Essential Creativity In The Classroom

Essential Creativity in the Classroom is about giving all children the opportunity to fulfil their potential. It is about developing real partnerships between parents, teachers, businesses and the community, identifying best practice, finding teachers that are inspiring and schools that are committed to providing a special learning experience. This is a book to inspire, excite and stimulate creative approaches to learning. Without creativity, we have no real innovation; we need people who are capable of thinking crazy, out of the box thoughts; we need people who shake us out of complacency. This book covers in detail topics such as: What do teachers need to do to help children make the most of their creativity? How do children prefer to learn? What can teachers do to stimulate children’s creativity? building self-esteem, helping individuals to believe in themselves supporting a young person in making creative career choices. Packed with proven practical advice this dip-in guide identifies the best ways of supporting pupils as they navigate their exciting journey through a world of learning and discovery.

Tap into children's natural curiosity and scaffold their creative abilities across all domains of learning--and nurture your own creativity!

Creativity and the Common Core State Standards are both important to today’s teachers. Yet, for many educators, nurturing students’ creativity seems to conflict with ensuring that they learn specific skills and content. In this book, the authors outline ways to adapt existing lessons and mandated curricula to encourage the development of student creativity alongside more traditional academic skills. Based on cutting-edge psychological research on creativity, the text debunks common misconceptions about creativity and describes how learning environments can support both creativity and the Common Core, offers creative lessons and insights for teaching English language arts and mathematics, and includes assessments for creativity and Common Core learning. Featuring numerous classroom examples, this practical resource will empower teachers to think of the Common Core and creativity as encompassing complementary, rather than mutually exclusive, goals. Book Features: Shows how teaching skills mandated by the CCSS and teaching for creativity can reinforce one another. Helps teachers better understand what creativity is, how to develop it, and how to assess it in meaningful ways. Examines the many misconceptions about creativity that prevent teachers from doing their best work. Provides classroom examples, ideas, and lesson plans from successful teachers across disciplines. “This wonderful book makes the important point that teaching to well-designed standards is completely consistent with teaching for creativity. [It] is filled with practical advice for teachers about how to teach to Common Core standards, in both ELA and math, in ways that lead to creative learning outcomes.” —Keith Sawyer, Morgan Distinguished Professor in Educational Innovations, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill “Beghetto, and Baer make a strong, nuanced case that knowledge for the sake of knowledge may be acceptable for immediate retention, but knowledge in the service of creating new possibilities has long-term consequences that can’t be ignored by educators and society.” —Scott Barry Kaufman, scientific director, The Imagination Institute and researcher, Positive Psychology Center, University of Pennsylvania

"Creativity is an integral element of any primary classroom. It has been never more important for teachers to involve children in their own learning and provide a curriculum that motivates and engages. Being creative involves generating new ideas, reflecting upon and evaluating different teaching approaches, and establishing an environment that supports creativity. Creativity in the Primary Classroom explores how to develop as a creative teacher and how to foster creativity in your classes. Drawing from key literature and detailed real-life examples, Juliet Desailly puts into practice her extensive experience planning, advising and developing creative approaches to teaching and curriculum planning. This book examines what creativity in a primary classroom can look like, and is supported throughout by practical activities for use across curriculum subjects and reflective tasks encouraging critical engagement with key conceptual issues. This is essential reading for students on primary initial teacher education courses including undergraduate, graduate, and employment-based routes into teaching, and also for practicing teachers wishing to enhance their own teaching."--Publisher's website.

This book borrows from a range of theories about creativity and about learning, while remaining largely practical in focus. It contains numerous examples for teachers of how to apply ideas about creativity in the classroom. In doing so, it attempts to maintain the subject's core identity while also keeping abreast of contemporary social, pedagogical and technological developments. The result is a refreshing challenge to some of the more mundane approaches to English teaching on offer in an age focussed excessively on standardisation and teaching to tests.

In Play and Creativity in Art Teaching, esteemed art educator George Szekely draws on his two classic volumes, Encouraging Creativity in Art Lessons and From Play to Art, to create a new book for new times. The central premise is that art teachers are not only a source of knowledge about art but also a catalyst for creating conditions that encourage students to use their own ideas for making art. By observing children at play and using props and situations familiar to them, teachers can build on children’s energy and self-initiated discoveries to inspire school art that comes from the child’s imagination. The foundation of this teaching approach is the belief that the essential goal of art teaching is to inspire children to behave like artists, that art comes from within themselves and not from the art teacher. Play and Creativity in Art Teaching offers plans for the study of children’s play and for discovering creative art teaching as a way to bring play into the art room. While it does not offer a teaching formula or a single set of techniques to be followed, it demystifies art and shows how teachers can help children find art in familiar and ordinary places, accessible to everyone. This book also speaks to parents and the important roles they can play in supporting school art programs and nourishing the creativity of their children.

The fourth edition of this well-known text continues the mission of its predecessors – to help teachers link creativity research and theory to the everyday activities of classroom teaching. Part I includes information on models and theories of creativity, characteristics of creative people, and talent development. Part II includes strategies explicitly designed to teach creative thinking, to weave creative thinking into content area instruction, and to organize basic classroom activities (grouping, lesson planning, assessment, motivation and classroom organization) in ways that support students’ creativity.

Creativity and critical thinking are key skills for complex, globalised and increasingly digitalised economies and societies. While teachers and education policy makers consider creativity and critical thinking as important learning goals, it is still unclear to many what it means to develop these skills in a school setting. To make it more visible and tangible to practitioners, the OECD worked with networks of schools and teachers in 11 countries to develop and trial a set of pedagogical resources that exemplify what it means to teach, learn and make progress in creativity and critical thinking in primary and secondary education.