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Okay, just finishing up the Module 6 lecture about creativity and I had commented that
students would prefer to spend 20 hours creating a video on a subtopic than they would spend
6 hours writing a research paper on the same topic.
Also, creativity is actually teachable (we should know that)—and since we know our
brains are “plastic” (referring to neural plasticity that’s talked about in the Digital
Natives article – our brains are plastic), we can learn, or regain, creativity at any
age. Some adult ESL students have never been encouraged
to be creative before, so they may need extra guidance and patience. I’ve actually, I
require students to ask a question on the discussion board assignments.
And I have actually have had students ask me, Please be patient with me, I’ve never
had a teacher require me to ask a question before. You have to be aware that creativity
is not required in many countries. However, according to (and I can’t pronounce
his name) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [spells out last name],
there are several factors that teachers should use to provide a creative environment:
teachers should provide an opportunity for exploration,
they should provide openness in the classroom, open to different ideas, open to questions,
they should provide learner autonomy, they should provide risk taking chances where
it’s safe to take risks, they should provide reflection where they
are asking students to reflect upon their learning,
they should provide flexibilities, teachers should be flexible with the learning, and
teachers should provide and model sensitivity to valuing the efforts of individual learners.
So value the efforts, regardless of the product. There has to be that mixture, where I know
we have to provide grades, but at the same time we really have to provide … let the
students know that we value their effort and the work they put into the product. You may
notice that many of these qualities of creativity, creative environments, overlap with SLA and
optimal conditions for CALL.