No Play, No Creativity

                                   
Definition of creativity

Creativity has been defined as a product or process that shows a balance of originality and value. It is a skill, an ability to make unforeseen connections and to generate new and appropriate ideas. Creativity in education has more to do with the process than with the product, and focuses therefore on the development of thinking and cognitive skills. 

Craft (2005) sees creativity as the ability to see possibilities that others haven't noticed, Esquivel (1995) sees it as the critical process involved in the generation of new ideas. According to Taylor, creative experience is thought of as opposite to reproductive experience.  

Innovative teaching is both the practice of teaching for creativity and of applying innovation to teaching. , innovative teaching is the process leading to creative learning, the implementation of new methods, tools and contents which could benefit learners and their creative potential.

Ways to teach creativity

1.      Cultivate a creative culture that value creativity

Teaching for creativity, or enhancing learners' creative skills, requires the practitioners to be creative themselves and to provide learners with an ethos and a culture that values creativity (Craft, 2005). We’ll choose creative teachers to nurture an environment to kindle the creative spark, an environment where students feels rewarded, are active learners, have a sense of ownership, and can freely discuss their problems. Moreover, creativity has to be valued by teachers throughout the whole educational process, from informal judgments to written assignments. Teachers can show that they appreciate creative expression (Beghetto, 2005) and welcome uniqueness of responses, or foster creativity and motivation by giving unusual tasks or assignments (Pleschová, 2007). 

2.      Brainstorming

It is developed by Alex Osborn. This technique focuses on a group generation of ideas or solutions to a problem and is based on the principle that a constructive atmosphere leads to the development of new ideas and solutions, while a critical and skeptical environment hinders creativity (Osborn, 1953). The basic rules of brainstorming includes never criticize, encourage more ideas and ideas building on others’. According to the curriculum, we organize lots of group discussions to encourage students to use this way of thinking to come up with numerous creative ideas.

 

3.      Six hat method

It is based on Edward de Bono’s pragmatic method. The main concern was to find tools and methods that can take the thinker away from an analytical and critical perspective in order to develop lateral thinking skills and to broaden perception. The six hat method involves "parallel thinking" and is used mainly – but not solely – in meetings or group discussions and provides a means for groups to plan thinking processes in a detailed and cohesive way, and in doing so to think together more effectively. Each hat represents a specific line of thought and a way to look at things (for example, the white hat is connected to the expression of neutral and objective information; the red hat with feelings and personal opinion; the green hat with new ideas; the blue hat tends to be the outward-looking, leader/trail blazing hat) and participants are asked to "wear a hat" at the time, i.e. to pursue one line of thought or one side of the matter at a time (De Bono, 1985) and then change to wear another hat afterwards. For example, when it comes to a problem addressing activity in class, teachers will guide the students to apply the “six hat thinking” to generate creative solutions effectively.

4.      Concern for the interest of every student

Creative people are those who are engaged in a task or activity because they derive pleasure from the activity itself. Sustained creativity needs sustained and undivided attention to the task at hand. Motivation is one of the main factors conducive to creative output and according to Teresa Amabile (1998) , intrinsic motivation is more important than extrinsic. Teachers make an effort to work on topics students find interesting or to find something that might catch students' attention in every topic and subject.

Figure: The three components of creativity (Amabile 1998)

The implication of this figure is that we can improve students’ creativity by teaching them knowledge, equipping them with skills of creative thinking and finding their intrinsic motivation through concerning about their individual learning interest. 

5.      Reinforcing personality traits related to creativity

During the course teaching, teachers are encouraged to pay attention to nurturing the students’ personality traits that are helps to foster creativity. For example, according to Davies, one of the personality traits of creative people is their capacity to take risks.  

6.      Cross-curricular activities

Across-curricular activities foster creativity in education. Students from different academic backgrounds of different departments will be gathered to take this English course. By thinking from different perspectives, students can see the differences and conflicts where creativity thrives. Furthermore, during this knowledge sharing process, students have opportunities to attack the assumptions they made before which help them to generate new ideas. 

7.      Technologies are used to enhance creativity

According to the curriculum, students are required to upload their assignments to the internet through face book or YouTube and their classmates are open to make commands and those who are chosen to be the best actors or play writers by others will get bonus points in their assignment grades. This activity encourage them to think differently to attract more people to make good commends on their acts.

8.      Role-play

There are lots of role plays in this course, by understanding a character in a certain play and well personate it, students are trained to be egoless, in this way, they can minimize their self concern and boost creativity.

Ways to assess creativity

The assessment should emphasize self-improvement and skills development and focus on learning and not on grading. Meanwhile, it should provide useful feedback on students' progress and enhances levels of curiosity, motivation, enjoyment and interest, all factors that are crucial in the development of creativity. Moreover, according to Simplicio, assessment should be seen as an extension of the learning process.

 
For this course, both Peer assessment and individual assessment are used to evaluate students learning effect. Besides, final exam and day-to-to evaluation are adopted. Furthermore, by learning the Robinson report, we use three forms of assessments, firstly, they are informal judgments which value uniqueness of responses and tolerate ambiguity when ask open-ended questions. Secondly, we use written, oral and practical assignment, that is, writing play script and act it; lastly, we organize students to final projects and evaluate their English skills as well as the factors that are relevant to creativity, for example, the originality of their ideas, how they present their project outcomes and so on.

Course guideline

The English language department offers this unique interdisciplinary creative English course. And it is designed for people who want to develop and apply creative thinking to a broad range of societal and business challenges. Moreover, by taking creative acting and practice, it offers students the opportunity to work collaboratively and creatively with different disciplines.

 Teaching fellows

Course Director has a strong background in creative English writing within the area of Drama. The course also draws upon a wide range of internationally and nationally recognized lecturers and practitioners from performance and other department. Outside lecturers from industry, NGO, local authorities and government will also contribute to the teaching program.

Teaching Participants

This course is for students who wish to explore and broaden their understanding of creative thinking. There is not any limitation for the discipline. 

Course structure

The whole course will be divided to three phases.
Phases 1 and 2 of the course will provide you with a detailed knowledge of core theory and skills in innovation and creativity. The skills and knowledge obtained will enable you to articulate ideas, observations and solutions creatively as language users, as well as building creative collaborations of thinking strategically and add value and new challenge to your work. You will be able to apply your knowledge to various kinds of contexts.

During the course in Phases 1 and 2, every class will be derived from a TV series. So Student will enjoy many popular US and UK TV series，such as Gossip girl, GLEE, Mad Men, Desperate Housewives and so on. The lecturer will choose interesting topics that focus on TV series and sharing lots of professional knowledge on each topic. In addition, the lecturer could suppose a new story line and encourage student to rewrite the story around the topic.

Phase 3 builds on the knowledge and skills that students have acquired and applies these to the creation of English drama projects. This involves the completion of a creative project about mixing two different TV series, which means the students will suppose the character in different TV series with the same background and create a new story according to the requirements of the teacher.

The course challenges existing orthodoxies and encourages story redesign. The final project requires students to show an original play with interesting ideas, as well as to explore the context of the project through which you can effectively express creative ideas. Besides the creative story, the students need to write and act the play in English to improve oral English and English writing skill.

 
On the program, students will have the opportunity to take part in designing stage, Drama workshops and study tours. These will be involved some theoretical framework of lectures, case studies, group discussions, seminars and tutorials. Absolutely, these curriculums will be taken on with the new format.
 
The detailed Structure is as follows:

Phase 1

Gossip girl: New York Culture and life

GLEE: American popular culture

Lecture: How to express your idea in English?

Phase 2

Mad Men: Political and media

Desperate Housewives : Essentials of psychology

Lecture: how to write a story in English？

Phase 3

Major project – mixed play

Final Project

Original Play

The stakeholders’ concern about the course

In the process of the course design, the stakeholders’ concern makes us improve the creativity and performance about the course. We briefs the improvement from the concern of administer.

1. Reasonable cost for the course

The course depends on the resource from English language department mainly, while the other department will support the course appropriately. Compared with the effect of the course, the cost will be a reasonable level. The requirement of cost for administer could make the course with a high cost performance

2. Interesting and attractive for students

It is a real problem whether the course is popular and attractive for students. And this course applies various kinds of interesting teaching methods to encourage student to learn the knowledge and skills. For administer, it could keep the course catch the horizon of the students. 

3. Easy accessibility and evaluation

Open class is an important feature in the course. It gives more space for student to learn and create by themselves, while the teacher just need coach and give directions. That will improve the accessibility of the course. Moreover, Final project will focus on the creative thinking and English ability. The integrated evaluation could reflect the effect of learning.

Inhibitors of arriving at an innovative curriculum

1.      Restriction of academic background.

People in the team that are designing the innovative curriculum are come from different academic backgrounds, for example, most of us were graduated from the business college. Refer to the research, people come from science department are more likely to do things logically with the help of technical skills. On the other hand, Business College’s student prefers to finish works in a financial way. However, for the developing of the innovative curriculum pitch, which needs us have more creative ideas to design it in various ways, limited experience in single major is fail to come up with creative outcomes.

 
2.      Group thinking

Group thinking is a psychological phenomenon that team members are trying to avoid conflicts or isolates someone by reaching a consensus outcome. However, the outcome is neither creative nor attractive. At the beginning of this project, in order to keep the harmony relationships, we are not willing to share our own critical thoughts, instead, we only discuss the project in a common way that everyone would accept it. Unfortunately, it is fail to work out a creative course.

3.      Evaluation

Quickly feedback is helpful to improve people’s job performance; however, it has a negative influence on creativity. Some studies show that people’s creativity may reduced by evaluation or having the feeling of owning the work and have to finish the assignment, they are unable to enjoy the learning and working experience (Amabile, Goldfarb, & Brackfield, 1990). Restricted by the evaluation standard, what we would to do is to follow the instruction of teacher step by step, and designing the course in a normal way without taking risk of new ideas. As a result, it will inhibit to achieve an innovative course.

Facilitators of arriving at an innovative curriculum

1.      Supportive educational environment

People are able to benefit from the comfortable environment in terms of physical as well as emotional (Coleman and Colbert, 2001). The teaching ways, high-tech facilities, good relationships between team members in a harmonious environment can encourage us to share our creative ideas freely, instead of afraid to make mistakes, afraid to test new ideas (Cole et al., 1999). With the developing of the discussion, we feel more comfortable with the situation and the way we are talking, more creative thinking are came out, which is adopted at the end. So the supportive learning environment has a positive influence on arriving at the innovative curriculum. 

2.      The combination of different person’s interest and life experience

Influenced by different culture and family conditions, all of us have distinctive interests and habits, which can produce sparks and come up with some creative ideas in the team work. Refer to five factor model of personality, openness to experience is related to creativity (Wiggins, Jerry S., 2002), and to the extent individuals are open minded, curious and imaginative (McCrae, 1987). The special interest can make people learn more things in that field, in contrast, it is strange and new for other team members, as a result, more creative ideas will produced by sharing the special interest and life experience during the developing of the curriculum pitch. 

3.      Challenge assignment

As an English curriculum that is set up from elementary school to university, students are familiar with its content, even feel boring about it. In most of English courses, it is containing of listening, reading, writing and speaking, the exam is not difficult for Chinese students, and we know how to obtain a high score. But we totally don’t want to make a creative work due to the simple requirements and assignments. Appropriate challenge is useful to stimulate team members to solve problem in a creative way. Designing an innovative curriculum which is very different from the ordinary on is challenge and very different from the assignments we used to do, and the corresponding critical thinking aroused by the challenge through the whole process will definitely help us to arriving at an innovative curriculum.

 

References

Amabile, T. M., Goldfarb, P., & Brackfield, S. C. (1990). Social influences on creativity: Evaluation, coaction, and surveillance. Creativity Research Journal, 3, 6-21.

Coleman, R., & Colbert, J. (2001). Grounding the teaching of design in creativity. Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, 56, 4–24.

Cole, D. G., Sugioka, H. L., & Yamagata-Lynch, L. C. (1999). Supportive classroom environments for creativity in higher education. Journal of Creative Behavior, 33, 277–293.

Anusca Ferrari, Romina Cachia and Yves Punie. (2009). Innovation and Creativity in Education and Training in the EU Member States: Fostering Creative Learning and Supporting Innovative Teaching, 27-50.

Wiggins, Jerry S., Pincus, Aaron L. (2002). In Personality disorders and the five-factor model of personality (2nd ed.). American Psychological Association, 103-124.