Background
One of classes in City University of Hong Kong is now having an English class. Let’s see what students are doing in class...
Wow, it seems that the whole class is in a mass. Students are doing their own things rather than listening class carefully and the teacher is almost going crazy! Think back that what is your behavior in your English class when you were in undergraduate.
After class, two students are complaining to each other:
Li Lei: The English class is too boring! I was almost got asleep!
Han Meimei: I can’t agree more. Mr. Chan just let us do unified readings, unified content and even unified exam every course! I hate that so much!
Li Lei: Just don’t mention it! I feel that my mind is locked because of the original textbook and traditional teaching method.
Han Meimei: Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the English class could be innovated!
...
One month later, Li Lei and Han Meimei attend a world creativity competition with other students who represent our school. Unfortunately, they don’t get any rewards in that competition. Students from other countries have excellent imagination and amazing creativity.
In order to improve our students’competition in the world, after this semester, the school administration mandate all teachers to incorporate creativity and innovation in teaching, learning and assessment. As a group of English Department, we, "Tick Tack" also need to come up with a new English language program and summarizes our curricular innovation to our students.
Introduction
In Pixar, “creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working effectively together to solve a great many problems” (Harvard Business Review, 2008). According to this definition, we think that the features about creativity in a class are using imagination, pursuing purposes, being original and judging value to make something new or a new version of something not only individually but also as groups. To nurture students being creativity, we claim that the English class should be both teaching creatively and teaching for creativity. We should encourage young students to be strong self-belief in their abilities, identify their creative abilities include helping them to find their creative strengths and foster their creativity draws from many ordinary abilities and skills rather than one special gift or talent. (British Council, 2009)
Base on Guilford’s the four keys to creativity (fluency, flexibility, elaboration and originality), the English class can be related to the following aspects as table 1 show. (Guilford, 1956)
Table 1
Teaching Objective: The English language program we created aims to make our students to
-learn actively and be good at critical thinking, divergent thinking, reverse thinking and problem solving
-openness to new and unusual ideas, and to a variety of methods and approaches
-respect for each other and for the ideas that emerge
How to teach creativity?
In traditional English course, the teaching model is “organization-revision-teaching-consolidation-homework”(Gou, 2004) Table 2 shows the mainly differences between traditional course and our new course. We transform the course important position from teachers to students and make students study cooperatively but not isolated. Besides, the course will also teach students English through multiple media such as Information Technology Communication (ITC) and digital media in multimedia classroom instead of single media in class.
Curriculum forum: The new English class will be held in multimedia classroom by group teaching. All students should be divied as several groups (5 to 6 people each group) randomly each month to complete an interesting project. At final, each student will give an individual creative presentation.
Why Group?
Creativity is existed in individual or group people as table 3 shows. In a whole class, not all of students have efficient creative ability at that time. Thus, to be formed as groups, students can show their own ideas which may have conflict to each other for new ideas and discuss themselves. Besides, the group work can help students thinking creatively by Alex Osborn’s most celebrated idea about “How to Organize a Squad to Create Ideas.” When a group works together, he wrote, the members should engage in a “brainstorm,” which means “using the brain to storm a creative problem—and doing so in commando fashion, with each stormer attacking the same objective.” (1948. Alex Osborn)
Individual Creativity
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Group Creativity
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Personality
-openness to experience
-conscientiousness
-extraversion
-(agreeableness)
-(emotional stability)
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Information Sharing
-informal discussion better during concept phase
-formal discussion is better during development phase
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Cognitive Abilities
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Discussion Stimulus
-high stimulus yields high results from “high
thinkers”
-low stimulus yields low results from all
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Expectations
-“creativity is a response to the creative
requirement inherent in work”
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Time-pressure
-inverted-U relationship between creativity and time-pressure
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Table 3 From: Serina Diniega (Creativity among individuals and groups)
Curriculum content: Here are some specific corse content or topic which we will teach.
a. Textbook
In this part, groups of students will learn basic English gramma, vocabulary by different ways. In learning English, the knowledge received in class mainly includes three parts (A,B, C). As modern teaching, teachers should focus on the “OPENING” knowledge stems from outside the teaching material(C). (Gou, 2010)
(A: knowledge of teaching material and reference; B: knowledge of the teacher himself; C: knowledge from interaction of the teacher and students) (Gou, 2010)
Listening: This English course requires students to improve their listening skill by mainly the resources from life, such as BBC voice, a segment of a movie or video.
Speaking: Students are encouraged to free speaking and using free imagination.
e.g. Use the power of images.
What’s on the other half of the picture?
Describe it to your teamworks.
Reading: In reading part, curiosity is the core factor of creativity. It means that teachers should ask rich questions to students and encourage students to raise wide questions themselves.
Why is questions important? It helps to
-extend thinking skills
-clarify understanding
-gain feedback on teaching/learning
-provide revision strategies
-create revision strategies
-enhance curiosity
-provide challenges
-strengthen learning
(Tran, 2003)
Creative questioning for students e.g.
-Ask students about change things to make them the way they would like
-Ask “what would happen if ...”questions: these questions are fun to ask and allow students to really use their imaginations.
-Ask “in how many different ways...”questions to extend students’ creative thinking.
Writing: In this class, we introduce a creatively writing method called “pross approach”, which helps students through various stages of composing. Students work in groups and these groups become collaborative teams. Harris (1993) says that a process approach involves three stages of writing, prewriting, planning and revising. Prewriting involves choosing and narrowing the topic and to generate ideas through brainstorming. Planning means to organize the ideas generated by brainstorming into an outline which involves making a sublist of main ideas, writing down topic sentences, and then to write an outline that is a formal plan for a paragraph. Revising consists of several drafts to produce a final copy to hand in. During the first revision, the writer is concerned with the content and organization. The next step is to proofread the paper for grammar, sentence structure, spelling and punctuation. Then, the final copy would be submitted to the instructor.
b. Combined Art with creativity (music,literature, etc)
Science has evidenced that the most creativity ides comes from the right brain, that is the part related to art. Every month, we will have a class in multimedia classroom and teach students English through art or literature to nurturing their creativity. We will use ITC and digital media including visual and audition since “technologies play a crucial role in learners’ lives and can act as a platform to foster creative learning and innovative teaching”(Cachia, 2010).
Example topic: use music to make students to be more creative
Here are some enforceable effective ways about using music to provide students with challenging learning activities. (Domke, Darla. 1991)
Cloze Procedure
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Selected key words are removed from the text of the song and are placed in a word list that precedes the song lyrics. Students fill in the missing words as they listen to the song.
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Word Bingo
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Students select words from the text of the song and place them in a bingo grid. Individually or in small groups, students then mark off the words as they hear them in the song. The first student or group to check off all the words is the winner.
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Reordering
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Particular phrases of the song are listed in an incorrect order. Students must number the phrases in the order that they appear in the song. An alternative altactivity is to write the song phrases on sentence strips. Students must then organize the strips in the proper order.
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Literature: Depending on the language capabilities of the students, retelling can begin with a simulation of the action within the literature work. Then, the students retell the story of the work in their own words, in a round, with each student contributing as much as he or she can in one sentence in groups. The groups could then retell the story using their illustrations. The course also encourage students to create their own poems, novels or even dramas.
c. Out-curriculum Activities (English Corner, role play, games,etc)
English corner: Students are encouraged to go to English Corner/Salon to talk with foreign teachers. It may help them to know foreigners and their culture easily in real life. They can also learn different thinking from other countries.
Role play: e.g. In a group, discuss the winning film at the Oscars but adopt a different role each, such as a policeman, a doctor, a priest, a famous film director, another contestant who lost, a film critic, etc. (divergent thinking)
Game: Asking related questions & Asking as many UNrelated questions as you can. (reverse thinking)
e.g. Ask as many questions as you can about this picture. Then read the article on the next page and check for answers. You win a point if the text does NOT answer the question- you lose a point if it DOES.
d. Learning outside
Many creative ideas are from the nature. Students will go outside to learn anything related to the textbook. As Hargadon and Sutton says (2000), the best innovators use old ideas as the raw materials for one new idea after another, which are so called ‘”knowledge brokering’”. The Knowledge-Brokering Cycle includes capturing good ideas, keeping ideas alive, imagining new uses for old ideas and putting promising concepts to the test. The important thing is that “ideas can’t be used if they are forgotten”. The creative ideas will miss if one don’t come it true.Thus, we require students carrying a note book when they are outside, to be ready when inspiration struck.
How to assess creativity?
The traditional main type of assessment are grades and summative assessment. However, the change for assess it is to “measure creativity as a process, and not just a product”(Cachia, Ferrari, Ala-Mutka& Punie 2010). Thus, we assess students mainly through three parts, individual exercises, group projects and feedback.
Individual exercises: Creativity can be showed at all the time. We require students to write an every month work according to their recording by inspiration notebook. Besides, at final, each student will give an individual creative presentation to show what they learn.
Group projects: With an interesting topic one month, each group will create a relative task that can be illustrated by any form, such as essays or poems just it shows creativity.
Feedback: students will give their self-assessment and peer feedback in final to evaluate their own creativity and others’ performance.
Barriers to implement the new course
① Teacher: In the class we will use from groups to teaching, according to one research said that the students who taught by groups their academic scores were higher than those who taught by general teaching. The researcher extracted six classes taught by the same teacher, two classes as a pilot class, while the other four classes still use the traditional way to teach. After the final exam, the average results of the pilot classes respectively 16.9% and 21.7% higher than regular classes. This graph shows the details of the result.
Parents: The allocation of the group members is not reasonable; the gap between the groups is larger. Because of the voluntary combination way, the student tend to “feather flock together”, so that it is easy to cause the basis of a good group to a higher level, the weak-based group improve little.
Administrators:This teaching way may cause free-rider phenomenon. About the assessment, you cannot assess the team members discriminatory, just rely more on the completion of the sub-over performance, which is a direct result of the part of the students’free rider behavior. Most of the classrooms use the fixed tables and chairs; this is not convincing for from groups.
② Teacher: Our first program is English corner. What’s your opinion?
Student:I don’t like this program. Because I have nothing to say, the topic change to frequently, I will lose interest and motivation in learning subjects. When we meet a difficult topic, I will use mother language to communicate, so we also cannot have any improvement. During the period we often only heard few people talking, most of us just listening. This program cannot help us to have any creativity thinking.
Administrators:with the development of technology, students can online communicate with the foreigners directly. Use internet can more freedom, time more flexible and students can stay at home. Traditional english corner will be subject to the limitations of weather, geography, time and other objective factors. According to a researching in Jiangxi University of Science and Technology showed that is no necessary to hold the English corner.
③Teacher:Watching English movie
Student: We hope the topic is different every time. If not we will feel boring and then we will talk another things, the topic must be can keep our high interest.
Parents: The students maybe will focus on the story and this will not help them to improve their creativity.
④Teacher: Study outside classroom according different topic
Student: Some of us lack of communication skills. Because we feel shy, nervous therefore we will not talk anymore or maybe talk stammered. The time when to go out is difficult to decide, because everyone’s schedule is different.
Parents:We concerned more about the safety. Because the students go outside, they need to take the transport and maybe some bad thing will attract them.
Administrators:We must connect with the unity well and ensure they can free for the students to visit. We must ensure the students safe in the visit place, this is a huge and difficult job. We must undertake many responsibilities.
Helpful factors to implement this new course
①Teacher: In the class we will use from groups to teaching, according to one research said that the students who taught by groups their academic scores were higher than those who taught by general teaching. The researcher extracted six classes taught by the same teacher, two classes as a pilot class, while the other four classes still use the traditional way to teach. After the final exam, the average results of the pilot classes respectively 16.9% and 21.7% higher than regular classes. This graph shows the details of the result.
Parents:This way can make student learning more initiative and have more passion to learn. This way reflects the dominant position of students.
Administrators:This way can active interaction of teachers and students also can develop students’creative thinking ability.
②Teacher: English corner
Student:English corner can stimulate our interest and enthusiasm, also can promote ours knowledge exchange, give us a stage to express our talent, opinion and make us feel successes.
Administrators: We will ensure the funding and policy to support the activity. We will regulate a fixed place for English corner and support the related equipment.
③Teacher: watching English movie
Student:The theme of movie is wide range, involved in all aspects of the social and culture. We can become more familiar with the classmates and improve together.
④Teacher: Stay outside classroom according different topic
Student:We have high enthusiasm on our favorite things; we have high intellectual curiosity, self-esteem and strong ambition so we can expend our view. Study outside the classroom is more interesting than inside, this will make us learn much more quickly.
Parents:This program can create self-learning situations and tap the potential of students.
Administrators:This program can fully mobilize the students’ every sensory to work together/ this program can expand the students’ vision and thinking space also can better exert the students’ initiative.
Students’concerns
Teaching students about how to master facts or turning students to become more innovative and independent is one of the issues the Universities in Hong Kong are concerning about. We know full well that most of graduates are ten a penny in the human capital market. With such ripe pickings, employers may become choosy. In order to make students compete effectively with other graduates from all corner of the world, a number of changes in the education systems and ways are required.
Solutions for concerns
Students may be concerned about quite a number of things including how the grades or marks are given, the increasing number of project or assignment, the effects and benefits of changing ways to learn, and the future employment.
To begin with, the teaching system will be changed from learning or remembering facts to understanding and improving students’ critical thinking skills. The grading method will also be different including change from the examination-oriented mode to problem solving and innovative mode. Students are graded based on their performance on projects and the creative idea they give on the projects instead of just take a final exam. The grading must be transparent and students can know how exactly the points or criteria they have to meet to get a better grade.
Secondly, some students may be worried about that the number of project or assignment will be increased under the new education system. However, changing ways to learn does not mean add burden to university students. Instead, rather than increasing the number of project, this new education program encourages students to do less projects or assignments in a creative or innovative way. The projects and assignments will be designed to stimulate the creativity and innovation of the students. Hence, they will be able to think analytically and creatively.
Furthermore, students may be concerned about the effects and benefits of changing ways to learn. By using the new methods in teaching, students are no longer required to remember tons of notes. Instead, students will be encouraged to understand the issues and figure out some ways to overcome the problems. This skill is valuable, irreplaceable and keeps along with the graduates for life. Innovative and problem solving skills are so critical that students should learn throughout their university’s life. Because this skills can lead them to success and can effectively compete with their global counterparts.
Finally, the issue of future employment cannot be ignored. The new program may not be accepted by students as they are not sure about their future employment after taking this program, especially for those are first adopting this program. Admittedly, the reform may not be accepted by everybody at the beginning. Yet, some employers will appreciate this program after they understand the advantages of the program. Since employers prefer to choose a candidate who is more creative than others, this program will help them address the problem of selecting creative candidates.
Conclusion
Creativity is a very abstract thing and it is hard to learn because everyone is different in his or her own brain. We can just try to nurture students’ creativity in class by creatively teaching. In summary, there are a number of benefits from this new program. When it comes to analyze problems and seek solutions, students can see things from a fresh or creative perspective. More importantly, students will have creative problem solving skills and innovative initiatives after taking this program. We hope that our program can be implemented soon.
References
Harvard Business Review. 2008. How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity.
British Council. 2009. Teaching Creativity and Teaching for Creativity. Retrieved from
Guilford, J.P. 1956. The Structure of Intellect. Psychological Bulletin. pp.52.
Gou, Dunwen. 2010. How to cultivate students’ creativity in learning English.
Tran Lam Son. 2003. Creativity in English Language Teaching. Nghe An Continuing Education Center.
Harris, J. (1993). Introducing Writing. London: Penguin Books Ltd.
Domke, Darla. 1991.Creative Activities for Teaching English as a Foreign Language. ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics Washington DC. Retrieved from
Lehrer, Jonah. (2012) Group Think. Retrieved from
Hargadon, A. & Sutton, R.I. 2000. Building Innovation Factory. Harvard Business Review.
Cachia, R., Ferrari. A., Ala-Mutka.,& Punie. Y. 2010. Creative Learning and Innovative Teaching. JRC Scientific and Technical Reports. pp. 20.
Cropley, A. J. (2001). Creativity in education & learning, a guide for teacher and educators. London: Kogan Page Limited.
WilUs, J．A Framework for Task-based Learning. London: Longnmn,1996: 26-28．
Hay, L. E. (2000). Educating the net generation. School Administrator, 57(4), 6-8.
