I cannot imagine a teacher who doesn't try to engage students in conversation or analysis or show multiple representations and approaches.
Even at a basic level like reducing fractions a teacher might present the GCF method and cancellation of prime numbers.
I love this one: "The teacher may encourage students to express and defend personal opinions or positions and the lesson or activity may foster students' original ideas or approaches to problems."
The personal opinion that I hear most often and that needs no encouragement is: "We've done this before." It's an ingrained attitude that is satisfied with scant familiarity and militates against mastery.
The personal opinion I hear most often is, "We aren't going to do that in class. She isn't going to teach us that!!!"
While most of the teachers my kids have had were supportive and encouraged creativity, some few did not. Some were very set in their ways and unwilling to engage students in any meaningful way.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I can't imagine anything would change because he/she read in a teacher's manual that they should "encourage students to express and defend personal opinions."
I can just see him or her, "Oh, I'm supposed to encourage creativity! I never thought of that!"
Hmm. Sounds like more preaching to the choir. If a teacher doesn't engage students, they won't change because of something they've read or been told to do.
Others will use these types of exhortations to justify their lack of content, because they are fostering creative thinking.
I found an interesting article written by a geology professor about "creativity"
ReplyDeletehttp://www.uwgb.edu/DutchS/PSEUDOSC/WhyAntiInt.htm
He's does a better job defining creativity than most and making the argument that we humans aren't really that creative after all. We are "tinkerers" rather than creators.
"Now we can address the contention that children are innately curious. They are not in the sense used here - they are tinkerers. The commonplace observation that children have short attention spans is direct refutation of the notion that they are creative and curious in any deep sense. The tragedy of our society is not that so many people outgrow their childlike curiosity, but that so few do. The adult equivalent of childlike curiosity is channel surfing and the ten-second sound bite."
And
"There is no persuasive evidence that any societies have ever had a high proportion of people who were deeply curious in a systematic, disciplined way. "