Learning & Leading

The 4 dimensions Guilford uses to describe creativity are Fluency, Flexibility, Elaboration, and Originality. Out of these 4 dimensions, I struggle the most with Originality. It requires a great deal of risk, and I am afraid of failing, so mostly, I would rather base my ideas and projects off of others' ideas and then expand on them on my own. I am good at providing details and planning and coming up with different aspects of plans, but creating something new entirely is extremely difficult for me. Originality cannot be forced, but only reinforced. This is both a good and bad thing. It is good because it means that it is encouraged, but the fact that it cannot be forced means that I am still less likely to develop that aspect of creativity. In examining tools we have looked at in class, blogging, I believe, is the best tool in making me facilitate creative originality. A blog has a basis; it has templates and tools, but the way they are presented and what is presented on them is completely up to me. This allows me to create something out of nothing (or out of very little). Blogging also aids the dimension of elaboration. Once you have created the backbone of your blog, you can add to and individualize it completely. You can make it look as if it never even began from a basic format. Both originality and elaboration can be explored and exemplified through blogging. In my future classroom, I plan on teaching history to middle schoolers. Twitter would allow students a really great avenue in which to communicate facts and ideas. Students could tweet facts about events they were studying. They would tweet the fact to our class twitter account (@perkins7thperiod-for example). Then, their fellow students would retweet or favorite tweets that they found interesting or agreed with. They would then be required to reply to say, 5 tweets. They would have to respond to 2 that they agreed with, 2 they disagreed with, and 1 they found interesting. Twitter, in this case, could be used as a tool to facilitate and implement creativity in the classroom.