Creativity in the Classroom

Andrew Wright, Hungary

Andrew Wright is an author, illustrator, teacher trainer and story teller. He has published with Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and Pearson. As a teacher trainer and story teller he has worked in 55 countries. E-mail: andrew@ili.hu,
www.andrewarticlesandstories.wordpress.com

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Introduction
Part one
Working in an ambiance of creativity
Making new connections
Redefining
Particularising
Empathy with the medium
Part two
Being silly
Being personal
Being someone else
Visualising
Responding positively to a restricted context
Creating cooperatively
Making and telling stories
Making it easy to achieve something
Publishing and performing
Acknowledgements
Further reading

Introduction

In this contribution to ideas about creativity I have described fourteen characteristics of attitude, focus and behaviour which I have found help me to be creative. Having described each characteristic I then go on to give related examples of activities in the language classroom.

Traditional educational studies tend to lead us to divide the world into creative and uncreative people…artists and non-artists. This division is destructively limiting for the individual and for society. There are many, many ways of being creative in our everyday activities and they range from making minor changes in how we arrange our desk, to find ways of relating to a class containing some students with very different perceptions of what a lesson should achieve, to creating activities which have never been done before. It is also important to add that although creativity has a huge contribution to make to effective teaching and learning it does not exclude the need for ritual and for rather mundane practice. Professional musicians perform with all their sensitivity but also spend hours every week practicing their scales and so on.

In the first section I have placed those characteristics which are fundamental to creativity and the second section examples of characteristics which can be helpful but are not essential. The characteristics apply whether seen from the point of view of the teacher or of the student.

You decide which characteristics are most relevant for you

Part one

Working in an ambiance of creativity

Working in an ambiance of creativity in which other people also believe that creativity is important and a key aspect of commendable behaviour. If the teacher uses these creative techniques with the sole aim of training and testing language memory and accuracy then the students will soon realise and will not risk making a formal error and will choose to say and write as little as possible!
In writing this article I know that HLT first of all want interesting and useful ideas. Mistakes in language use, etc. can be ‘cleaned up’ later!

Language teaching

Making new connections

‘Making new connections’, is almost a definition of creativity! Wandering and wondering is more likely to lead you to new connections than being guided by a strict goal and approach determined methodology. By all means, plan your lessons! At the same time be open to unexpected happening and see them as a potential rather than a threat.

Language teaching

1. Changing collocations: ‘black cat is a common collocation but what about a ‘black doctor, black expert, black student, black room, black day, black problem? Subsitute: an expert, a brilliant, a tidy, a rainy, a difficult for ‘black’. What does that mean for you? What associations do you have with these different combinations? (Ur and Wright 1992)
2. Chain association in which student A says a word and the student B says a word which he or she associates with the first word…not as part of a sentence. Student A can ask B to say why he or she added that word.
3. Brainstorm on a word. Write a word in the centre of the board or paper. Brainstorm any associated word around it.
4. Sentence pattern tables: Take standard sentence pattern tables and produce either grammatically accurate but ludicrous combinations or serious personal versions. Example: Children often play with chairs.
5. Finding a large variety of connections between two pictures chosen at random.
6. Comparing and contrasting things, for example, a pencil and an elephant.
7. Metaphors and similies. Brainstorm possible metaphors for creativity and then discuss the pros and cons of each.
8. What might you do with an old tin can?
9. Why have you got a small koala bear in your bag? An opportunity for silly answers.
10. Opposites and reversals. Describe many aspects of an everyday object eg a book. Then agree on the opposite of each aspect (it has pages/it has no pages) Then conceive of a new object inspired by these reversals…describe it and say how it might be used.
11. Delphic oracle. Open a dictionary of proverbs or idioms or indeed, just a dictionary. Open it randomly and randomly stab your finger down. How does the word or phrase you have randomly stabbed relate to your present, past or future condition?
12. Substituting texts. The princess was awakened by the kiss of a handsome prince. The princess was awakened by the kiss of a hideous prince.
13. Expanding texts with one or two words at a time. Go. Go to bed. Etc.
14. Reducing texts by one or two words at a time.
15. Provocative topic: what would happen if animals were more important than people?
16. Brainstorm a list of materials and a list of objects and a list of places. Imagine what it would be like to combine, randomly, words from the three columns…eg a rubber cow in a bathroom. Go on to say why this might be possible or even perfectly reasonable.

Redefining

A very careful re-examination and identification of need (aims, methods, techniques…even the words you use) can often lead to a fresh, new, individual answer. The best known example of this, in the English speaking world, I submit, is, ‘My cup is half full, not half empty.’ Some years ago I was asked to write and illustrate a picture dictionary for children. I didn’t think it was a useful idea for children but I wanted to do it! So I added a section of games and activities to the dictionary which meant that it had all the qualities of a picture dictionary with the additional qualities of a language practice book! This had not been done before, as far as I know. Redefining lead to the creation of a new concept. (Wright 1992)

In teacher development one might discuss alternative words for words and concepts which are central to education. What does ‘teach’ mean? For many people it means ‘tell’ and explain. It follows that with this train of thought a good teacher is a good teller. But surely a teacher is someone who helps someone else to learn? And telling is only one way of helping someone else to learn. Sometimes providing a carefully selected experience is the best way to help someone to learn. How else can someone learn to drive a car, in traffic? Sometimes, the way a teacher behaves towards their subject matter is more important than what they actually say about it. To cope with the ever changing challenges in education we need fresh ideas and to achieve this it is helpful to have a ‘fresh’ understanding of the notion of ‘teaching’. Redefining what we are trying to achieve may help us to find new ways of doing our work.

Language teaching

Brainstorm two or three problems the students feel that they have and then brainstorm alternative ways of looking at these problems so that they are no longer problems or no longer serious problems. Problem: ‘How can I be more creative?’ Re-definition: ‘How can I help the students to be more creative?’

Particularising

One of the hallmarks of creative work is the feeling that it is both universal and highly particular at the same time. At the same time one of the ways of finding a ‘new’ form and a new connection is to be very particular.

Language teaching

1. From the early stages encourage the students to create characters, places and situations in stories which are highly specific. Is she slim or thin? How does she sit when she is in the café with her friends? At the lowest language proficiency level a cat can be: big, small, black, white, fat, thin, happy, sad, etc. ‘A big, fat, sad cat’, is a very special cat…and made with first year English! Creativity through particularization!
2. Brainstorm on a word, every association the class can think of. Push them with questions to be more and more precise…and particular.
3. Odd one out. Offer five words of which one clearly can be considered as the odd one out, for example, clock, chair, bed, table, cow. Argue why each word could be the odd one out.
4. Take two words and find 10 ways in which they are different.
5. How many things are bigger than you are? What exactly do you mean by bigger?

Empathy with the medium

A sympathetic feeling for the medium you are working with can lead to a fresh vision. You create together ‘with’ the medium rather than ‘by it’. Is the success of a ballet production the choreographer’s, only? My chapter in the British Council book on creativity, (title to be announced) focuses entirely on this idea.

Language teaching

1. Words: sometimes enjoying the sound of words and playing with them. “i before e except after c!’
2. Chalkboard: starting from a messily cleaned chalkboard, ‘What can you see in these shapes?’
3. Paper: we usually just write on paper but paper can be folded and cut and even looked through! Paper can be all shapes and sizes, not just the International Paper Size. How can these different aspects of the medium be used in language teaching. (Wright 1989)
4. Classroom: the classroom furniture can be arranged in different ways, the windows can have opaque card stuck on them and small cut-out windows opening, the ceiling can have paper streamers and mobiles hanging from it. The tables can be mountains and the passage ways in between them can be valleys. The sink can be a small lake high in the mountains.
The floor can be a map of the world or of the town. Through the window we can see places and things happening…the weather changing.
5. People are a medium. They can just be seen as receivers and sponges…like paper to be written on. Or just as paper can offer far more than merely a support service so can people: points of view, experiences, feelings, social skills, humour, knowledge, skill, etc.
6. Your body and voice are the constant media you use as a teacher…directors, actors and mimes have developed those media…do you make as much use of your body and voice to express ideas as fully and effectively as they might be expressed?
7. Tablets and smart phones give access to the world of ideas and images and offer public places for communicative sharing.

Part two

Being silly

‘Don’t be silly!’ is a phrase, normally used, by people in authority who are irritated by behaviour which is inconvenient to them. However, a willingness to ‘be silly’ is a key characteristic of creative people. What is silly for one generation is often normal in the next: the Impressionist painters were regarded as being very silly when they first began to exhibit their paintings. Now, their paintings are considered to be traditional.

Language teaching

1. Instead of teaching and practicing prepositions related to ‘book on the table’, choose silly examples, ‘cow on the table’, etc. Support these ideas by sketches…done by the students not by you. Hide toy animals in the room: in, on, under, behind, etc. The students look for them and then report where the animals are.
2. Take a traditional sentence pattern table and make as many silly combinations as you can with the words in the different columns.
3. Retell a traditional fairy story making it as silly as you or better, the students, can. Little Red Riding Hood was so greedy that she ate the pizza intended for Grandma before she arrived at the cottage.
4. Have a boasting competition: ‘This morning while you were lying in bed, I was swimming across the River Danube!’
5. Interrupting the story…stopping the storyteller by asking him or her any questions you can think of related to what he or she is saying…let it become a joke…’stopping the storyteller’.
6. Brainstorm ideas to help someone who can’t sleep.

Being personal

It is very important for some learners of a foreign language that they establish a direct personal link with the new language and do not continually learn it as the teacher’s language or the language of the people in another country. The language can and should be experienced as an alternative language associated with new joys, new fields of experience, personal expression and a whole range of emotions and of different situations which matter to the students and in which the language has a key role. We must look for activities which help the learner to want to use the language in order to understand or to communicate successfully.
Feelings and emotions, creating and expressing are central to social life and communication but are still given less value, in education, than ‘remembering and regurgitating’.

Language teaching

1. In the early lessons, the students brainstorm all the words of English they know. They group them into words they like and words they don’t like, into valuable words, into words they associate with a particular situation, into sensual words and intellectual words, into content words and into grammatical words. There is no right and wrong in this activity.
2. Write one of your own favourite words on the board. For example, ‘cat’. Brainstorm words and phrases you associate with ‘cat’. Talk about ‘cat’ and what it means to you. Ask pairs to work together on their own chosen words.
3. Students work together in pairs: ‘If I weren’t here I would like to be…’
4. Role plays which allow the students to explore and express a wide range of emotions rather than just the transactional purposes of communication.
5. Brainstorm all the words for emotion you would like the students to be familiar with. Ask them to talk about what makes them feel each one (or a some of them). This must be seen as a genuine enquiry with your interest in what they say rather than in the correctness of their English…or they won’t trust you and won’t be willing to share.
6. Take your own name as an acronym and plan how each letter is the initial letter of a word and reflects an aspect of yourself and then tell a neighbour.

Being someone else

Sometimes people have such a fixed and narrow view of themselves that they cannot be creative unless they ‘leave’ themselves and become someone else! Look for opportunities for encouraging students to imagine they are someone else.

Language teaching

1. Role plays, particularly if the students first define the characters.
2. Class invented a soap opera of characters in a community. Students can take on the roles of characters within the soap opera and, for example, answer as the characters in communicative practice. Have you got a pet? When do you go to bed? etc.
3. Puppets and mask dramas where the attention is taken off the student
4. The students write a letter from the point of view of a bird in a tree or a cat in a pot…or a lost child at a railway station.

Visualising

Closing your eyes and seeing inner pictures. Everyone can do it to some extent…some people do it to a vivid degree!) The power to visualise is one of the most extraordinary ordinary things which exists. It is not given much status by most people because it is largely non verbal and ‘irrational’ and so does not belong to the classical academic tradition which placed words and logic above private pictures and the random. And yet we all know of the case of Einstein who conceived many of his visions of complex physical realities through metaphorical visions. No better example of creativity can be found that Einstein’s ‘visions’! Many teachers who make use of visualization, in their teaching, first of all relax the students with relaxation instructions, see relaxation below. Sometimes music can be used to provide a background.

Language teaching

1. You can use visualisation yourself and you can use it with the students.
2. You can use it to create positive frames of mind towards particular things, eg wish to be more creative.
3. You can help the students to visualise a place or person…even the beginnings of a story and then ask them to describe what they saw and to contrast this with what other students saw. This technique helps to side step the tenth hand cliches which so many students make use of in their imaginative work.
4. The students visualise, for example, a landscape, townscape, room, staircase, window, gate, door, path, box, weather, hat…as a first image…then begin to add more…for example, a person… then another person…and what they do.
5. You can be guided in your questions or suggestions by the five senses.
6. Students write visualisations of lovely places or exciting journeys and read them to others, with their eyes shut, to imagine.
7. Brainstorm the words you associate with creativity. Brainstorm the metaphors of objects, places, actions, situations you associate with creativity, choose one of these…make it clear and simple.. and visualise it…see it…like it…keep it….see it on your left and on your right…in front of you turn around and see it behind you…let the colours change see it move but keep it there..absorb its life…feel it in you…now set off with it through the wood…the wood opens and light comes in…

Responding positively to a restricted context

The notion that artists must be free is a relativity new idea. Artists from the beginning of time have been employed by other people and have been asked to work within narrow restrictions of form, content, style, location, etc. Furthermore, any medium you use has its restrictions. (If you have a black pencil then you can’t show colour)

Restrictions of content, medium, time, length, etc. can often give a creative stimulus to the students (and indeed their teachers)

Language teaching

1. Show 3 pictures, each for only a few seconds and ask the students to write for exactly 4 minutes about each to make a story. (Maley and Duff….)
2. Ask for an exact numbers of words in a story.
3. Ask for ten examples of a particular grammatical point to feature in a story.
4. Ask students to speak for 4, 2 and 1 minute on the same topic. And to do this to three different people.
5. Ask the students to expand a text eg begin with the single word, ‘a’ or ‘go’.
Eg Go/Go to bed/Go to bed said my mother angrily/you must go to bed said my mother angrily etc.
6. Students draw a map or picture map representing an aspect of their childhood and then talk about it with their neighbour.
7. 10 random words beginning with the same first letter. Talk about 1 word for 2 minutes.
8. Two minute writing storm begun with a given sentence eg When I think of creativity… Get in groups of 3 and discuss the ideas but don’t read them out to each other.
9. You are a pair of shoes. Describe what you are like. Describe your day. You belong to: a roller skater, a postman, a spy, a fisherman.
10. Write: five reasons for: laughing/ why bananas should have zippers/ for not doing homework.
11. Poetry with specified sentence patterns, for example,
    Everyday I…(5 x simple present)
    But today I’m (1 example of the present continuous)
12. Describe your experience of eating an icecream without using the following words: cold, vanilla, chocolate, delicious, nice.
13. Groups. 20 to 30 bits of paper each. Write on them images which could be in dreams. Pairs given 5 or 6 of these papers. Invent a crazy dream. Play music at the same time. Read them to other students who close their eyes and pretend to have the same dream.

Creating cooperatively

Some people are more creative when they can work together with others. Furthermore, one has the privilege of experiencing other people’s talents in this way. Various groups of artists have worked closely together in the past and flourished.

Language teaching

1. Group brainstorming.
2. Pyramid grouping: in which a question is answered first of all by each student, then reappraised in pairs, then in fours, then in eights.
3. Letter exchange: in which students exchange letters, normally in pairs.
4. Pass the story: which may be done orally or in writing, each student adding a sentence or an idea.
5. Group books and friezes: groups of students work together on the same book or wall frieze.
6. Class created stories: a whole class create a story, orally, together. In one form of the activity a written story is passed from one student to another throughout a whole term.
7 Put on a play.

Making and telling stories

Stories are one of the most important arts in the family of creativity. Stories can be made within the first year of language learning and can be used to stretch the most proficient of students at advanced level.

Language teaching

1. Re-telling is creative just as much as a musician ‘re-playing’ Mozart or a theatre putting on a Shakespeare play.
2. Re-telling and making changes
3. Re-telling through a different medium and with restricted options
4. Stories springing from pictures, objects, single overheard sentences, adverts in the local newspaper.
5. Encourage the students to ‘have a go’ and to concentrate on trying to make stories with the language they have got rather than conceiving the story in the mother tongue and then trying to translate it. Fluency is not mastery of the target language but, first of all, an attitude of mind and a skill in using the language you have available to you in order, however limited, to create meanings which matter.

Making it easy to achieve something

Sometimes make it easy for the students to achieve something creative. So many people have become convinced that they are not creative that they have no self esteem left and will not even try.

Language teaching

1. Take an existing poem or story and change it.
2. Put useful phrases on the board in order to support dialogue invention or story writing.
3. Give the students a flow chart structure of a story to base their own on.
4. Ask the students to write a first paragraph only.
5. Accept incomplete sentences or even single words…and respond first of all with unconditional joy to the intention and contribution of the learner and only later to any mistakes there might be from the point of view of language.

Publishing and performing

It is highly motivating for most people to have to present their work to a broader audience than the class teacher. The students want to do their best in every way…

Language teaching

1. Poems and stories: display in the school lobby, publish as a book, put in the school library and send to partner schools, publish on the school web site. Make copies and let many people have one…most important is the students family.
2. Drama: shows for other classes, for parents, on video and audio tape for partner schools.
3. Information capitions and leaflets in English for local institutions, for example, the local tourist office, the local museum, the local bus and railway station.

Acknowledgements

I have taken many of the activities in this chapter from books I have co-authored with other people and would like to acknowledge them: David Betteridge, Michael Buckby, Penny Ur. I would also like to acknowledge my debt to Mario Rinvolucri and Alan Maley.

Further reading

Maley, A. and Duff, A. (2005. 3rd edition) Drama Techniques in Language Learning. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.

Ur, P. and Wright, A. (1992) Five Minute Activities. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.

Wright, A. (1989) Pictures for Language Learning. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.

Wright, A. (1992) Picture Dictionary for Young Learners. London. Nelson ELT. (now out of print)

Wright, A., Betteridge, D. and Buckby, M. (2006. Third edition) Games for Language Learning. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.

Wright, A. (2014) Creativity in the Classroom. Budapest. ILI International Languages Institution. (available from info@ili.hu)

Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology & Language for Primary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology & Language for Secondary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Teaching Advanced Students course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the How the Motivate your Students course at Pilgrims website.