Creativity in the Classroom

Creativity in the Classroom
Donaldson highlights the importance of creativity in education by dedicating one of his six areas of learning to ‘expressive arts’. The idea of this learning topic is to give children the chance to explore their own creativity and imagination, through the practice of their artistic skills. (Donaldson, 2015)    
However, creativity should be clearly recognizable within all aspects of the curriculum, not just in art lessons. This means that teachers should be ensuring that the lessons that they plan are exciting and original. Lessons that are not original and creative will soon become repetitive, and will therefore disengage the children from wanting to learn. (Freire, 1985, p.79)
            In order to engage students heads, we first need to engage their hearts (Curran cited in Gilbert, 2006). To do this, we need to create a ‘fun learning environment’ to allow disengaged students to feel confident within themselves to fully explore and therefore learn (Gilbert, 2006). The incorporation of entertaining new tasks and ‘novelty’ into teaching will introduce the idea of this type of learning environment (Vizard, 2009).
            Fun activities will have a positive effect on students’ learning as they are more likely to trigger laughter within the classroom, which researchers have found to have a worthwhile impact on education (Vizard, 2009). This can also be supported by Burgess (2000) who agrees that, ‘by creating a happy, interesting, stimulating and laughing classroom, we help to promote better learning’. Clarke et al (2006) provide further support that creativity in the classroom is beneficial for pupils in finding that 40% of college students are classed as 'visual learners'. However, this percentage may differ when looking at primary school students. Furthermore, this idea of VAK learning styles lacks scientific evidence meaning that we are unsure of it's validity (Pritchard, 2013).
            The following photos are part of a Maths activity that is a good example of creative and original teaching:




















(Twinkl, 2017)
            There are various ‘emoji’ cards (like the one above) hidden around the classroom. The children must find these cards and scan the QR code with a tablet in order to reveal the value of each different emoji. Once all of the values have been found, they are then able to use these to complete sums and equations that involve the different faces.
            This activity would be engaging for children as not only does it get them out of their seats in what would normally be a potentially boring maths lesson, but it also brings digital competency into the lesson, which will interest the children and engage the numeracy activity with other areas of the curriculum, practising cross-curricula learning.

References

Burgess, R. (2000), 149 2 3 Publishing).


Clarke, Irvine, III., Flaherty, Theresa B., & Yankey, Michael. (2006). Teaching the Visual Learner: The Use of Visual Summaries in Marketing Education. Journal of Marketing Education, 28(3), 218-226.

 Donaldson, G. (2015). Successful futures: Independent review of curriculum and assessment arrangements in Wales. Welsh Government.

 Freire, Paulo. (1996). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Penguin. LondonFreire and Macedo (1987). Reading the Word and the World. Routledge. London.

Gilbert, I. (2006), The Big Book of Independent Thinking (Carmarthen: Crown House Publishing Ltd).
Pritchard, A. (2013). Ways of learning: Learning theories and learning styles in the classroom (Third ed.).

Twinkl. (2017). * NEW * Order and Compare Numbers Beyond 1000 Moji Maths Activity. [online] Available at: http://www.twinkl.co.uk/resource/t2-m-5731-order-and-compare-numbers-beyond-1000-moji-maths-activity [Accessed 9 Nov. 2017].


Vizard, D. (2009). Meeting the Needs of Disaffected Students Engaging students with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (Meeting the Needs). London: Continuum International Publishing.

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