Facilitating Creativity in the Classroom

In this podcast, Katie discusses the importance of creativity and agency in the classroom. She emphasizes that creativity is not just limited to art classes, but can be a valuable skill for learning new concepts. Katie shares her experience of two types of classes: those focused on memorization and those that challenge students to understand the material in a personal and lasting way. She believes that teaching students to think critically and computationally is also crucial in the 21st century. Katie suggests using Google Forms to gather feedback from students about their interests and preferences for learning. By incorporating students' interests into lessons and projects, teachers can better engage and support their learning. Katie concludes by encouraging listeners to be mindful of students' interests and to teach towards them in order to foster a love for learning in the next generation. Hello, and welcome to my thoughts on creativity and agency in the classroom. My name is Katie, and I'll be going through a few things with you today. I've had the chance to explore modern classrooms and how we can help students be more creative, and I've learned so much. There's a lot we can do to let students explore their own learning and what works best for them. Creativity is often thought to be reserved for kids in art classes, for drawing and doodling or writing music. People don't always consider it as a skill useful for learning new concepts, but that's one of the ways we fall short in our classrooms. Little do we realize how impactful letting students create and truly participate in their education can be. Think of it this way. In my school experience, I've had two main types of classes. There's the classes that are purely about students getting through the class, memorizing the facts, taking the tests, things like that. They care about knowing the material. They don't always care about what happens with the material after the course. Then there's the classes that really challenge the student. They've also had a lot to do with knowing facts and often taking tests, but they challenge the student to understand the material. This happens in a couple of different ways, often by collaborating with other students or choosing their own methods for presentation, or things like that. But it's about learning the material in a way that's personal and lasting. There's still guidelines that should be in place so students have a standard and direction for these tests and projects, as the goal isn't to have them simply learn about anything, but to cover material in purposeful and meaningful ways to them. Looking back, I honestly don't remember all of the projects that I worked on, but I remember that I did them, and I remember that I was kept involved. Sometimes it felt like a lot, and I didn't appreciate it at the moment, but by the end, I knew I learned in those classes. That's the most rewarding part. Another important part of teaching students in the 21st century is to teach them to think critically as well as creatively. Critically meaning not just logically, but computationally. Many new jobs and fields are opening up, and it's important to teach future generations about it. We have to teach our students not just to be creative, but to be critical computational thinkers. So if we're interested in teaching students creatively, and helping them learn how to be computational thinkers as well, and if we care about finding out their interests and skills, how do we go about that? As I found looking through the internet, and many other resources that are available, there's a lot of people that simply use Google Forms to take surveys to get info and feedback from students. This is helpful as well, because each class is unique, just like our students, and not everything will transfer from one year to the other. I personally really like this idea. An example of what it could look like in my classroom looks like this. I can take some time at the beginning or end of a unit, and give varying examples of what projects look like. Podcasts, for example, or written assignments or videos, however students want to present something, and then send out a survey for kids to take. The survey would have questions about their interests. What hobbies do they have? What skills or interests do they have? More importantly, what do they want to learn? And do they have a preference for how they want to learn it? I will then ask them what kind of project they'd like to work on. This is information that I can use in my lessons. If I know what they're interested in, I can cater my teaching towards that. When I know what kind of project they'd like to work on, I can then work with the students on a rubric and follow up. By being mindful of our students' interests and teaching towards that, we can be better equipped to help them, and ourselves, learn and teach the next generation. That's all I've got time for in this podcast today, but I hope you learned something, as I certainly did. Thanks for listening, and I hope you have a great day.