Creativity in the Classroom: What It Is and How to Make It Happen

Dracobly, J. D. (2022). Creativity in the Classroom: What It Is and How to Make It

Happen. In A. Brewer, M. Elcoro, & A. Lippincott (Eds.).  Behavioral pedagogies and online learning. Hedgehog Publishers. https://westcollections.wcsu.edu/handle/20.500.12945/3072

Quality Metric: Invited, Peer-Reviewed Chapter

Summary

There are three key concepts to remember. First, beyond teaching students content of a course, we can teach students to vary their responding. Providing students with repeated opportunities signals that some part of their responding should change. As students responding changes, then, faculty have the opportunity to reinforce that change toward the goal of producing both mastery of content and extension into synthesis, application, and creation. This approach capitalizes on what we know about increasing response variability from the empirical literature (e.g., Page & Neuringer, 1985; Dracobly et al., 2017) while adapting it to the unique needs and constraints of the higher-education classroom. Second, as we teach students to vary their responding, we can also teach them when to repeat. There are times in which students need to do the same thing - this is often necessary base content knowledge. However, without promoting variation responding, students may default to only repeating what they know. Therefore, it is important to teach students to vary and then also teach them when to repeat. The repeated-opportunities approach provides an opportunity to do just this. Finally, as students begin to vary in their responding, and repeat when necessary, we also have the opportunity to vary our responses to help students. This can take the form of varying our instructional content, an opportunity to be highly synergistic in creation of instructional methods and varying how we respond to students’ performance. In doing so, we keep our instruction highly relevant to our students and their level of responding while also facilitating the development of higher order skills in Bloom’s taxonomy – synthesis, application, and creation.

In summary, providing students with repeated opportunities and reinforcing changes in their responding across those opportunities helps produce meaningful change both in our instruction and student learning outcomes. Beyond learning content, synthesizing, analyzing, and creating, the repeated-opportunities approach teaches students to value varying in what they do. This helps students become better problem solvers and adapt to an ever-changing world. The repeated opportunities approach also provides students with the opportunity to practice those higher-order skills and Bloom’s taxonomy. Analyzing, synthesizing, and creating are difficult skills that take many opportunities to become fluent. By providing students with repeated opportunities to practice these skills and aligning our feedback and grading to both changes in student responding and the quality of their responses, students not only refine these critical skills but also do so in a manner that encourages embracing learning and receiving feedback and growing. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the repeated-opportunities approach helps establish a very important history in our students. It is rare that we get anything right the very first time, whether it be our own instructional design or our own scholarly work. What often makes us effective as teachers and scholars is that we continue to refine what we have done before. We want to create that same repertoire in our students. To do that, we must provide them with a history of both responding, receiving feedback, and revising, multiple times and doing so in an environment that is highly supportive of this growth and refinement and improvement of responding. Creating this kind of environment substantially facilitates student creation of new and unique approaches and solutions. Not only does this present excitement and meaningful advancement for the student, but it also helps drive our understanding of both our effective teaching practices and the world around us. In the end, this represents the greatest goal of the academy - the development, refinement, and dissemination of ideas that will change the world.