks minimised. It seems to me that the following points are relevant:
- Recognise that there is inherent creativity to be valued in subjects already. In English, writing of all types is superbly creative; there is the potential for great depth which should be celebrated and valued in textual analysis, for example. As English teachers, we should be promoting and equipping students to explore the creativity in the discipline, not feeling, as I was, the need to 'import' creative approaches and techniques from other, more obviously 'arty' subjects or pursuits.
- Always be led by the learning and not the activity, and try to avoid feeling that it's necessary to 'try something creative' if that's not going to help them to think about what you actually need them to learn
- Use success criteria which refer to the learning and not the activity. If students are preparing a fake news-report to show their understanding of a historical event, make sure the criteria focus on the accuracy and precision of the explanation of the historical event, not the effectiveness by which students can pretend to be Krishnan Guru-Murphy or whoever.
- Get the bits before and after the creative activity as sharp and effective as they can be. Drama is a really good example of this - I recently used role-play as a way to get students to understand the ways that spoken language changes according to different contexts. The students really enjoyed watching their classmates pretending to be head teachers and the like, in fact they enjoyed it to the extent that it was pretty-much impossible for me, in the moment, to draw their attention back to the learning in hand. To be fair, it was hilarious - tears-rolling-down-cheeks, desk-bangingly, breath-gaspingly funny - but it didn't teach them anything about spoken language. Now it would be a shame to lose the joy of it, and I'm generally all for enjoying stuff, so following up with a focused, individual (and much much less amusing) task in which they had to write up a transcript meant that a happy medium was achieved. They enjoyed it, had fun, had their thinking nudged towards the right area, and then consolidated with a task which made me confident that they'd given the learning proper thought.
In the early years of my own teaching, I tended to feel troubled with a sense that my lessons were a little bit lacking when it came to creativity, that my planning missed the creative spark with which I could ignite the fires of learning in the kindling minds bobbing expectantly in front of me (ahem). I suffered from a sort of 'creativity-envy'; an abiding belief that I just wasn't creative enough myself to devise the sort of imaginative and engaging activities which would (in that mildly-alarming edu-phrase) 'grab them' and, through sheer fun and adventure, ensure that they loved to learn.
This nagging anxiety prodded me to action at times, usually by attempting some ill-advised and spectacularly unsuccessful activity in an attempt to stimulate a creative 'vibe'. Without wishing to dwell, and with some trepidation lest the below ends up on a 'dumbing-down blog of shame' somewhere, these included such highlights as:
- A project where students created their own band / musician (student at the time: "this is sad, sir"; me at time: "no it isn't"; me now: "actually, OK, I see your point...")
- Showing pictures of some mountains to groups of bemused students and insistently badgering them to let me know 'how does this make you feel?'
- A year 7 'sound-scape' about the Titanic, in which children attempted to replicate the infamous nautical disaster through generating an en-masse aural reproduction of, among other things, the sound of cutlery hitting the floor, passengers screaming, seagulls squawking etc
- Something long ago with papier-mâché that I can't actually quite remember the point of, only the terrible, terrible mess
Not to say of course that all of this was utterly worthless; I'm sure there was some sort of point attached, and lots of it was quite fun and diverting (not so much the mountains thing), but therein lies the problem. Because my understanding of how to employ creativity in the classroom was so crude - essentially just activities imported from art, music or drama - its main function was to act as a diversion from the learning which needed to get done; it was creativity as distraction rather than complement to learning. I was assuming an inherent value to being creative but not applying the skills of planning, structure and organisation which are needed to make it worthwhile. And when that happens, I would now argue, these sorts of activities can be actually damaging in the classroom, and not only due to the waste of time. There is a real danger that crude creativity can lead to confusion and unresolved ambiguity - a fundamental lack of clarity as to what the students are supposed to be doing and getting from it. The students who are able to cope with that are those from culturally-advantaged environments, who are best placed to make links, fill the gaps and make progress anyway, leaving the rest trailing ever-further in their wake.
So - is the suggestion that creative approaches to lessons in traditionally 'academic' subjects to be avoided at all costs? Well no... more that it has to be treated with care and expertly handled if the gains are to be real and the risks minimised. It seems to me that the following points are relevant:
- Recognise that there is inherent creativity to be valued in subjects already. In English, writing of all types is superbly creative; there is the potential for great depth which should be celebrated and valued in textual analysis, for example. As English teachers, we should be promoting and equipping students to explore the creativity in the discipline, not feeling, as I was, the need to 'import' creative approaches and techniques from other, more obviously 'arty' subjects or pursuits.
- Always be led by the learning and not the activity, and try to avoid feeling that it's necessary to 'try something creative' if that's not going to help them to think about what you actually need them to learn
- Use success criteria which refer to the learning and not the activity. If students are preparing a fake news-report to show their understanding of a historical event, make sure the criteria focus on the accuracy and precision of the explanation of the historical event, not the effectiveness by which students can pretend to be Krishnan Guru-Murphy or whoever.
- Get the bits before and after the creative activity as sharp and effective as they can be. Drama is a really good example of this - I recently used role-play as a way to get students to understand the ways that spoken language changes according to different contexts. The students really enjoyed watching their classmates pretending to be head teachers and the like, in fact they enjoyed it to the extent that it was pretty-much impossible for me, in the moment, to draw their attention back to the learning in hand. To be fair, it was hilarious - tears-rolling-down-cheeks, desk-bangingly, breath-gaspingly funny - but it didn't teach them anything about spoken language. Now it would be a shame to lose the joy of it, and I'm generally all for enjoying stuff, so following up with a focused, individual (and much much less amusing) task in which they had to write up a transcript meant that a happy medium was achieved. They enjoyed it, had fun, had their thinking nudged towards the right area, and then consolidated with a task which made me confident that they'd given the learning proper thought.
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