Final project of innovation lab

INNOVATION LAB

AINHOA ALBIZURI NEKANE ALTUNA LEIRE LASA

INDEX Theoretical part ....................................................................................................................... 2 Project day ............................................................................................................................... 4 Reflections on students opinions ......................................................................................... 6 Our innovative contribution ................................................................................................... 6 To go further ............................................................................................................................ 7 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 8

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Theoretical part

Creativity is our project’s mainstream. According to that, there are some theories which underline its importance. It’s easy to say that we need to be creative as teachers but how do we get this skill?

As Christian Stadil and Lene Tanggaard have said in the book “In the shower with Picasso”, “creativity has, in other words, become unavoidable. We need new and significant methods of ensuring sustainable growth on both national and international levels. This requires that we possess the necessary skills and imagination to envision the new, and it requires that we develop meaningful alternative products and lifestyle.

Our ability to imagine the future is the most human of all abilities. But individual imagination is not enough. If new ideas are to be successfully realized, we need to be able to act on them.”

We know that everyone has the potential to be more creative at work and his or her own lives. The question is, do we dare? The America psychologist and creativity researcher Ropert Sternberg asserts that the most important doctrine for promoting creativity is that one that first needs to decide to be creative.

This is the most important point of being creative, to decide to be creative. But apart from that there are, of course, certain preconditions for being creative. You need to be able to discern new contents. You need to be able to combine things differently and in new ways. And you need to be able to analyze what the new might be in an existing market or field. Even if you possess those “skills”, there is, of course, no guarantee that you will actually be creative. Perhaps you are not able to evaluate your ideas. Perhaps you expect that people will automatically listen to what you have to say.

This is not good enough. You need to decide to use your talents and abilities.

Creativity is, in this sense, action based. We can only speak of creativity when we speak of its expression in practice. It is not good to say, “I´m creative. I just haven´t managed to show anyone yet. “ The concept of creativity in schools is still quite empty, and there is a growing need to find more democratic and collective organizational structures facilitating creativity and peer learning. Furthermore, most educational studies on creativity have until now concentrated on explaining the relation between teaching and creativity and in this context, learning very often remains as a secondary concept (Torrance, 1972; Hannessey & Amabile, 1987; Fasko, 2000-2001). Our goal is to be creative with the pupils, we want to make them aware about the importance of being and working as a group, and to help the others and let the others help you without taking into account who they are.

‘To achieve the goal of promoting creativity in education there are two issues that require attention: on the one hand what creativity means to teachers, and on the other hand their actual practices to facilitate creativity in the classroom’ (Cheung, 2012, p.

43). So we are going to work on that. Think about what creativity means to us and how we can practice to make creativity easier in their class. For us creativity is the skill to make things better in a different and innovative way. Therefore, we want to put into 2

practice an activity to facilitate the relationship between the pupils in the classroom in a creative way. But as stated by Bilton (2007, p. 39): ‘Creativity is better understood as a process rather than as an individual trait – something we do, rather than something we have’. But we think that this could be the start of a change regarding the gender separation and concerning the school architecture.

On the other hand, we have another type of theories that emphasize the significance of making a project. Regarding Dr. John L Taylor’s text, every project has to be focused in a clear direction, coherently, with a central objective and be based in a real need. For instance, our project is focused on student`s needs, specifically, in fourteen years old teenagers from a Danish school.

First of all, it is advisable to start the project with vague ideas about what we are trying to achieve, asking ourselves about the real needs of the students. In that way, after having done a brainstorming of ideas, we will finally suggest a project which we think fits best with those needs.

After that, we should begin gathering information from several resources in order to compare them and take the one that fits best with our needs. In our project, we have interviewed the English teacher of these group, who has explained us the relationship between girls and boys, search information on the internet and visit the school, where we had the choice to observe an ordinary class and met them for the first time. That has given us the background for the final work. In addition, it would be advisable to link sources in order to take into account all agents taking part, such as pupils, the teacher, the classroom, etc.

Furthermore, as the text says, students really benefit from being given a different structure, giving them the opportunity to choose the way they are going to organize the work, present it. For example, even though we have a wide range of media resources, we finally decided to use a blog, which offers us the possibility to show our project step by step.

Finally, we have to say that making a project helps you to develop expression, critical thinking and arguing skills, so we are learning that while doing the project.

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Project day

As explained in the last blog entry, part of our project took place with 24 students in the Ingrid Jespersen School. During the project we could observe several excellent aspects and others to improve, which we are going to discuss in the following sections.

On the one hand, according to the weaknesses, we did not know enough the student group previously and we hadn`t great trust relationship with them. Therefore, at the beginning of the session there was a lack of communication between them and us.

Firstly, the fact of not having done a brief introduction and the poor explanations we gave them made the pupils to be confused about what they had to do, they may have felt lost. As a result, some pupils lost interest in specific moments. This was reflected on several moments of chaos in which the help of the teacher was essential to continue with the dynamics.

In the same way, we had difficulties answering and clarifying the doubts and multiple questions from students and the gap between the two languages spoken in class (English and Danish) didn't facilitate a good understanding between students and us. Moreover, the pupils might have found the game called “kiss tackle” a little bit aggressive due to their nordic culture; they are not used to physical contact as much as we do. The narrow traditional architecture of the classroom didn't help at all to carry out the session. Regarding to the next time, it would be advisable to use another way where the students rotate from a game to another, while all of them take part in all dynamics at the same time, but in a smaller groups.

On the other hand, in reference to strengths, we should underline the active participation and dynamic behavior of students and the teacher. The high participation of the students, their desire to reflect on and contribute new ideas, their speed when it comes to acting, surprised us pleasantly. In addition, we should identify as achievements the cooperation we showed between the three members of the group, the fact of having divided the project into two parts and the achievement of our goal without having done any type of introduction. Summarizing, we managed to see how deep is the relationship among teenagers, the differences found between leisurerelated activities, in which the difference of gender is clearly visible, and those related to school work, in which there are no such differences. According to the analyzed experiment in "Anales de Psicología", there are no significant gender differences in social self-concept, total self-concept and general academic skill, both perceived by parents and teachers. (J.A.Amezcua, M.Pichardo, Anales de psicología, ISSN 02129728, Vol 16, Num.2, 2000, págs. 207-214) Furthermore, we find essential the role of the teacher during the session. From our point of view, he is the main reason why the pupils have a trust based relationship between them and with him. Through countless jokes and funny comments he is able to establish an excellent working atmosphere, where each student plays a fundamental role and feels protected and valued by the entire group. The teacher gets the perfect balance between seriousness and a great friendship. His attitude stands out for being dynamic, active, participatory and friendly. He is the inspiration; his way to guide 4

students and his ability to believe blindly in all that he does leads to an excellent learning environment. Despite the architecture of the classroom is traditional and they have evident gender differences because of biological reasons, the teacher succeeds in carrying out a large number of group works.

In the same way, students demonstrated a participatory an active attitude and interest in our project. At the beginning, they felt ashamed, embarrassed and concerned about what the rest could think. At that time we could clearly see the differences of gender and their friendship preferences. However, in the end, they had already achieved to behave as a unique group where they could feel confidence and comfort enough. Even so, we have to point out that at the end of the project, when we were talking out loud and reflecting together about the session, we noticed that the girls had spoken much more than the boys. We found out a theory which supports this phenomenon: “Taking into account the point of view during the XX century, the behavior differences between genders are due to biological differences between boys and girls. Therefore, men would be physically stronger, less flexible, they would have a bigger spatial, numeric and mechanic capacity and they would perceive the world in terms of objects, ideas and theories. Meanwhile, women would reach the physical and psychological matureness, they would have higher and earlier verbal abilities and they would perceive the world in a more personal, aesthetics and moral terms. In the influential book “Men and women” Hutt asserted, for example, that men and women are inherently different and that therefore these characteristics are not likely to change.” (Hutt, 1972) This theory is written from a biological point of view, and even though nowadays the social based theories are more significant, this one has a straight relationship with the situation we lived on the classroom, at the end of the project. This would explain the reason why the girls spoke more about how they felt. However, the boys referred to which activity was easier or which one was more challenging.

Reflecting on everything we have previously mentioned, we have come to certain conclusions. First of all, we have noticed that even having traditional school architecture, it is possible to create an innovative learning environment. This is reflected on the fact that the tables are placed in pairs and routed to the blackboard where we can see the teacher`s table in the middle, their material located in some cupboards on the back of the classroom, etc.

Despite the fact that we are accustomed to see traditional class architecture linked to individual work, they have shown us that it could be feasible to produce an unbeatable group-work atmosphere. This mostly happens thanks to the active attitude of pupils and teacher; both of them want to go in the same direction, with some clear and agreed common goals. Furthermore, the teacher is ready to get out of his comfort zone and face the needs of his students. He does not really want to follow always the same methodology and that is why he has courage to check new ways of teaching. In consequence, it is not necessary to change the school architecture, providing their rewarding and significant learning process.

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Reflections on students opinions

We are so happy because students were so motivated and they participated a lot. After doing everything, we gave a post-it to each student in order to see what were the things they liked most, and which ones the ones they liked least.

After analyzing their answers, we saw that the game they liked most was the game of "hula hoops" because they had to work together and help each other. Another reason was that they found it very funny.

Moreover, we have also seen that they did not like the kissing game, because they felt uncomfortable, and they did not understand well who had to kiss who.

We were also told that the games were too easy, and sometimes they do not feel so much motivated and they feel bored at some points. Besides this, they do not know what to do at some times, we think that we could have explained better each activity. Finally, they did not understand well why we played the tour of Copenhagen; the purpose of the activity.

As a conclusion, we can say that we need to improve the explanations of the activities and the way of speaking to the pupils in order to let them get information in a better way.

Our innovative contribution

Our project basis was to analyze the relationship between the pupils and to see how it does affect in their learning process. But our innovative idea has been the next one: make them conscious about their capacity of working in groups formed by different gender colleges, in an effective and efficient way.

We noticed that even if they choose same gender colleges to spend their free time they don´t have any problems in working together through their learning process.

We asked them to do a group exercise where they needed to listen to each other but without telling them anything about the hidden details related to gender. In the end, when we talked about it out loud, we explained them the reasons of why did we did it as we did, so they could understand everything.

Therefore, we can say that our innovative contribution has been to make them conscious, by proving it with them, about a reality that they couldn´t see; their ability of helping each other and working together in groups and as a big group, without taking into account the gender of their colleagues.

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To go further

One of the conclusions we have reached, is that being creative requieres to have freedom. But how much freedom must the teacher give to the students? How much does the teacher have? Which kind of freedom is the suitable? Which is the limit of these freedom? Do we need a lot of instructions?

First of all, the teacher must follow some educational issues, as the curriculum and the schools ideology. However, he has his own space to use the methodology he wants and support teamwork. Our challenge as a teacher should be to know how much freedom they need to feel comfortable with the activity. Giving a lot of instructions does not mean to contribute to their learning process.

Also, as we are talking about creativity, we should take into account that giving plenty of instructions do not help to develop pupils’ creativity. In consequence, the teacher has to get use of the context without saying which aim they need to reach. In that way, students will think, reflect on and use their mind in order to solve the problem they face.

Finally, according directly to our project, once they had given the instructions they should have felt that they needed to work in group, helped each other, without telling them before to use teamwork.

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Bibliography   

Amezcua Membrilla, J.A., Pichardo Martinez,M.C.(2000). Anales de psicologia.

Vol.16, nº2.Pags 207-214.Spain.

Stadil,C., Tanggaard, L. (2012). In the shower with Picasso. Copenhague.

Vassiliou,A.(2009).Diferencias de género en los resultados educativos: medidas adoptadas y situación actual en Europa. Get from http://eacea.ec.europa.eu/Education/eurydice/documents/thematic_reports/120 ES.pdf

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