Faculty Resources

Teaching Resources

Refining Your Teaching | Week 1: Apply Your Creative Sensibility in the Classroom—Part 1
Fall 2009

Faculty development has recently done a bit of research on how to foster a creative sensibility. We found literally thousands of articles and books related to creativity in the workplace, school and life. Below you’ll find a simple four-part strategy for keeping creative selves alive in the classroom that is based on some of the information we found.

"Have fun. Work hard. Take risks. Everything Counts."—P. Rachel Levin

Have fun

"I feel free and a burst of energy goes through me. I have fun, I laugh more. I feel like a kid, and it's just too much fun to stop what I am working on." —AAU student.

"For me it really comes down to letting ideas flow. But I have to get the ideas down quickly, if I do, those ideas show up in my work. Otherwise, they’re gone, pretty much forever." —AAU student.

Play, fluidity, flexibility, and going with the flow are essential ingredients of a creative sensibility. When we allow for uncertainty and ambiguity, continuously shifting our responses to changing circumstances we stumble upon new ideas or strategies. We’ll also want to pay attention to these newfound ideas, capture them in our notes, and use them later.

Try this in the classroom: At the conclusion of each session, take a minute or two to capture what worked and what didn’t. Keep these notes handy. Review them before the following semester.

Work Hard

"Creativity comes with hard work and research, and brainstorming." —AAU student.

"I feel like I'm pushing past what might be expected or what's been done before or is overly typical of a style." —AAU student.

If teaching is an art, then we know teaching requires hard work, focus and discipline. One piece of that discipline is to embrace constraints rather than fight them. And there are plenty of constraints put before us as teachers: 3-hour sessions, 15-weeks, grades, number of students, and more. Creative professionals know that constraints are the roots of productive and original solutions.

Try this in the classroom: Assign yourself a new constraint. Try teaching with technology if you usually don’t. Or unplug the PowerPoint if you can’t imagine teaching without it. Try a new approach at least three times. Engage students in the feedback loop each time; then try again.