Your responsibilities as a teacher involves helping your students learn their lessons effectively. You can do that by sparking innovation in your class.
Teachers have to enhance innovation in their students. This way, students will be encouraged to think outside the box to discover and develop something new.
Most teachers find it difficult to engage their students in creative discussions.
This brings us the question: how can you spark innovation in your students? How best can you make your sessions interactive to give your students a better learning experience and still boost their creativity and innovation?
Here are a few tips we can offer:
1. Create Hands-On Learning Activities
If you were still a student, would you rather learn more from reading modules or doing projects?
Most students thrive on learning from doing their projects rather than solely reading directly from the textbook or a module. The reason is that most people tend to remember from doing things more than by memorization.
Therefore, the first tip is to create hands-on learning activities to let your students to explore their creativity and imagination. Instead of letting your students answer the activities directly from the textbook, why not create an enjoyable exercise that would utilize their creativity and imagination?
For example, you can let your students create a poem that they will present after an English subject. You can also group the class into teams and have them create a jingle if you are teaching Mathematics.
Hands-on activities involve direct participation from the students, allowing your students to grow as they explore their creativity in doing the projects.
2. Don’t Limit your Student’s Potential
Freedom is essential in discovering innovations. As much as possible possible, give your students freedom of choice when doing the activities.
An excellent example is that of drawing projects. Give your students the freedom to choose what kind of theme to pursue, whether it is cartoon characters, landscapes, doodles, etc.
If they prefer to use a particular material over the other, allow them to do so. If you restrict them into doing a specific task only, chances are that it would be hard to spark their innovation as they’ll feel forced to do the task for the grades and not for learning.
Having that mentality can hinder their growth and ability to get creative to explore new things.
If you discourage your students from trying out new things, they might not only lose interest in your class. However, they may even develop a dislike for the subject.
Just keep in mind that stifling their creativity can have long-term adverse effects as well.
3. Encourage Students to Ask Questions and Participate in Discussions
In most cases, your students may fail to ask questions and participate in class discussions. This can be discouraging and leave you wondering whether your students are genuinely listening or they are doing other things during your lessons.
Learning is a two-way process, so try as much as possible to encourage your students to ask questions from the lesson and participate in class discussions. Also, give them time to figure out the answers themselves.
For example, if you are teaching Science, you can give them an experiment activity first before giving out the answer. This will allow you to spark innovation in your students since they will have the time and space to try solving the questions by themselves.
Another great tip is to ask questions during class discussions. Ask your students questions so they can think for answers regarding that question. It encourages them to research more about it and learn something new.
Of course, you can also collaborate with your students. Try to find the answer together by exploring and discovering new things. This way, you will be able to spark innovation in your students.
4. Take Time to Give Feedback to Your Students
As a teacher, you are more likely to get busy and it can be difficult to follow up with your students. Even so, you should take time to provide feedback on your students’ creative work.
Feedback is essential in a student’s learning since it allows them to grow and know what areas they should improve. Also, constructive feedback can help enhance the student’s innovation even more. It gives them a sense of direction as to what they should do in order to improve on a specific task and think of innovations that have not been done before.
Of course, your feedback should be well-thought-out to avoid hurting your student’s feelings. If you think their output is not innovative, try as much as possible not to give harsh feedback.
Instead, tell them how they can improve and give them ideas on enhancing creativity in their work.
Final Words
Teaching can be both challenging and rewarding at the same time. As a teacher, you can impact your students to become innovators in the future who will change the world. There are various things you can do to enhance creativity and innovation in your students.
We hope that these tips help you spark innovation in your students effortlessly.
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