I found a lot of great and insightful information in the four videos we watched for this week’s session. In my opinion, all 4 of them share the idea of allowing students the freedom of practicing the 4 C’s in the classroom. At times the scholars in the videos give the message that these skills can’t be taught but that students will become critical thinkers, creative, collaborators, and or communicators through open ended and rigorous tasks. And for students to accomplish this we should allow them to learn exponentially or at least facilitate this type of learning environment. This is something that John Seely Brown mentioned in his talk. He believes that this can be accomplished by students having a mindset where they have a passionate pursuit of extreme performance with a deep questioning disposition while being committed in being present and engaged in the classroom. I also admired Ken Robinson’s quote on “seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are (children), and seeing our children for the hope that they are. Our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future.” This to me is a great 21st century skill since us as teachers have to allow students to use their talents to be successful in any content class. This ties in with what another scholar in a video, Daniel Pink mentioned about advocating that the answer isn’t just one answer and to find it is straight ahead, but the answer should be “peripheral”.
All of the talks tie in with 21st century teaching and learning, equity, the brain etc. since my biggest take away is giving students open-ended work where they are challenged which then makes them use their own 4 C’s skills to a certain extent. Being a Math teacher, my students and probably the majority of them, still believe that in Math you always have to get the correct answer, no matter what. That there is only one way to find a solution and that it seems to be the end of the world when they make a mistake in a Math classroom. I know that I have to put in my part in what Ken Robinson says to “celebrate human imagination”. As a second year teacher this is something that I have been trying to get better at in acknowledging and celebrating mistakes in my class. This school year I opened up my class with 3 days on celebrating mistakes and trying to create this type of culture. This goes in with Mobley’s 6 insights in helping students think creatively. To me thinking creatively is giving students the option to go in any direction to find a solution. One of the main ways I practice this in my classroom is showcasing student work where each student work showcases a different approach to a solution. The open ended tasks in my classroom allows students to be creative and I also try to students work with people with different academic capacities so they can get that exposure to diverse ideas when doing group work. What I do is in no way perfect because I know I have to give more power to my students. I say this because when I feel that students aren’t practicing or using the 4 C’s I tend to take over. So how do I not take over and feel comfortable in seeing them struggle? The feeling I get is to jump in and guide them in the right direction and at times their guided with my thinking and in what I believe in. I catch myself doing that a lot. Which brings me back to the main question, how do we or can we even teach creativity?
3 Comments
James Macariola
3/28/2018 02:40:51 pm
I agree about bringing back creativity into the classroom. It gives ownership of learning back to the students and less to test scores. I remember when I was a young teacher I had all these great ideas, great lesson plans, and great projects. However, over the years I moved away from those ideas due to the many pressures in the classroom to try to bring up test scores. Pressures such as No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top concepts. I believe that to solve 21st century problems, we must solve them by using 21st century methods. To have our students be successful in the future, we as teachers must teach them for the future! In education we can not go back to the past, but just like Dr. Emmett Brown once said, we must go "BACK TO THE FUTURE!"
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Matt Kelly
3/30/2018 10:32:44 am
I agree with what you were saying above. Somewhere along the line students shifted to only wanting to make sure they got the right answer. It seems that no matter how much we as teachers insist that a lot of the times it's more about the process and the learning than some concrete answer at the end, our students are stuck in this cycle of just wanting someone to tell them how to answer the question "correctly." Of course we as teachers want our students to show content knowledge, but the process in many instances is just as important.
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Paula
3/31/2018 10:00:38 am
I was thinking of a similar question like you, how do we teach or assess creativity.? What you are doing is the right path of allowing students to think for themselves. Allowing students to partner up with others to observe different modalities and levels of success is a way to expose them to creativity. Showcasing work is another way to celebrate creativity but also to spark an interest of doing things in different ways. I can relate on how you said you tend to jump in to guide students into the right learning objective, and that's just you wanting the best out of your students.
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Samuel UreñaWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
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