Educating today’s brighter than ever students is challenging to the point of despair. They are highly creative and helping them channel this cleverness into educational success is a daunting task. The key is connecting to your own creativity.
We are all creative. Some of us have a creative hobby, others have a sense of humour, allowing us to view situations with new perspectives. Some of us are very good at creatively solving problems. Often the person that insists they surely don’t possess even one creative bone in their body is interesting. The fact that this person is exclaiming this, means they have some curiosity driving them. This quality is the root of creativity.
From whichever point you connect with creativity, direct it to empower your educating techniques. Embrace the 5 E’s – 5 core practices for raising creative thinkers.
Use the 5 E’s to enrich your life:
1. Explore: Take on new fields of interest. Enrich yourself reading National Geographic, for example. You’ll gain respect for that from family and students.
2. Experience: Look for new experiences that inspire you and fill your heart. Choose a book that lights up your eyes. Go to the theatre.
3. Examine: Reflect about your days when you drive, or before sleep. Learn about yourself what drives you toward creative products. Those could be ideas and original thoughts or more tangible things.
4. Elevate: Find little things that elevate your life experience, like placing a flower bouquet next to the sink full of dishes.
5. Express: Become a good conversationalist by enjoying what people say. The fact that you have enriched yourself and reflected will show. You’ll have interesting things to say. Write in a journal. It’s great for putting order in the overwhelmed post-modernistic mind. Make it a habit at least once a week at the weekend, to bid farewell from last week and to open possibilities for the next.
Use the 5 E’s to enhance your educating techniques, too:
6. Explore: Tell children a story or show a video. Just celebrate their eagerness to learn about the world.
7. Experience: Use experiential teaching methods, like enacting a play. Try simple experiments. Google is full of engaging ideas.
8. Examine: When the students respond with insights and ideas, research them together. Ask something to help them clarify.
9. Elevate: Converse with the children about thoughts they were intrigued by. Help them refine their ideas, taking them to the next level. Help them implement by producing creative educational products.
10. Express: Help students communicate what comes up as a mess in their minds. Give them confidence to express the examined and elevated products.
Creativity needs nourishment. We need to fill our mind, heart and soul with interesting things. Then allow time so they may incubate to sprout as new ideas. Enrich yourself and your children or students. Then let creativity unfold itself. Just let it happen. It will surprise you when the time is right.
Here’s a quick tip: If you’re a teacher using the 5 E’s for handling a school task, start in advance. At the end of a lesson, say something inspiring about next lesson’s material. Ask the students a question, to begin their thought process. Invite them to jot down their insights. In the next class, examine and elevate their ideas, inserting to the conversation what you need to teach. Then ask the students to cope with the task ignited by what they learned together with the ideas they developed in their minds.
If you need to help your child with homework, ask them to read the task and material when they are just back from school, maybe even on their way back. Coming home, they’ll let it incubate while eating and watching some videos or playing games. If ideas come to mind during this time-out, ask the child to jot them down. When sitting to do homework, the answers will be ripe in their mind, ready to be written. If the child still doesn’t know what to write, tell them to let go and just let the pencil write by itself.
Perhaps you are wondering why this article has an ice cream painting along with it? Quite simply, I took the advice of Andy Warhol. I once heard he needed something to boost his career, and someone told him: Paint something you love. Mr. Warhol painted the dollar, a witty choice. I decided to paint ice-cream, an item so small, yet so much a part of my life. The point is that the little things we creatively connect to generate a big difference. What motivates your creativity?