Student Perspectives--Creativity in the Classroom

This week I interviewed two high school freshmen regarding the role of creativity in the classroom, what they value in their current learning environments, and what they would change in terms of digital media and technology.

After listening to the Robinson TED Talk, I was really expecting to hear many complaints, and that school is boring and does not inspire creativity.  Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to hear the two girls rattle off a multitude of opportunities for creativity that have been shared in their school experience this year. Both girls said that they had had opportunities for creative expression in ELA, World Civilizations, Foreign Language class, and even in Physics (though they felt that there were fewer opportunities there). They both felt like they had not had any creative experiences in math class this year and rarely in the years prior.  They remembered tessellation projects in 5th and 8th grade. I inquired if they had ever been assigned to design their own math problems, and they both said that they could not recall a time.

Some of the assignments that they described that called for creativity on their part included creating a report card for early European leaders, writing a short story that included elements of irony and symbolism based on a famous painting, composing and illustrating a political cartoon regarding the French Revolution, designing a travel brochure for an island vacation using French vocabulary, and selecting and organizing a CD soundtrack for Of Mice and Men using current music. In physics, most recently they were assigned to design insulation for an egg drop experiment.

The student felt that their opportunities for creativity had increased this year in large part because of the requirement to take electives.  One student was taking band as an elective all year, the other student had taken Theater Arts for first term and was taking Electronic Music for this second term.

When asked what they value about their current education, they both agreed that they preferred classes that encouraged talking and working with people as opposed to classes where the teacher is doing most of the talking, and they’re actually told to be quiet.

The students both would like to have more access to technology at school, but described one problem for access as there being so many elective classes that need the computer labs, that teachers can not get time in the labs for traditional academic classes.

Regarding using social media for learning, one student knows of a group of seniors who have set up a study group Facebook page for one particular class in order to share notes, and have discussions.  They know another student who has a blog where he reviews movies.

Ideally, they said it would be great if every student had their own laptop, and that it would be nice if social networking sites could be accessed from the common areas of the school, like in the cafeteria and library.   They also both agreed that it would be more realistic for students to take notes on a computer since they rarely pull out their notebooks away from school—but are on the computer regularly after school hours.