This past week was an excellent reminder that immersing yourself in different situations, collaborating with different people, engaging in traditional “creative” type spaces are all excellent ways to bring out, or reinvigorate your own creativity. During my graduate program coursework my driving thought has always been: How can I incorporate this into my teaching? During this past week we engaged with a lot of different activities and tasks, which on the surface felt as if they would not have a place in a high school mathematics classroom and initially I thought this as well. Some mornings we would collaborate with another branch of our hybrid course where students come from vastly different backgrounds, some not even in the traditional classroom setting. We took field trips on MSU’s campus to the STEM building, the stadium, Broad Museum, and we also traveled off campus to Michigan’s Capitol building, Michigan’s House of Representatives offices, and local well known eateries. We also engaged with in class creativity creations from this past week. The infographic below is a collection of experiences in these different spaces.
However, reflecting on all of these experiences so far I have come to the conclusion that they don’t need to be incorporated one to one to my math classroom for me to get something out of it. Again, being surrounded by different types of creative outputs encourages me to be more creative, or has my brain think in different ways. So, when I think about redoing a unit for my Algebra 1 class I am inspired to think up new tasks or new ways to approach, some may argue, bland topics. Being able to collaborate with my classmates and professor, or even just hearing about their ideas for their own unit designs, I am inspired and motivated to push my unit to be even better. Visiting museums, architecturally interesting buildings, a panel discussion with educational leaders, MSU staple restaurants and landmarks gives me new perspectives. This has encouraged my brain to work in different ways that what it normally would, which in turn allows me to think up and create differently than I traditionally would.
All of this speaks to my own theory for how we learn. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, my theory for learning is a combination of sociocultural learning and constructivism. By surrounding myself with more knowledgeable others, whether that is my professor or classmates I am learning more about topics, them, and myself. By experiencing new places and people I begin to construct new ideas. And by physically creating new artifacts during our creativity tasks I push my knowledge and understanding to different or new levels.
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AuthorMarissa McGregor, high school math teacher extraordinaire. I love my husband, daughter, and family dearly. Archives
August 2022
CategoriesThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. |