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Teaching creativity is more than just accepting what students have; it’s using the right tools to turn what they have into a complete work.

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Module 7: How do I love thee?

The above video is a powerpoint that plays with the idea of students giving their writing a "makeover' in order to give it style and make it more attractive to their intended audience. Students will gain an understanding of how different types of figurative language (simile, metaphor, personification, hyperbole, and onomatopoeia) add sensory appeal to their writing. More than just learning the definitions of the terms discussed, students will see the importance of figurative language and why it is useful when trying to capture the audience's attention. Using art and technology to teach this concept helps engage the students and stimulates those who are primarily visual learners.

Module 7: What's the Big Idea?

Playing with a purpose has proven beneficial for many of the great minds of the sciences and arts. While play may begin without responsibilities or rules, it has the potential to end with results that are informative and valuable. It is by playing with the topic that we actually begin to be creative with the other thinking skills addressed in the Sparks of Genius book. Playing allows us to reach outside the limits of the norm – finding abstractions that we may otherwise not have discovered, recognizing patterns and even developing new ones, practicing body thinking and empathizing. Play also has an effect on our ability to make transformations from one area or skill to another; this could include writing poetry to help students understand math, setting rules, formulas, definitions, etc. to music in order to increase students’ ability to memorize, or even including artistic, visual imagery to invoke understanding to concepts in any field of study.

One example of playing, which has been useful in the field of Language Arts, is one’s willingness to play with word patterns, which can be found in all the different forms of poetry – acrostics play with the letters of a word to form sentences or lines that describe the original word. Then, of course, there are sonnets, haikus, cinquains, and many more ways to play with patterns in poetry. Scott Kim and John Langdon played with words in their books Inversions and Wordplay. The creators of Word World, seen on PBS, play with words by creating word pictures and J.R.R. Tolkien played with letters and created new “Elvish” languages – languages that are still played with today.

I think this whole chapter on playing helped with my immediate creativity because it gave me an excuse to step outside the rules. There is a freedom to try something new without worrying about the intended results; it is a bit like writing a poem in free verse where one does not feel obligated to follow a specific rhyming pattern or a specific set of grammar rules. In the long run, I think opening the door to “playing” in the classroom sparks the kind of creativity Vivian Paley had when she allowed her kindergarten students to act out stories that they read as a class and stories that they made up on their own. Her students learned a lot about themselves and each other as they engaged in this type of play and Paley and her students created a community in  the classroom that began to thrive on levels that otherwise would have gone undeveloped without Paley’s willingness to “play”.

Language Arts offers a variety of different options for play within the classroom – acting out plays and stories, playing with old literature and modernizing it in either a dramatic or humorous way, creating new types of poetry, making up new words, or even following in Tolkien’s footsteps and creating a whole new alphabet and language. Giving students freedom to “break the rules” of grammar and literature enough for them to learn to appreciate it and enjoy it can make all the difference in their perception of literature. As students see literature’s multiple purposes through their time of “play”, they will hopefully see the importance of their own contributions and the creativity of their own ideas at work.

Module 7: Zoom In!

  This is a picture of a knife hanging on a spice rack I have in my kitchen. Notice in the background is the reflection of dipping oils I have on my counter.

I was inspired by the above picture I took for my first "Zoom In" from module one and decided to continue playing with "reflection" pictures. This was neat for me because while I was focusing on taking a picture of one particular object, other objects became part of the picture as well . . . and some were even more dominant than the original object I was taking a picture of. I was amazed at how many reflections I found just in my own home while I was working on this assignment. Below are just a few of the ones that really caught my eye.

The same hands that you see in this picture, gingerly holding our sweet little girl, are the same hands that built and stained the large wooden bookcase that can be seen in the reflection.

 

 

This is a picture of our other sweet little girl and through the reflection on the glass you can see the door which leads into her bedroom. I liked how the praying girl and cross is seen right beside her sweet little face.

Here you can see a blurry reflection of our breakfast nook table through the light that hangs above it.

Here is an even better reflection of the breakfast nook seen through the microwave.

This is actually a picture of the inside of my china hutch, but the reflection of the dining room table actually appears more clearly than the glass objects found in the hutch.

Module 6: What's the big idea?

The Root-Bernsteins describe dimensional thinking as “moving from 2-D to 3-D or vice versa; mapping or transforming information provided in one set of dimensions to another set; scaling, or altering the proportions of an object or process within one set of dimensions; and conceptualizing dimensions beyond space and time as we know them” (p. 204). Linear thinking can many times be insufficient and can cause us to miss other aspects and perspectives that are vital to our overall understanding. So, after reading chapters 11 and 12, I can see how dimensional thinking serves as a vehicle to enhance creativity by enabling teachers (or anyone for that matter) to better master the whole of a given topic and, therefore, be more effective in the skill of modeling. Looking back over past skills, I would have to conclude that dimensional thinking is not the only thinking skill that increases our ability to model effectively; it also requires keen observation skills and the ability to make abstractions by simplifying that which is complicated or by finding within any given subject or object that which has yet to be discovered.

Modeling is different from body thinking and empathizing in that with the latter two skills we are allowing the subject or object to actually possess us in such a way that we can get a feel for how it works from an inner, intimate perspective. Modeling, on the other hand, allows us to possess the subject or object in a way that allows us to make changes, manipulate, and/or oversee its possibilities. Similarly, all three – modeling, body thinking, and empathizing – produce a greater understanding of the subject/object, and together, they can stimulate a fuller perspective.

The “How Do I Love Thee” assignment for this module showed just how much students will benefit from teachers who exhibit strength in dimensional thinking and modeling. There is a vast difference between looking at a written definition and examples of hyperbole and looking at visual images that bring life and understanding to the meaning of hyperbole – as I discovered in making my “hyperbole” model. These two skills are also beneficial because they offer room to get students involved in thinking creatively about the topic and they provide a great way to evaluate students overall understanding.

Since I am not a big fan of the traditional type classroom where rote memorization and lecture are the norm (and neither are most of the students I have been privileged to teach), I can appreciate dimensional thinking as well as modeling for offering a creative alternative to this type of teaching style. Not only can these two skills add an element of fun (as seen in the “Zoom In” project for this module), but they can create a more meaningful learning experience for the students – learning centers are a great example of this. While I cannot speak for all subjects equally, I do know that modeling is a key element which should be used in all Language Arts classes. As students make abstractions concerning stories, novels, poetry, etc. that they read, they should also be required to make models of their abstractions which will not only encourage an extra effort of creativity, but it will also cause them to take a look at aspects of the literature that they may have otherwise overlooked. Finally, dimensional thinking and modeling will also allow students to play with their topic, strengthening their ability to make sense of anything that at first may appear foreign or unfamiliar, which in actuality can be true of any of the thinking skills discussed in the Sparks of Genius book.