Nurturing Creative Thinking: Starting from STEM and Art
21st Century Classroom
Overview
This open lesson focuses on enhancing students' creativity, including cognitive sensitivity, fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration, and emotional curiosity, imagination, challenge and adventure. Teachers build up an interdisciplinary learning platform in visual arts and STEM education. The teaching is based on the ATDE creative teaching model which facilitates the students to construct an orderly and systematic creative learning framework. According to the characteristics of the teaching activities, different creative teaching strategies are used, such as forced relationships, nine-square thinking method, SCAMPER, etc., so that the classroom is closely related to the teaching goals. Creative questions will be used to build up the creative atmosphere in the lesson.
The teaching plan is divided into two parts:
1. The Williams creativity assessment packet is used to measure the overall creativity level of student; and
2. The ATDE creative teaching model is used to link up the STEM education and visual arts.
The theme of this lesson is problem-oriented, and there will be no body watering the plants in schools during the epidemic (a situational problem). The students design their creative products by using the knowledge and skills of STEM and visual arts. The products will be optimised, and the situational problem will be solved. Many people consider STEM education and visual arts as a platform for nurturing students' creativity. Why can STEM education and visual arts effectively cultivate students' creative ability? What is the mechanism? What are the factors or teaching strategies that enable students to develop their creative potential effectively? This lesson can be used as a reflection of teaching strategies, learning frameworks, and assessment methods on creative teaching.
This teaching plan was recommended by the Creative Teachers Association CTA, and was shared in the creative teaching plan competition organised by the CTA. The students' overall creative ability has been significantly improved by using this teaching plan. Teachers explain and apply creative teaching strategies for different levels of creativity. Participants' creative thinking will be magnified after the activities.
