Educational practice has favored repetition and memorization as strategies for obtaining supposedly "significant results." Totally out of context!
We must not only train our students, but we must transform them, make them change or modify their environment and their relationship with others daily. Creativity is a critical element of this development.
Below I compile the main ideas shared by essaycompany.org that guide us to develop this competence in school contexts.
Two fundamental aspects of creativity in education should be considered: creative teaching and creativity training. The first is focused on the teacher himself and his daily practice. The second is focused on developing creativity in the person who studies.
The current context of creativity in education
Before addressing the development of creativity, we have some general aspects of the current context that characterize it and that, therefore, we must consider:
- Our knowledge is being renewed every 2.5 years; this means that it is advancing at a dizzying pace as much or more as the advance of technology, which implies constant updating.
- 85% of children currently in primary school will work in a job that does not yet exist. What should we teach a child who does not even know what position they will take and does not even know what they will need?
- 43% of current jobs in America will disappear in the next few years. Technology is making them obsolete, and new skills and knowledge will be required for emerging jobs.
- The number of patent applications. China in 2019 applied for 1,542,000 patents. The USA, its closest competitor, applied for more than half a million. In Mexico, we are in the order of 16,000 patent applications. It is directly related to the creativity and innovation of each country.
- The number of robotic arms in the manufacturing environment is an important indicator. For every 10,000 inhabitants South Korea has 855, Japan has 364 components. The USA has 228, China 97, and Mexico has only 33 robotic arms. It could change the entire manufacturing and assembly environment, and we must rethink the validity of the current workforce.
The outlook is uncertain; we do not know what the future will be like, we do not know precisely what will happen, but we know that new soft skills will be needed. International organizations agree that skills such as leadership, digital literacy, teamwork, innovation, creativity, problem-solving, etc., will be required. From here, we rescue creativity to talk about it in school environments, and it can be affirmed that creativity is, and will be, an essential skill.
Ideas about creativity
The excellent news about creativity is that it is a human trait we are all endowed with and can be developed. We are all creative.
The bad news is that it can be tough to develop because we are used to being in our comfort zone, which we like and know. So we need a plan and strategies to value and develop it.
Let's start by getting to know it through four traits that characterize it:
- One trait of creativity is originality, how original you are in your classes, dressing, cooking, etc. Originality is an unusual, novel, and not obvious idea to solve a problem or address a situation.
- Another trait of creativity is fluency, speed, and ease of generating ideas; we may wonder how many pictures we develop in a given amount of time.
- The next trait is flexibility. In addition to generating original ideas fluently, we should create ideas on different topics in different fields and contexts.
- The last trait is related to realizing some use, some purpose for that original idea.
In summary, creativity is characterized by originality, fluency, flexibility, and practical and helpful character.
Creative teaching
Creative teaching refers to the level of creativity you employ when teaching your class and how you integrate creativity into your teaching process.
To develop creative teaching, you should consider taking these actions that become the purposes of innovative 1education:
- Foster a constructive mindset
- Encourage open-ended learning
- Encourage students to work collaboratively
- Discovering other disciplines
- Rethinking the teaching-learning process
- Encourage new forms of expression
- Assume the risks of change
- Empowering limitations
- Develop self-confidence
- Create new opportunities
- Finding new ways to reach the expected results
Training in creativity
On the other hand, we have this different approach; training in creativity. The central questions are, how do I promote my students to be creative, how do I develop creativity in my students? From this perspective, the actions and objectives change. Now you should seek to carry out the following steps as part of the didactic planning in your subject:
- Promote creative thinking - transversal
- Promote teamwork
- Develop imagination
- Use creativity in all disciplines
- Teach the creative process
- Eliminate blocks to creativity
You should develop these actions with a four-step plan:
Step 1. Define formal knowledge objectives regarding integrating a creative challenge in your classes. That is, make explicit the curricular contribution of the creative challenge to the subject you teach.
Step 2. It is to establish limits, rules, and scope of the activity. It is vital to define times, resources, work modality, roles, etcetera.
Step 3. Warm-up. We must promote the previous activation of the students with a dynamic or creative game to start capturing their attention and start using their brains. This way, we will achieve a positive predisposition for the challenge or creative activity.
Step 4. Challenge or creative activity. In this step, you explain the creativity technique you will use and what the challenge or creative activity will consist of.
With these four steps, we will create a prepared environment with the right attitude, clear objectives, established and agreed on limits, and the technique we will use well explained. If you add incentives to maintain a high level of motivation in this environment, the success of your exercise will be guaranteed.
Power Skills
In another sense, a group of businessmen and academics have joined together to form the Power Labor Skills Certification platform, understanding that these soft skills are neither smooth nor soft, but Power Skills, that is to say, are powerful skills. These skills are the ones that will take your personal, school, work, business, etc., projects forward. And I am referring to negotiation skills, resilience, digital literacy, negotiation skills, leadership skills, influence, or flexibility that you may have. These are the elements that, in the future, in a project, will take you forward. It will not only be technical knowledge because we are advancing very fast. Companies are deciding to train their staff in technical knowledge. It is the soft skills, and what PLSC precisely certifies these skills to teach in developing the primary and necessary soft skills between now and 2030.
In conclusion, motivating creativity in the classroom is a precious resource for all young people to develop skills and talents that will benefit them for life. Thus, we are educating, but we are transforming to learn to feel comfortable in a strange environment, even a hostile environment. Yet, they will find solutions to significant present and future problems.