University of Puerto Rico in Humcao Department of English Practice Teaching
Creativity I love this core disposition! Being creative is one of my favorite things to be. There were so many ways of empowering my students to strive toward creativity and individual expression I couldn’t choose just one. I really didn’t have to do a whole lot to encourage this disposition because children are creative by nature. The things they came up with and said sometimes were hilarious. What I did need to emphasize at times was individual creativity. One time I gave an assignment for a fable we read in class. The task was to dress up a pig worksheet I had given them. When the students started to hand in their assignments, a lot of them were just like mine. It was actually pretty funny. So I made it cleared in case they just didn’t understand, that they could make their own designs and not necessarily follow mine, because I wanted each student to follow their own artistic expression. Besides that, there were other ways I encouraged creativity. Towards the end of the semester, as a group we started creating a group Fable. I let students completely guide where they wanted to take the story to. First we started choosing two characters. They chose a dog and a cat. Afterwards, they had to choose a setting. I let them mention places and wrote them on the board. The setting they chose was the beach. Then they and to make up a moral for the story. I did brainstorming with them and they mentioned a couple of pretty good morals such as helping others, not making fun of others, love, and respect. I did a count of hands to choose the winning moral which was help others. The students were pretty excited because they were actually coming up with the story. When it came to plot, that’s were their imagination ran wild. They
University of Puerto Rico in Humcao Department of English Practice Teaching
mentioned a situation where the dog was skateboarding and tripped with a rock, and then the cat helped him. I loved hearing their creative thinking and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I would never want a classroom where the students have to think exactly as I do or that their works look exactly the same. I believe creativity helps the students to discover themselves as individuals, makes them more sensible and it helps them to grow emotionally. Each of my students have a special talent many I saw and many I didn’t but that doesn’t mean they are not there. Promoting creativity will help these students to discover what their gifts are. In no time these kids won’t be small anymore, they will be on the brink of adult hood. From finding unusual solutions to problems to maybe even finding a cure to an incurable disease, creativity is going to be their best friend. I hope my students and every education center can keep promoting creativity in students to keep building great thinkers.