Creativity in teaching, a workshop

by | Tuesday, May 26, 2009

The Office Faculty and Organizational Development at MSU conducts an annual Spring Institute on College Teaching and Learning every summer. The past week was their 15th such event (details here) and I was asked to conduct a workshop on Creative Teaching. I was assisted in this by Mike DeSchryver.

Over 50 people signed up for the workshop, which though immensely exciting, was not, truth be told, something I was expecting. As it turned out I fell sick the day before the workshop and though we did go ahead with the workshop I didn’t necessarily feel that I was really totally with it. That said, it was a great experience for me – since this was the first time I was doing something like this for university faculty. I have a much better sense now, both in terms of timing and content, of what I would change if I were called back to do this again. I am including below, for the record, pdfs of my slides, a workshop handout and handouts for some activities we did.

[ Creative Teaching slides | Workshop Handout | Alphabits activity | Pedagogical problem solving activity ]

As a part of the workshop participants worked in groups to “see” letterforms in the world around them (the alphabits activity above). Since there were 9 groups Mike and I selected the 9-letter word “Discovery” and each group was given one letter to look for (though we were careful not to let the groups know that the letters they were looking for would end up becoming a word!). These are three images made from the letters the groups came up with. Pretty creative, don’t you think?







You can see another version of this activity, looking for the alphabet in cracks here: Alphabet on Crack and more…

The PDF of my keynote presentation does not include the movies that I showed. The ones created by me and the kids can be found here. The Teach/Learn ambigram can be found by following the links from this page.

Enjoy.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Webs of activity in online teaching

Webs of activity in online teaching

Space filling web for the word "WEB"(created from the same shape repeated and rotated) I recently received a request (via ResearchGate) for something I had written back in 2004. In looking for it I realized that it had not been updated on my website. So below is...

TPACK & Art Education

Camille Dempsey, a professional development consultant in instructional technology, education, arts and leadership as well as a doctoral candidate in in the Leadership and Instructional Technology Program at Duquesne University has been " investigating TPACK in...

The future will not be a multiple choice test

From Chris Sloan, teacher at Judge Memorial Catholic High School and a student in our hybrid PhD program, comes a link to a TED talk. The description is as follows: Creative genius Drew Davies and forward-thinking educator Jaime McGrath propose a new approach to...

Photos from SITE08

Matt has Flickrd photos from SITE08. Some of these photos are taken by me, but the rules are that the owner of the camera automatically gets the bragging rights 🙂 and since I didn't take my camera along, he takes credit for all the pictures. Given that a bunch of...

OECD Global Forum on the Future of Education: Bucharest, Romania

OECD Global Forum on the Future of Education: Bucharest, Romania

I have been in Bucharest for the past few days participating in the OECD Global Forum on the Future of Education. It has been great fun, meeting lots of new people, developing frameworks around AI and education and more. A few resources and photographs from the...

RickRolled by AI

RickRolled by AI

ChatGPT does not cease to surprise. As I had described in my previous post (Plugin' into superpowers), I have been playing with some of the plugins that are now available to use with ChatGPT4, In this post I describe my experience in playing with a plugin titled Video...

Brevity is the soul

I had posted earlier (see Twittering a tale) about short, short fiction that is suddenly the rage. Matt Koehler just introduced me to another example of this new emerging genre: Six Word Memoirs. Check it out.

Indian creative genius

A great article titled the: The Subtle Technology of Indian Artisanship: From saris to hand-painted signs, design thinking is an unacknowledged force in Indian craft by Ken Botnick & Ira Raja. I have written about ideas such as these earlier, particularly in the...

Seeing patterns with eyes closed

Oliver Sacks has a fascinating piece in today's NYTimes (titled Patterns, as a part of his NYTimes blog, Migranes, perspective on a headache). Oliver Sacks describes the visual auras he has suffered through his life as follows: tiny branching lines, like twigs, or...

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *