Are your students accustomed to choosing the letter A or B and so on for their answers? Well, this manifests confinement. And there is no creativity if one is just conditioned by parameters. You need to inculcate creativity and make your students think outside the box.\
What skills does creativity develop?
When students are creative, they are working at their best both in and outside of the classroom. It’s because they possess the skills to innovate and create something new. This can make us so curious about what skills creativity develops.
What are creativity skills? In a most practical sense, discovering new ways to solve problems and perspective situations is what creativity is all about. In this article, I dish out the useful skills that creativity develops.
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<<How important are your effective teaching strategies? Learn the best points about teaching strategies to adapt them to your student’s needs.
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Why is creativity important?
Creativity is an important skill. It’s one of the valuable assets of successful people in the world. That’s why schools incorporate creativity skills into the curriculum.
Hence, developing and encouraging creativity in our students can help them see things from a better perspective and develop new ideas. It’s one of the crucial life skills that contribute to one’s success in life.
In addition, creativity instills in students a resilient spirit by training them to persevere in the face of challenges. They are never afraid to try different ways to achieve their creative goals.
Furthermore, creativity aids in the emotional development of the child. The classroom has always been a great place for emotional growth where the students are taught to become optimistic and goal-driven.
With creativity, students learn new things as they become more willing to explore and persevere.
What Skills Does Creativity Develop?
Creativity skills are not just for musicians, painters, and artists, but it is relevant to people from different walks of life.
When students are encouraged to think differently, they are most effective in solving problems through in-depth analysis and evaluation. The following are the creativity skills that can help students become more participative, interactive, and collaborative.
It’s creativity at work!
1. Asking questions
Increased confidence to ask questions. When students get curious about something, their creative minds play the scene by probing into the situation or circumstance.
As teachers we can teach creativity by asking questions. Likewise, it’s also one of the skills that students hone when they show their creative prowess. To deepen their understanding of content and to satisfy their sense of curiosity, they ask questions.
Notably, through the implementation of effective teaching strategies in the classroom, students increase their creativity and they ask questions. When students begin to ask questions, the learning environment takes on a lot more depth and learning become more focused on what they really desire to learn.
Practicing the art of questioning in the classroom is not only for us , teachers. In a student-centered classroom setting, students are given opportunities to feed their curiosity and the freedom to ask questions.
To develop creative and analytical minds in the classroom, the open forum, the question and answer activity always come into play. Therefore, as teachers, we have to design activities that allow for small group discussions where students can exercise in questioning.
As a result, students’ performance increases and they become more productive. And, more importantly, their involvement and engagement in class doubled once it’s made clear what they wanted to learn.
2. Making inference
Building inference skills in the classrooms is simply an amazing goal. It nourishes comprehension and creative skills.
When you’re asking for the unique qualities of the characters in the story, identify the theme of the story, or determine the type of conflict in the story, you are asking your students to make inference.
Inferencing is one of the higher-order thinking skills that shouldn’t be over looked in learning. With creativity, students probe into details in order to deduce or conclude.
In light of this, an excellent way of introducing inferencing in the classroom is to encourage the students to show their perspectives and not just tell. Make them more creative in presenting their viewpoints. You can ask them to write a descriptive paragraph about the story’s theme or how the characters in the story develop.
However, as a teacher, you should help students realize that inferencing is not only for the language arts but also for all subjects . Above all, you should have them delve into real-life inferences.
In short, students should realize that they are inferencing on a daily basis. Just like extrapolating what they saw in social media or generalizing the conditions around them.
3. Organizing unique processes
When students are given the freedom of doing things in the classroom, like experimenting, investigating a concept, or analyzing a text, they are more plausibly to find creative means of doing it.
Instead of confining them to rigid processes and procedures, why not allowing them to make things on their own. For as long as the goal is never twisted, organizing unique processes is indeed a useful creative skill that students should enjoy.
Consequently, when giving students tasks and they’re expected to present an output, avoid saying “you should do it this way”. If the different procedures won’t affect the expected results, then students should be allowed to do things their way.
Certainly, allowing students to explore enriches their imagination and develops their creativity. As a result, students get excited about doing things in the classroom and they appreciate learning.
Significantly, after the task, you can ask them, “How did you come up with such a brilliant work?” “How did you do it?” Then, students will share their creative process excitedly. It enriches their understanding and develops their creativity.
4. Making new things
Developing new ideas is a gallant work of a creative mind. When designing learning activities in the classroom, as the facilitator of learning, you should integrate options and allow students to explore.
An example: My seventh grade students are tasked to make a Home Reading Report that asks for analysis of the characters, determining the theme and conflict and bringing out the moral through illustrations or whatever they like best.
In the presentation of outputs, students remarkably show their creations and I am amazed of how they see things from their perspectives. Out of the presentation, I also gain insights of my students’ learning styles, skills, and unique gifts.
On the whole, a creative mind is curious. That is why our creative students would love to improvise in order to do new things to step out from their comfort zones.
5. Solving problems
Creative minds in the classroom are honed to finding solutions to different challenges. Then, they innovate.
The founder of the Creative Education Foundation, Alex Osborn, developed the Creative Problem Solving theory (CPS) that elaborates innovative ways of solving problems through brainstorming.
With this principle, students are encourage to use their creativity in bringing about solutions as they develop a plan in order to accomplish their tasks or finish their goals.
My 7th grade students are given enough opportunities in the classroom to brainstorm, discuss, and share ideas on relevant topics. They find it challenging, yet exciting. For example, if they do text analysis, to further enhance their understanding of the story, they create a different ending to the story by resolving the conflicts in non-violent ways.
Decidedly, using the Creative Problem Solving process encourages the students to see things from a fresh perspective and to look at things differently to discover new ideas and to present innovative solutions to problems.
Evidently, problem solving is a necessary creativity skill that students can make use of in real-life setting. Thus, they should be trained well in the classroom and recognize how valuable this process is. And when students are prepped to solve problems in real life scenarios they become more confident to solve real problems.
6. Analyzing situations
When students are to formulate a plan and implement it, they have first to analyze situations. This is one of the important activities of a creative mind.
For example, students can be given varied situations relevant to the context of the present lesson where they work in groups and make creative analysis to come up with new ideas.
In my English class. I usually require my students to make a literary analysis to capture the essential elements of a master piece. This is a notably engaging activity that helps my students to exercise their creativity in literary analysis and for best appreciation of literature.
For example, when my students are done reading a short story, I will tell them to make a character analysis and see if the author has been effective in using those characters to achieve the theme of the story. This way can elevate students’ thinking and increase their engagement in class.
By probing into the deeper meaning of the text, students are tasked to analyze the meaningful dialogues of the characters, the relevance of the setting of the story, the type of conflict the story is built-on, and the general theme that transcends all boundaries.
Again, that activity essentially requires careful analysis of every detail and is one of the valuable creativity skills that students must develop.
7. Communicating effectively
In modeling all those skills mentioned above, effective communication skills come into play. Effective communication is needed as students present their analysis, perspectives, and new discoveries.
As it happens, creative thinking ultimately breeds creative communication. Truly, with creativity our students devise novel solutions to problems and communicate their thoughts and ideas in a most effective way.
Of course a creative mind aids to effective communication. It impacts communication. And when students developed creativity, in a sense, they also possess good communication skills. As they engage in complex creative thinking, they ask questions, analyze situations, project new solutions, implement, and execute.
Undoubtedly, creative thinkers in the classroom are engaged to share their ideas and to contribute their expertise. They hold the skill to connect and to communicate with one another.
In essence, creative minds find ingenious ways to establish good relationships through effective communication.
In Essence
With all the valuable creativity skills mentioned above, I can say that creativity is a potent force. Our students must be encouraged to become creative thinkers by giving them enriching opportunities to ask questions, find solutions to problems, and discover new ideas by looking at things differently.
As with, the referred creativity skills should also be innate to us teachers so we can enhance our teaching skills and make a difference in the lives of our students.
Who knows, with our creative minds, we can come up with the next big thing in education that magnify student success!
