The Creative Classroom: 50 Key Techniques for Imaginative Teaching and Learning: 50 Key Techniques, #2

By Sue Cowley

In 'The Creative Classroom', best selling education author Sue Cowley offers you 50 key techniques to boost and develop creative teaching and learning. For each of the 50 techniques, Sue offers a series of practical tips, ideas and activities for you to use in your primary classroom or early years setting. She also gives a series of thinking points for you to consider, to help you reflect on the approaches you use, and why you use them. As with all Sue's books, this guide is written in her much-loved practical, honest and realistic style. The ideas Sue gives here are ones you can put into practice straight away, to encourage an atmosphere where imagination and experimentation are valued and encouraged. The techniques in this book will help you achieve a happy classroom, in which your children feel free to express their ideas, build their imaginative thinking and develop their skills within different artistic disciplines.

If you find this book useful, you might also enjoy 'The Calm Classroom: 50 Key Techniques for Better Behaviour'. The first edition of this book (in print version only) was originally published by Scholastic as 'You Can Have a Creative Classroom', but has now gone out of print. This ebook is an updated second edition of the original text.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sue Cowley Books Ltd
• Release date: Sep 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781516347919

Sue Cowley

Sue Cowley is a writer, presenter and teacher trainer, and the author of over 25 books on education, including How to Survive your First Year in Teaching. Her international best seller, Getting the Buggers to Behave is a fixture on university book lists, and has been translated into ten different languages. After training as an early years teacher, Sue taught English and Drama in secondary schools in the UK and overseas, and she also worked as a supply teacher. She now spends her time writing educational books and articles, and she is a columnist for Teach Nursery, Teach Primary and Nursery World magazines. Sue works internationally as a teacher trainer, as well as volunteering in primary classrooms, and helping to run her local preschool. You can find Sue on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@Sue_Cowley

Book preview

The Creative Teacher

1. You can ... get creative with your body

There are many similarities between teachers and actors: one of the key parallels is that we both use our bodies to communicate with an audience. The more expressive and inventive you are when you communicate with your class, the more effective your communication will be. If your children see you communicating in creative ways, this will boost their imaginative thinking as well.

Thinking points:

* Teachers can communicate a great deal without ever opening their mouths. What your body ‘says’, both consciously and subconsciously, will have a strong influence on how your students behave and learn.

* To get creative with your body you have to think ‘outside the box’. Become aware of the way that you usually move around the room, and then give your students a surprise by doing something completely different. Don’t be afraid to make a bit of a fool of yourself. Often you need to go a bit too outside your comfort zone to be truly creative.

* Your hands are one of the most expressive parts of your body. Use them to communicate routine information in a creative way. For instance, you can show that you want the children to stand up by lifting your hands with palms upwards.

Tips, ideas and activities:

Use your body in creative ways to show when you want the children to give you their attention. The more bizarre the approach you use, the better it should work. For instance, you could:

* Suddenly remove your eyes from the class and stare at the ceiling. Because we normally give our students plenty of eye contact, this sends the clear message of ‘I’m waiting’.

* Clap or click a rhythm with your hands, or tap a pattern on a desk.

* ‘Freeze’ your face and body completely still and hold this position until the children stop to see what on earth you are doing.

* Strike a weird pose or do a ‘Gangnam Style’ dance.

* Hide under a desk or behind a chair. Hopefully the children will come and find you!

Experiment with the different shapes and patterns you can make around your classroom using your body. You might:

* Circle the classroom to ‘visit’ all your students. Your natural instinct will probably be to go in a clockwise direction; try going anticlockwise as well.

* Weave in and out of the desks as you move around the space – aim to be as sinuous as a snake when you move. Alternatively, take a diagonal route across the room to ring the changes.

* Think up and down within the classroom space, as well as around. You might stand on a chair to make a speech, or crouch down beside a child to talk about the learning.

Change the way your body appears, by putting on an unusual outfit and role playing a different character. You could:

* Wear a white lab coat to play the part of a vet, a doctor or a government scientist;

* Put on a police helmet to kick-start some investigative learning;

* Dress up as a character from a book, and get the students to hot seat you to find out more about you.

2. You can ... play around with your voice

The way you use your voice is a key part of what makes you a good teacher. The more interesting and stimulating the sound of your voice is, the better your children will listen to and understand what you say. You can also have great fun getting creative with what you say and the way that you say it. Show your children that talk can be used in an imaginative way.

Thinking points:

* Our children spend a large part of each day listening to their teachers (and other adults) talking. If your vocal sound is interesting and engaging, rather than flat and dull, this will help your children connect with and understand what you are saying.

* It’s very easy to get into bad vocal habits. Learn to listen to yourself as you talk, adapting your voice as you go along. Ask for some feedback from your children, and from other adults working with you, about how you sound to them.

* As an educator you need to take great care of your voice: you only have one and it cannot be replaced if it gets damaged. Aim to speak only as much as is strictly necessary; remember that you can communicate a great deal without opening your mouth.

Tips, ideas and activities:

Add tone to your voice to create interest and to help your children engage with what you are saying. You could use:

* An excited tone to give the sense that the work is going to be fun;

* A sad or disappointed tone if the children are misbehaving;

* A scary tone to tell a spooky story;

* A curious voice to show interest in a child’s ideas.

Vary the pace of your voice to add interest to your teaching. You might:

* Speak quickly to energise and excite the class;

* Use a sharp, staccato sound to make a point;

* Stretch out the length of certain words to emphasise them (to do this, imagine you are stretching the word like a piece of chewing gum).

Experiment with different kinds of vocal sounds as well. You might:

* Sing

* Roar

* Click your tongue

* Whistle

* Laugh!

You can play around and experiment with different accents, dialects and languages as well. For instance, when taking the register you might ask for responses in a different language each day/week. You could teach yourself and your students to say ‘good morning’ in languages from around the world. For instance: ‘bom dia’ (Portuguese), ‘buenos dias’ (Spanish), ‘guten morgen’ (German), ‘suprabhaat’ (Hindi). If you have children with different native languages in your class, ask them to take charge of teaching the class the greeting in their language.

3. You can ... use imaginative reward systems

Many practitioners and teachers devise highly creative rewards to use as part of their classroom management systems. This is particularly so in the early years, and at primary level, where the kind of rewards that are used are often amazingly diverse. Whilst sanction systems have to be consistent and pretty much inflexible, reward systems are often a reflection of the individual teacher’s imaginative skills. You can have great fun thinking of ways to make your reward systems more creative and interesting.

Thinking points:

* Schools often put a set of rewards in place and keep them the same for a very long time. However, rewards do tend to go ‘stale’ after a while, and it’s worth refreshing your own classroom system regularly.

* Rewards don’t have to be of high intrinsic value, because a reward ‘stands for’ something else. It is a marker of the fact that you approve of, are pleased with or have taken the time to notice good effort, learning or behaviour.

* Some children will work hard and behave well without the need for extrinsic rewards; others will need almost constant approval in order to keep going. Of course, this depends a great deal on the student’s background and whether he or she has been taught to see learning as intrinsically rewarding.

* Take care over the way you give rewards. Don’t always use them as a way of keeping tricky children under control. Remember to praise the quiet, hard working children as well.

Tips, ideas and activities:

When creating whole class reward systems, use imaginative and creative displays. These will really engage and inspire your children, and make them want to earn the rewards that you offer. You might:

* Draw a large animal picture to go on the wall (e.g. a caterpillar). As the children do well, they get to colour in sections of the picture. When the picture is completed, the whole class gets a reward.

* Make a sky/weather picture and create Velcro-ed shapes for a sun, some clouds, rain, lightning and a rainbow. Use each of the shapes to indicate how pleased/unhappy you are with the class (keeping the rainbow for when you’re absolutely delighted).

Make sure that the ‘end result’ of your whole class reward system is creative, preferably educational, and seen as really worth earning. For instance, my daughter’s teacher has just rewarded her class with some (real life) ducklings.

Many schools are now sending reward postcards home as part of their system to motivate the children. This kind of home/school contact is a great idea. To make the most of this approach:

* Get the students to design their own postcard, then choose a winning design (or several designs) and reproduce them. This helps give the