Encouraging students to become more creative is very important to their learning process.
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Encouraging Student Creativity (Tips)
Encouraging students to become more creative is very important to their learning process.
Over 80% of educators surveyed in the U.S believe creativity is a learned skill that should become a standard component of student learning. Creativity is important to the learning process because it encourages students to become more active and engaged with their courses. Fortunately, there are many things educators can do to introduce and promote creativity in the classroom.
Education resources
How to introduce creativity to students
Most of the methods required for this process depend largely on the grade and subject of the classroom at hand. For example, if you teach a subject based on visual art, allowing students to experiment with abstract designs and make up stories about them will get their creative gears running.
For classrooms based on history, allowing students to create a dialogue or write letters from the perspective of historical characters can also help them become more creative. Subjects dealing with math or science can be much more difficult to encourage students to become creative. However, it is still possible. For example, allowing students to create songs about mathematical principles or objects using geometrical shapes can help them become more creative.
Five ways to promote creativity in classrooms
Check out the following five ways to promote creativity in your classroom:
1. Use creativity models
Creativity models like the Osborne-Parnes model are often used in education and business environments to influence creativity. They are usually composed of individual steps designed to challenge ideas and change thinking patterns. For example, the Osborne-Parnes model consists of six steps:
- Mess-finding
- Fact-finding
- Problem-finding
- Idea-finding
- Solution-finding
- Acceptance-finding
This creativity model is a simple method that will allow students to come up with cutting-edge ideas to implement. By using complex brainstorming methods to generate and evaluate ideas, students will also have the potential to become a lot more innovative than they were before.
2. Encourage curiosity
Creativity is a high intrinsic value that can be improved by tapping into a student’s curiosity. Research has shown that curiosity might be just as important as intelligence. This step encourages students to become creative because it causes them to relax and open their minds to new ideas and ways of solving problems.
3. Integrate hands-on learning
Integrating hands-on learning into your classroom to break away from traditional standards and encourage students to become more creative and innovative. Instead of asking students to read textbooks alone, making them read as a group and share ideas and conclusions based on what they have read will influence them to become more creative. Or, if you teach a class based on art or design, you can try getting your students to practice creating artwork in new and innovative ways rather than spending too much time on theory or basic principles.
4. Encourage group discussion
Allowing students to engage in group discussions will allow them to become more creative by gathering new ideas from others. Group discussions will also challenge their thinking and cause them to think more critically about the material they are studying. This is important because one of the first steps to becoming more creative is challenging and building off other people’s ideas.
5. Incorporate humor into the learning process
Humor is very important for keeping students engaged with their work and promoting creativity. Studies show that humor can boost creativity and make students more productive. Humor can boost creative thinking because interpreting humor requires more creative thinking than a normal thought process that doesn’t require creative thinking. Incorporating these steps into your student’s learning curriculum will make them much more creative and productive both in and out of the classroom.
