Graduate Work Portfolio
Creativity has always been central to both my teaching and my life outside the classroom. My time at Michigan State University has grounded my existing practices in research while expanding my understanding of creativity's importance and my ability to effectively foster the creativity of my students. The work included on this page represents the highlights of my graduate work related to creativity in the classroom.
Creativity
The problems of the 21st century, problems such as climate change and overpopulation, combined with an increasingly global world that is shaped and connected by technology, requires that we strive to educate students to be creative thinkers who will be capable of providing our world with the innovative solutions it needs to survive.
Teachers and parents are the first front of this battle against the stifling of creative thought created by a reliance on standardized testing and an industrial-era educational system. By fostering student creativity through development of cognitive tools, by affording students the time and space needed to create, by building student knowledge of content and skills, and by presenting students with open-ended learning tasks that allow for innovative responses, teachers can help create a generation of imaginative innovators.
This paper explores the need to help students develop their capacity for creative thought. With the daunting problems facing mankind as a result of globalization, our society requires innovative thinkers who can work to create solutions. The paper details a variety of cognitive tools that help students explore and expand their capacities for creativity. Ultimately, the paper serves as my clarion call to fellow educators to make room for creativity in their classrooms.
This paper presents a lesson plan that I developed for seventh to ninth grade students. It is focused on helping students learn the connections between the values of a culture and the stories and myths that are created by that culture. The lesson also incorporates comparison of related texts, and reinforces student understanding of key literary concepts including plot, setting, conflict, and characterization, while building student familiarity with textual analysis. The lesson requires students to think creatively by asking them to rewrite a traditional fairytale or myth to represent the dystopian culture presented in the novel that formed the basis of this literature unit.
A semester-long digital record, this blog follows my work to enhance my use of creativity in my classroom. The blog presents a series of entries, each detailing a lesson that I developed and taught in order to explore the use of a specific cognitive tool. One of the strongest lessons presented on the blog is a plan centered on the use of embodied thinking in a literature classroom. The blog entry follows my attempts to connect my students with the speakers of various poems through reading, writing and movement.