Creativity gives a competitive edge to any work and this is why you as a teacher need to pay a careful attention to nurturing creativity among students.
Allow students to explore, expand imagination and create creative ideas that helps in building something that’s innovative and gives worth to their effort put in the process.
The word creativity may sound cool but it isn’t something that comes easy. Here, it reminds of what Sir Ken Robinson described of what creativity is all about? To quote his words- ‘Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value. It is a process; it’s not random.”
It is important to note that, creativity comes in varied forms, starting from working on the right idea up to a point where one finally feels that it can be turned into something that’s tangible. For it, one needs to devote in a lot of time and requires people to struggle down several blind alleys before one finally finds out the right solution. Initially, the creative activity may appear like loafing around until the breakthrough happens.
So, in order that the breakthrough happens, you need to make sure that you practice the essential techniques to help students make a beginning to their creative journey. Given below are some tips to boost your students’ creativity to eventually help them to work on creative projects on their own.
Think Over & Come up with Many Ideas
The idea is never be firm on one idea and avoid being resolute with ideas. Ideally speaking, there should be at least three working ideas, however, there is never a limit to jotting down some good ideas. Here, tools such like chalk talk or affinity mapping can be used by students to share their ideas with their peers and receive feedback on them. Collectively, the students can then discuss among them on the best ideas and drop on the others.
Re-evaluate a Concept, Idea or Solution
Once an idea has been finalized, that’s not an end to it. It needs to go through many faces of revision to give room to varying perspectives, put in consideration to what the audience thinks and the viewpoints of different culture, supporters and that of the critics too. This helps in ensuring that the final idea is accepted by not just like-minded people but by everyone.
Here, primarily one thing is important to remember, it does not matter if one starts off with a baseless and meaningless idea, because with the collective views of people discussing on the idea, the baseless idea or theme too shapes up to become an amazing idea at the end of the day.
Engage into Structured Conversation
For any work, be it small or big, the first thing that is precisely important before beginning with the work or after the initial start has been made is to sit down to communicate on the ideas to understand the varying perspectives and also to understand on the idea. This, one to one communication also gives a scope to recognize certain aspects that requires more effort and or other aspects that stand out and should be focused upon.
Get into Trial and Errors
Often times, the best idea comes up only after making mistakes and this is because, flaws actually helps in the creation of a better opportunity to a better approach of achieving the target.
A student is bound to make mistakes and it is the mistakes that they make which helps them learn on something that did not work out and the other ways to deal with such work. Hence, when they make mistakes, it is important to make them feel encouraged rather than feel lost if the idea fails to work.
Keep an idea aside for a Day or Two
It is always a wise idea to keep aside the topic and focus on other things for working on the same idea can turn up monotonous at the end of the day. Many times, giving the idea some space helps students to approach the idea with fresh perspective and makes their revision more effective
Expand work portfolio
It’s never a bad idea to keep a collection of drafts that the previous students have worked on and may be produce some first drafts from which students can draw inspiration for creative projects.
Store ideas in a Journal
Inspiration struck students’ mind so often and the same is with Ideas too. They can help develop those ideas only if they record it in a journal and let it not go off from mind. Also, there are cases where, earlier drafts make more sense than the ones drafted later. Hence, in any case, keeping a journal to note down inspirations and ideas can be really beneficial for the students while they work on creative projects.
Research to Gather Knowledge
While working on any idea, students should conduct research that is related to the concept and get inspired and learn on new dimensions to the concept while researching on it.
Critically Analyze Peer Work
Besides letting students focus on their work, it is important to let them also critique on their peer’s work as this helps in understanding their thought process and also gather feedback as to how would they approach on to completing the idea to a fruitful solution.
Solve Problems or Exercise to Think Out of the Box
For this activity, a tool called Teampedia is a great resource where students can actually practice creative problem-solving. This assists the students to go out of their conventional thinking process and may be start working from a fresh level.
Students can also be given a chance to conduct a post reflection experience where the students are allowed to may be unpack tools that are there and may be not used by them from their creativity toolbox. This will also help them add a new dimension in their creative project.
Have we missed out any other essential tool for students’ creativity toolbox?
