This post is a follow-up of the previous one, which I wrote to highlight our obligation to ensure that our students will be ready for the challenges they will have to face when they leave our classrooms and enter the professional world.
Today I would like to reflect on one of these "21st century skills", which has been described as creativity. We have to try hard to help students to develop this skill and we have to assess it too.
Let me start by sharing this short video that made me draw some interesting conclusions:
After seeing it, I reckon you will agree with me that we sometimes forget that our students need time to be creative. Maybe we do not forget it but we do not allow them to spend longer on creative projects because we tend to think about the number of projects /lesson plans that we still have to carry out and we are worried we will not manage to cover them all. Therefore, let us never forget that we should always choose quality over quantity.
In my view, special attention should be drawn to the fact that students also need time to share their creative outcomes with their peers. If they do this, they will learn a lot together and others' acknowledgement will help to build on their self confidence.
As I pointed out above, we have to find ways to assess creativity because assessment has a clear impact on students' motivation so you can start by explaining that you will consider creativity as part of your assessment and you can start with a simple tool they can easily understand. For example, if students have carried out a PowerPoint Presentation on a topic, you can use this assessment template.
I will continue developing this challenging topic in future seminar sessions but now I would like to share a very recent publication by University of Navarre: "Towards Creativity in CLIL", which offers very good examples of creative projects for different content areas.
My most sincere congratulations to participants in these projects: Ruth Breeze, Melinda Dooly, Alessandra Agati, Fernando Echarri, Amaia Alvarez, Maika Goya, Laura Medina, Izaskun Tomasena, Henri Eric Castleberry, Laura Giamattei, Abel Miguel-Marqués, Angela Ruotolo, Immacolata Ercolino and Daniela Amendola.
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