Education is a long journey for everyone. To achieve it, we must be alert to change. To understand the changes, we must understand our main client, which is our students. In our education system, the mainstream of thinking centers on the necessity of helping our students to achieve great grades. This, however, makes a student’s success after school a privilege rather than a right. Therefore, we must endow our students with creativity which will affect our students’ behaviors. Each student has their own creative thinking abilities, learning styles, and problem-solving styles. These abilities will affect their way of learning and as a teacher, we must inculcate them to boost their creativity. So how is not teaching them actually teaching them? In this article, I would like to share a few ideas which might be useful in our classroom.

First, get to know your students’ talents. Are they athletic, artistic, more inclined towards the sciences, or a bit of everything? Athletic students usually participate to get away from their problems (Billie, 2010), impress other people with their talents, or improve their performance level. Artistic students, on the other hand, participate because they want to be actively involved in school and these groups are usually very popular among their peers and teachers. The science students are usually labeled based on their genetic component with high language and mathematics abilities. They are well known but not so popular. But these characteristics are not 100% relevant because human nature changes with the environment. During my observation in my classes, however, I found that most of these characteristics are interconnected. So the question is, how do we grab their attention and boost their creativity?

Secondly, understand the nature of your students. Athletes need personal or team practice in a game. They usually use courts or fields with tools for training. Audio, kinesthetics, and visual abilities should be their main options in learning style. Science and art students usually use the lab or studio to work and they can either work as individuals or peers or in big groups with apparatus and many materials. They are the type of students who use any of the learning styles; audio, visual, reading or writing and kinesthetics. Teamwork can be incorporated in most of our students except for those with special needs. Our teaching and learning activities need to be used to enhance the classroom environment (Arthur, 2005).  Let them teach each other while we monitor them as a controlled variable, especially in their communication and responses.  Apart from that, we must understand the emotional level and openness of our students. Keep in mind that athletes are usually easygoing with great leadership skills whilst artistic students can be emotionally unstable, cold, and work against group norms but also perfectionists. The science domain has more autonomy, flexibility, and drive to complete the task. Mixing them into teams will create the diversity of personalities which can become a platform for gaining experience and a training field for their mental development. They will learn their differences and similarities; they will accept it as part of their lifelong learning journey. Once they reach the illumination stage, you will know it because the word ‘aha’ will echo in the group discussion instead of just one-way communication way or worse, no sound at all. This is the time when you can smile and nod in agreement for whatever solution they find because they have taught themselves with your guidance!

Finally, once your students can generate ideas and dig deeper into the ideas, your part as the teacher should be to empower them now. You must show them the path without directing the road so that they can have the courage to analyze the problem and suggest a solution. PBL is one of the tasks which require many skills including synthesizing, evaluating, and reorganizing. If we can apply this method, we no longer spoon-feed our students. They solve the tasks using their creative thinking ability, learning styles, and problem-solving styles thus inculcating creativity beyond the mind!

Bibliography

Arthur B. Vangundy, 2005 (reprint 2016), 101 Activities for teaching creativity and problem-solving, San Francisco, John Wiley & Sons Inc. Published by Pfeiffer (www.pfeiffer.com), http://hdll..handle.net/123456789/1070 (20 Aug. 2022)

Billie L. Woodeel-Johnson, 2010, Creative, learning styles and problem-solving styles of talented secondary school, Western Connecticut State University, West collections digitalcommons@wcsu, http://repisotory.wcsu.edu/educationdis (2 Feb.2023).

Written by Siti Azizah Md Yussof