Week 3

In class today, we had to choose from pictures laid across the floor. We were asked to select a picture that we thought reflected creativity, and to walk around the classroom trying to guess why people chose the picture they did. 

These are some of the pictures that my classmates chose and why;

Anna chose this picture of a child laughing because she felt that creativity brings joy and often children are creative.

Emily chose this picture because she saw creativity as something that all people possess, no matter what age, race or gender.

Rachel saw creativity as a form of expression, like this picture of graffiti.

This starter activity was a way of getting us to use our creative minds to interpret these pictures, and it paved the way for the next activity which was based on our readings. Our lecturer gave everyone out a quote or definition on creativity from the reading that we had prepared for that day (Kelly & Kelly, 2007) and we had to walk around the room discussing these quotes and trying to find a match for the words and definitions. I really liked this started activity as it allowed us to us the readings we had done, and to get each others opinions on what the quotes and definitions meant to us. It was interesting to see how these changed throughout the class. This is an activity I would definitely take and use in my own teaching. 

To get us thinking more about education, we watched an video of a talk by Sir Ken Robinson on the reasons for changing education.

 

He made some interesting points about how education standards should be raised. He raised the point that academic and non academic are judged today, and that children should be encouraged to be creative, not just strive towards high academic success. Robinson commented on the rise of ADHD being treated in children, and how their stimulation is being significantly lowered by medication, making their creativity levels and motivation drop. He suggested that to combat this and the problem that academics has become too focused upon, that the paradigm should be changed and we should be going in the opposite way to standardisation.

The second half of our class was spent preparing the first part of our assessment. The assessment is about design thinking and problem solving, and we will be going into schools to talk to teachers and pupils about how design thinking could improve their school.

We began by getting into groups of mixed nationality, and thinking about what our dream classroom would include. I thought this was good as it meant there was a mix of ideas and personalities, and a range of experiences from schools around Europe. I was in a group with Kim and Goretti. We looked at practical things, and some ideas that we wished existed for our classrooms. We then took these ideas and thought about how we might make these things happen in the classroom. This led to us starting to look at what we were actually going to do for our assessment, thinking about our end goals and the constraints we might need to think about. Next week we will be going into a school to talk with members of the school community, so we decided in our group who we wanted to interview and the broad and specific questions that we would ask. I am looking forward to this as I have never been in a Danish school before and I am interested to see what both the teaching and the layout in the school is like. We ended the class by giving a brief pitch to the class about what we would be focusing on in the school, and took any feedback or ideas they wished to give us.