Thursday, November 11, 2010

INVENTIVENESS

I feel that one of the most important ways in which we can encourage and teach students to be inventive and creative is to simply give them opportunities to do so.  Working projects and activities into school work that allows students to be creative and think up new things to be able to do something that is uniquely their own.  Showing students that when they make something that looks different from their friends it’s not a bad thing, it can be a good thing and should be rewarded.  Assigning work to students that can have more than one right answer.  Creativity is an indispensable skill for the 21st century.  The ability to make something that is unique, something that people haven’t seen before is exactly what employers and consumers are looking for.  People don’t want to see something they’re seen a million times, they want something new, or something old that is presented in a new, fresh way.  This skill, being creative is something that doesn’t really need to be taught to children, they already are creative. Children are able to dream and imagine things that adults could never do because to them the world is limitless, anything is possible. And so, what needs to be done is not to teach them how to be creative, what needs to be done is to nurture that innate creativity that children possess, and allow them to maintain it and to grow up with that creatively, not grow out of it.