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Chapter Five
Creative Teaching
Challenge Your Comfort Zones
Classroom environment
Look at the classroom from the perspective of a student.
Is the environment warm and welcoming or is it cold and sterile?
Does it have a personal feel to it or is it just another classroom?
Try to encourage a mixture of student displays, bought displays, positive messages,
key words/advice and plants.
Sharing key information – pictures of famous people linked to the subject.
3 principles for creative planning
1. The student should be at the centre of the learning process.
2. Help the students to develop skills they can use and develop independently of the
teacher and in other subjects.
3. A lesson needs to be viewed as part of a narrative – a sense of story helps creatively
connect learning and aids reinforcement and memory.
Key questions to ask yourself:
Why am I standing here?
Why am I talking?
What do I want the students to get out of the lesson?
Is there a brisker way of covering this work?
Am I engaging all learners with this?
Why would students want to come back to my lesson?
Starting out
Setting the tone of a lesson the moment they arrive – gives a sense of purpose to the
lesson.
Engaging the students with the starting activity – ask students for key ideas from last
lesson (with books closed) and collate as a collective mind map on the board.
Using homework as an active starter – e.g. Pair and Share – Split the class in two and
give them a different homework task each. Start the next lesson by pairing up the
students to share each other’s findings.
Asking the right questions
Use Bloom’s taxonomy’s creative question cues to develop students’ engagement.
Instead of questions, you can use tasks to lead students to higher outcomes, building
from simple activities to more complicated task.
Your most powerful words as a teacher when interacting with students are: Please
and Thank You.
Active Learning
Using TV as a model – students remember reasonably complicated and multiple plot
lines due to the way television soap operas use reinforcement, recap and
cliffhangers. Reinforcement and recap become “starters” and cliffhangers are useful
“plenaries” which then work as starters next time.
Make students’ leisure interests work for you as a teacher.
Working with character cards – set up character cards to help them engage with a
task in a role.
Angry hats and empathy glasses – use props to encourage students to see ideas from
various perspectives. It also introduces a sense of fun.