Whipping up a Batch of Creativity

Passion projects, STEM, STEAM, Maker space, Moonshot Thinking. All recipes to help students to develop their creativity and problem solving skills, but do they really help? 

How do we engage our learners so they move from following a given recipe to having the creativity to adapt them to suit any new situation? How do we unpack those vital skills students will need in the future? Making their own recipes and collaborating with others to share and improve the world around them. 

I'm not a huge fan of them but I know how much most teachers love acronyms so here are some to get you thinking. 

The Human RACE, what makes us who we are? 

How can we best prepare our students to run their own RACE, where learning is their goal? 

Relationships

Agency

Collaboration and Creativity

Empathy 

If we look and the heart of what makes different people within and across cultures connect it comes down to relationships; whanau, friends, colleagues and community. Building positive relationships and modelling positive behaviour towards each other. Showing that learning happens anywhere and with all students and teachers is the foundation on which to build. This can be then extended to incorporate our wider learning community. 

If we don't take the time to find out about our students interests and lives can we support them on their path to agency? If they don't know about where we have come from and some of the factors that colour our lives why would they want to join us on a learning journey at all? 

Key Competecies and Learner Agency tag in to drive our daily learning. The simplification of these concepts for our students takes a huge amount of collaboration and creativity. Helping our students to become adaptable and agile learners is to move from the recipe and apply it to your specific group or Kete. 

Here is an example of collaboration and creativity in learning experiences so my students could take their knowledge and try to creativity build on it in a way that was meaningful for them. 

Students started by unpacking a co constructed recount. Looking at what makes a good recount, effectively working from a tried and tested recipe to write one. Afterwards students opted into the Recount workshops and began to add their creative spin with Lego. 

Three groups choose this and they decided that each group would make part of the story with Lego and video their explanation for the following group. They would have to collaborate within their own group and across all groups so that a complete recount was 'built' by the final workshop. 

By listening to each other explain which part they had choosen to make and examining their models they began to hugely enhance their understanding of what a recount is. The discussion and language used was far more indepth then if they had sat alone and written on a device or paper. Most students collaborated in twos or threes and a few opted to create alone. However they all agreed that it was essential that what they made in each workshop had a cohesive flow for the next group to follow on from. 

This was beginning to touch on empathy as well. If they couldn't create their part then they felt they would be letting themselves and the others in the group down. So for the students who often seem disengaged with learning and decide to opt out and not take ownership this was a huge breakthrough. 

 

So what does this mean for us as teachers? 

What qualities do we need to develop so that we can be that support crew for our students In their RACE while we work on our own? 

Anyone can follow a recipe but we want to be learning how to whip up our own batch of creativity!