Fostering Creativity in Students

For this weeks lesson as we were talking about fostering creativity in students I had to reflect on my own teaching and realize that I really need to get back to using methods and ideas to help foster students creativity in their learning.  To that end this week I was doing a lesson using station based learning to have the students practice our content for the week and to differentiate from our traditional classroom learning experience.  As part of that experience I chose for one of our stations to help try and foster students creative use of our content to create a "Librito" where the students were told that they had to create a book that used each of the verbs that we were going over and had an image of what they were discussing on each page.  For some of my more artistically driven students this was great because it allowed them to use their artistic abilities to demonstrate an understanding of the content.  All students had to think creatively to create their own unique version of their books which really sparked some of my students interests in the content and deepened their understanding of content.

One of the things I continue to struggle with in terms of this standard and with 21st century learning as a whole is trying to give the students more control and not keep control of all parts of the learning process myself.  I think it is hard as a teacher to allow for students to go outside of a strict structure for their learning and instead allow them the freedom to be creative in the way they demonstrate their knowledge.  I will need to continue to find different ways for the students to demonstrate their creativity and foster student creativity in demonstrating their competency in the content that we are learning.