Creativity-Think Out of The Box

WE ARE INFINITE！

Assignment : To Design a new Curriculum that can help students to be more creative.

What is Creativity and Innovation

Creativity is the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality. Creativity involves two processes: thinking, then producing. Innovation is the production or implementation of an idea. If you have ideas, but don’t act on them, you are imaginative but not creative.

To keep Creative, you should first keep thinking out of the box, lose yourself and think in unusual ways; then have a certain confidence to produce your thoughts.

As an example, in old days, the mobile phone is just for calling. Owing to creative ideas, the smartphone with so many creative functions and creative design appeared in the earth, which is a great innovation.

Design the New Curriculum

Backgrounds

The future employee is from the marketing or sales industry. What they mostly concern about is the employer’s oral-presentation ability and creativity thoughts.

Traditional English Course

The traditional English courses in mainland China are sharply divided into four parts ---- Listening, speaking, reading and writing ---- which are all taught for the future examination.

   The typical English exam paper is as above. ‘Listening’ and ‘reading’ are both tested by doing multiple choices; ‘writing’ is like giving a certain situation and writing something in fixed format, which seldom contributes anything to students’ creativity thoughts. Most of the time, these three parts are taught simply by practicing and analyzing the test papers. What’s more, the ‘speaking’ part is seldom covered.

To put in a nutshell, this kind of traditional English course in mainland China cannot foster students who are ready for the future employee to use.

Innovative English Course

Since we don’t think the traditional course is the best way to foster students for the future employee, we have come up with a new curriculum which focuses on the real language ability, aims at teaching innovatively and teaching creatively students.

Course aims:

This course aims to provide students with an interesting way to learn real English and teach them to think creatively at the same time.

Teaching philosophy:

The principle is to excite students’ creativity by leading them to think in others’ shoes and provide the opportunity for them to turn their ‘crazy’ thoughts into reality.

Course Intended Learning Outcomes (CILOs):

No	CILOs
1	Have no difficulty in reading materials and catch the points.
2	Be able to do oral-presentation before the whole class fluently.
3	Be able to understand others’ oral-English and thoughts through their expression.
4	Be able to hand in English reports with both good order and good logic.
5	Have much more creatively thoughts.

Teaching and Learning Activities (TLAs):

CILOs	TLAs
1,2,3,4,5	Role play
3,5	Games

Assessments:

	Type of assessments
Continuous Assessment	Mini-drama, group report
Final Assessment	Individual report

Detailed process:

First of all, students are divided into small groups consists of 4 to 6 persons.

[Role play]:

We provide several themes for students to choose, such as ‘cartoon’, ‘interview’, ‘blind-date’ etc. Students will be marked based on their performance on the class and the group reports after class. 

1. Before the class, each group will receive a piece of reading material listing some characters and their characteristics. All the group members should choose their own role and understand the character’s personality through the material, and then each group is asked to come up with a short situation drama which can express each character’s personality.

2. After choosing the role, all the students have to design and practice the short drama in groups in order to make them understand by others. The drama can be very dramatically since the characters are from different areas which lead to infinite possibilities.

3. In the class, each group will perform the drama they designed before the whole class. And of course, they will watch other groups’ show as well. After all the performance, teacher will make comments on each group and give some leading feedback to help the group do better for the next time.

4. After the class, each group is asked to write a group report to summarize their performance during the class, and to make some comments on other groups.

[Games]:

    Games are not only provided by the teacher, each group is welcomed to raise an interesting game. Games are mainly concentrating on arising students’ enthusiastic in class. It may take 20% time during the whole semester. Let’s take ‘PICTIONARY’ as an example.

Pictionary is a funny game that requires a person to describe in sentences or act by body language or simply draw something for another person to guess an object.

During the acting process, students are trained to express themselves in diversity ways. Hence, their imagination is the most important thing.

While through the guessing process, students need to try their best to think from the acting person’s perspective, which can motivate them to think ‘out of the box’.

In addition, some bonus marks will be given for the groups who play better as an excitation.

How the New Curriculum Make Effect

The role-play will have different themes. The students should be familiar to the background materials and then create a new drama basing on their own understanding. In order to perform the most exciting scenes in limited time, the students in the same group have to choose which part of the original drama to be retained and how to recompose it in the interesting new angles using limited words. The process to generate a new drama can help the students foster the abstractive play that is one of the factors to enhance the creative potential. Besides, in order to have a wonderful show, the students need to comprehend the characters by putting themselves in other’s position, which minimizes self-concern and ego issues within one’s creative work. In addition, by offering the chance for students to realize their little creative thoughts in the drama, they will be more willing to try new ideas and have the belief that their ‘crazy’ thoughts will work.

By arranging playing games in the class, students will not only be more active but also be more familiar with the English expressions. As a result of group dividing, even some really quiet students could force themselves to fight for the honor of their groups. Under such tense but funny atmosphere, the taught English expressions would be recalled and the imagination would be excited. Students should express themselves in as much way as possible while the others should try their best to think from the acting one’s angle. That’s why the ‘Pictionary’ game will be easier to play among a group of cronies, because they can really understand each other and totally think from the other one’s perspective. This is an effective way to learn from other members in the group and absorb different thoughts.

When the thoughts of one are diversity, and have a producing channel at the same time, as a result, he or she will be more creative.

The Additional Information

The famous artist :龚琳娜 

Gong Lin Na is a famous singing artist in China.

The audiences have different comments on her ‘exaggerate’ performance. Some think her product is delivering her music philosophy through international way while some think what she sang is just abracadabra.

    However, from our point of view, she is just doing what our philosophy says: ‘think out of the box’ followed by ‘belief in producing thoughts’.

During the performance in the video, she is playing the role ‘Sun Wu Kong’. She totally loses herself when singing. It seems that all the melody and lyrics are come from the monkey’s mouth. What’s more, other performers on the stage are doing the role play as well.

Even though not many people can appreciate her show, Gong insists creating new songs. She believes her idea is unique and excellent, and she is so sure about her product which comes from her ‘strange’ ideas.

All of the above leading to the final result ---- Gong is an creatively singing artist.

Reference:

1.  Linda Naiman - Creativity at Work

     http://www.creativityatwork.com/

2.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity

3. Sabaneev, Leonid. The Psychology of the Musico-Creative Process  pp. 37–54.

4. John Cleese on Creativity

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VShmtsLhkQg