CREACTIVITY

CREATIVITY

• Creativity is an inner impulse without interferences from emotional hindrances such as fear, anxiety, embarrassment or shyness. Creativity promotes the development of our abilities to the full potential. It is more an attitude than a mechanical learning. Creativity requires skills such as flexibility or improvisation and a good plan becomes an essential part of it.

• Creativity is then the ability to create in our live surroundings. The origin of the word reveals a deeper truth. In Spanish “Crea” (create) “en ti” (within yourself) “vida” (life). But there are actually two meanings: “crea en ti vida” (create within you life) and “crea-actividad” (create-activity).

• Therefore, according to the origin you are going not only to create life in your classroom, but also in your life as a professional. You will get your fire back. You will be excited to put a new activity into practice. The other thing you are doing is create you own activities. You are now in control of what happens in class. You might have a syllabus to follow and contents to accomplish. That is undeniable. However, you, and only you are in charge of what happens in class. You get to choose to put meaningful activities to students and get them engaged. You will be independent and free from the bondages of the external requirements.

• The opposite of this is to get stuck, fossilized. You are not feeling like teaching a lesson that is predictable and that is perceived by children as well. You are pressed upon, therefore you press the students. In such an environment, no one is going to really enjoy the process.

• Creativity in the classroom gives you and your students the opportunity to show their real identity. Students can talk about themselves, and you become the reflection of the whole class environment. I always say that you could see the inside of a teacher by observing his relationship with his/her students.


• “Creamos lo que creemos y creemos lo que creamos. Cada uno crea y/o re-crea su propia vida, y…..a menudo, la auto exigencia de ser geniales, bloquea el genio que todos llevamos dentro”.

• “we create what we believe and we believe what we create”. Each one of us creates and recreates his/her own life. And often times, the desire to be perfect or excellent, blocs the creator we have within.

• Do not try to be genius creator over night. Reactivating your own creativity is a process of trying, experiencing, learning and improving. I know my best class has not yet being taught. I know I have so much more to offer.

• Creativity is the quality you imprint to the things you do. One can be creative in doing the day to day things. Being creative does not be to be extravagant, disorganized or a little bit crazy. Being creative implies reacting creatively to the events you face in every situation as well as to have the ability to create from an inner place, in which nobody else but you have access.

• We all have access to that creative place. And it is nothing similar to anybody else´s. You are unique, your creativity is unique, and your class is unique. You have the key, but you need to reach for it. That key might have been lost somewhere along the way. There was some time ago, where you had it and you felt you have the ideas, the ability and the power to create.

• How to recover it? The key is to awake it up again, reactivate it. But how? By reading material that builds you up. Studying what others are doing. By studying the model of excellence in others we discover our own excellence. Recover the passion for learning and become disciplined with it. Many people have something against the word “discipline”. It actually comes from the Latin “discipluli” (student). You need to become a student again. The last words uttered by the famous Spanish painter Goya at 72 years old were “I am still learning”. You need to acknowledge that there are many things still to learn and that you are available to learn them. Make a habit and get some material that will build up you creative skills and stick to it. Becoming a student puts you in a position of humility and it gets you closer to your students vision.

• Whatever you do, do it with joy and passion, enthusiasm without expecting approval from students or colleagues. Do not get disappointed if an activity does not work. Learn from it!!. The essential thing is not WHAT you teach, but HOW you teach it. The bottom line of all this is that you fall in love again with your job again, that you recover faith in what you do. Turn the ordinary into the extraordinary, routine into adventure, impersonal into personal. Give a twist to your class, to your life, to your approach to your relationship with your students. A teacher that is not excited about teaching it is not going to make his/her students excited.

• Teach creatively, live creatively and the more your skill grows, the more you will be in control, connected, fulfilled and satisfied with your profession.

Respectfully
Javier Marin, Renata Bevilacqua and Melanie Gauthy