Creating a Culture of Creativity and Deep Thinking in the Classroom

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October 28, 2019 by twunewteachers

This blog post was written by Donald Place, graduate student in the Teaching, Learning and Curriculum program Texas Woman’s University. His full biography is posted below. 

This post is intended for new teachers and any “old” teacher wishing to really create a culture of creativity and deep thinking in the classroom. The first three years of teaching have a steep learning curve. There are the expectations of administration, the curriculum, the district policies, lesson planning, managing student work, grading, meetings, Teaching Learning Communities (TLCs), student behavior, parent calls, children with Individual Educational Plans (IEPs), among others. The list can be overwhelming.

I believe that most people go into teaching because the feel called to make a difference in the next generation, to mold students, to help them grow and achieve their potential. But quickly things, what Charles Hummel called “the tyranny of the urgent,” take over and we let our priorities be sidelined by a list of “to-do items.”

So what are some of the priorities that every teacher, regardless of whether you teach in public or private school, elementary, middle or high school?

Foster Creativity

Pablo Picasso once said: “All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” For your classroom to be an incubator for creativity, you have to plan of students to first pose problems. Too many times we give students problems to “solve” and never ask students to identify the problems. Sometimes they will pose wrong questions, but they can learn from their mistakes.

Create Long-Term Projects

Encourage students to come up with new ideas, new inventions. Often, inventors try and fail several times until they get it right. Ambiguity and failure can be great learning opportunities if one reflects on them. Students will experience failure and it’s important to help them continue and find new ideas and new solutions. They need to learn to overcome and persevere.

Teach Students How to Think

Arthur L. Costa believes that one is born thinking but that thinking skillful is learned. There are several things you can do to do this:

• Pose challenging questions
• Have students assess how they are learning by creating a learning log
• Teach them to question assumptions made by them
• Help them value diversity of view-points
• Teach them to care for others and find peaceful solutions to problems

Grapple with Tough Issues

Don’t underestimate your students abilities to handle difficult questions and issues. We want to cover the material but in a way that students don’t just memorize it for a test and quickly forget it. When students have the opportunity to wrestle with challenging problems like, global warming, current wars, social justice, etc., they will tend to remember the lessons learned. Allow for diversity of solutions. Often as teachers, we have one correct answer in mind. Create rubrics where students are given the opportunity to explain their answers. The result is students who can handle deep moral questions calmly and rationally.

Discuss Civic and Moral Issues

Along with dealing with tough moral issues. John Dewey believed that American schools have an obligation to teach the students how to live in a democracy, to grow morally and intellectually. Lawrence Kohlberg believes that morality is developed when a person has empathy for the other once he or she has walked in that person’s “shoes”. Teachers need to take on the challenge to help students grow in their decision-making abilities regarding difficult issues by allowing carefully guided discussions. In the process, create a community of learners that go beyond just “obeying the rules” and create an internal moral compass for doing right when “no one is watching.”

Don’t Teach to the Test

We all dread the standardized test at the end of the school year and we are tempted to “teach to the test.” Schools like Singapore, China, Korea and Japan, have incredibly high scores in standardized tests, yet their societies lack inventors, entrepreneurs and artists. Instead, incorporate the knowledge being tested in interesting units where students will learn the material while grappling and trying to solve issues.

All Students Deserve a Challenging Curriculum

At the end, the issue is that all students deserve a curriculum that is engaging and challenging. All students deserve an excellent education, not just those who are in the Gifted and Talented program, Honors or Advanced Placement courses. That is the part of the great experiment that is the American educational system. Thomas Jefferson had put the idea forward that our democratic form of goverment would be best placed in the hands of an informed people, not just on an educated elite. Our multicultural society will thrive only if all children have an excellent education that is engaging, thought-provoking, innovative and responsive to the needs of the future.

P.S. You can find many of the concepts found in this blogpost in the book:

Ornstein, A. C., Pajak, E., & Ornstein, S. B. (2015). Contemporary issues in curriculum. Boston: Pearson.

About the Author:

Donald “Don” Place was born and raised in Managua, Nicaragua. He left Nicaragua when the country was starting to spiral into chaos before the Sandinista Revolution. As an ELL student in the late 70s he graduated from Paschal High School in Fort Worth, Texas in 1980. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Political Science at North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas). He began his teacher at McKinney High School where he taught for 13 years. He currently teaches at Denton High School where he has taught for 17 years. Don Place teaches the Advanced Placement Spanish Language and Culture Course as well as the International Baccalaureate Spanish Standard Level course. He is pursuing a Master of Education in Teaching, Learning and Curriculum at Texas Woman’s University through the ELLevate! Grant. He has taken students on trips to Costa Rica, Mexico and Spain. Some of his accomplishments are:

• 1998 McKinney ISD Excellence in Teaching Award, Secondary Teacher of the Year
• 2003-2019 AP Spanish Language Examination Reader and Table Leader
• 2015 Denton High School Teacher of the Year