Saturday, January 30, 2010

Sir Ken Robinson: The Importance of Creativity

I was blown away by the thoughts that Sir Ken Robinson provoked. His entertaining and humorous look at the world kept me focused on what he was saying. Sir Ken mentions that "education is meant to take us into this future we can't grasp" and I totally agree. I don't know what the future holds but I would like to prepare my students to be successful there. There are so many academic areas that my students need to be taught and only two teachers to cover it all. My students are in grades 6 through 11. We teach all subject areas and the arts are just not addressed. I see that we are doing these students a great disservice by not going that extra step to get to their creativity in more areas than writing.

Sir Ken Robinson stated that being "not prepared to be wrong you won't come up with something original". With the younger students I see that they are less afraid of being wrong in front of their peers. Once they are middle to high school the fear takes over and they would rather keep quiet than be mocked. I try to address this by either mocking myself when I don't know something or allowing them to pick on me a bit when they catch me in a mistake. Even to the point of purposely messing up so they can catch it. I want my students to be OK with making a mistake and not letting it stop them from trying.

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