Creative Teaching Strategies

Debono's Creative Hat

Debono's thinking hats are an effective strategy assisting in students utilising all means when solving a problem. The Thinking Hats facilitate productive: critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity. The six hats include

Debono's six Hats is a great strategy to incorporate into your classroom, more specifically for textile classrooms the green hat which represents 'Creativity'. Having a green hat or creative hat in the classroom can help encourage students to think creatively in the classroom and activities can be based around using this hat. Below are a couple of example activities that can be used in the classroom using the 'Creative' hat.

• Write a random word on the board, for example, white. Ask the students to add words to the given word in order to make combinations that ideally go together. For example: white lie, white-wash, white elephant, etc. The aim is to get as many words as possible that no other students has listed.

• At the beginning of each lesson one student will put on the hat and describe an 'alter-ego' of themselves to the class, something that is completely opposite to their genuine self. They could explain what hobbies they enjoy, music they like, clothes they wear, and give themselves a new name.

• Give each student a picture that has three shapes drawn on it (triangle, circle, hexagon). Ask them to describe the shapes in ways that are different from the obvious. A student may describe the circle as a basketball or even the Sun.

• Put students into different groups and provide students with a different garment and a camera. Each group must think of different ways the garment could be worn and take a photo of each outfit, the students must try to get as many outfits as possible within 5-10 minutes. Upload the photos and share as a whole class.

Concept Mapping

Concept mapping is a great way to teach students creative thinking and how one initial idea can be transformed into another. Concept maps represent knowledge in a graphic form. Networks consist of nods, which represent concepts, and links, which represent relationships between concepts. This form of graphic organiser aids in generating ideas by integrating old and new knowledge, this strategy for creative teaching assists the teacher in developing students creativity skills and continue to build their creative minds.

Process: Start by developing a focus topic, object, or question. Have students begin to build on this by adding links and nods to create a web-like structure. By doing it this way students have the opportunity to branch off into multiple avenues. Set minimum number of additional nods students must add to there concept map. This activity could be completed as a whole class as a warm up activity for the lesson, or it could be used as an individual activity in the beginning of an assessment task to have students coming up with ideas.

Check out my concept map below, I chose to complete this activity in order to develop ideas for a sustainability assessment. Obviously this can be expanded a lot further but this gives an idea of what it should look like.

Swapping

The concept of 'swapping' directs students away from their original thought processes into something completely unexpected and different. Whilst students are completing an activity the teacher may say 'swap' at any time throughout the activity, the students must trade work and begin completing the activity using the other students work. This strategy encourages students to think creatively and critically to complete the activity without any instruction as to which direction the previous student was completing the activity. This strategy could be used during individual or group activities.

As an example students could be completing a mood board individually, the teacher instructs students to silently swap their work with another student in the class. Students must then continue completing the different mood board in the direction they think the other student was going.