Boosting Creativity in the Classroom

by Steve Bowkett

 

Programme:

 

During the day you will be offered up to fifty ideas, insights, games and strategies for building thinking skills into your classroom practice.

 

Section 1 – Overview: a Thinking Skills Approach to Teaching and Learning.

• Definitions and description of the mind, thinking and creativity.

• A model for linking basic principles of thinking with classroom practice.

• Review of ‘the creative attitude’.

• Linking creativity to multiple intelligences, a hierarchy of understanding, learning styles and the Accelerated Learning cycle.

Section 2 – Creative and Critical Thinking – Core Activity 1.

• Picture Exploration – featuring observation, deduction and inference, speculation, raising awareness of value judgements.

• Training VAK, sensory acuity, perceptual filtering.

• Developing concentration and visualisation skills.

• Encouraging systematic questioning and decision making.

Section 3 – A Thinking Skills Digest.

• A resume of some creative and critical thinking skills to review the ideas so far and highlight the difference between reactive (routine automatic) thinking and the deliberate use of thinking tools.

Section 4 – 6x6 visual organisers – Core Activity 2.

• For Big Picture / logical sequential thinking.

• Understanding basic narrative elements.

• Understanding and applying metaphor.

• For retaining and recalling factual information.

• For brainstorming and problem solving.

Section 5: A Medley of Thinking Games.

• Quality Questioning, Logical-sequential and Big Picture thinking, The Merlin Technique, The Hypothesis Game, Pyramid Visual organisers for structuring knowledge, Surface and deep structures in thinking.

Section 6 – Review:

• Establishing a creative / thinking approach to teaching and learning.

(If time allows)

• Creativity, thinking and Bloom’s Taxonomy.

• A Narrative Dynamic Model for teaching and learning.

• Assessing and evaluating creative output.

Note that this course aims to describe a thinking skills’ approach to teaching and learning and to make general applications across the curriculum. Subject specialists are encouraged to share insights for specific applications within their own subject areas.

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