Exploring strategies for teaching creative thinking Part 4

In my previous post I wrote about how I applied the research of  Anderson and Yates (1999), who taught artistic clay work to six-year-old students using social modelling and cognitive learning principles, to my clay lessons with Y3 and 4 students (age 7-9).

In this post I write about how I scaled it up to Year 5-6 students (aged 10-11), and what I observed.

With older students (Y5/6), I no longer modelled physically. Instead I loaded a you tube video for them to watch and follow independently before they cycled through the clay centre. This was in an effort to further develop both independence and collaboration among the small groups, as well as their decision making/problem solving skills. This video can be found here. 

While this was sufficient for approximately half the students, others still needed my hands on support to work through the process of constructing a figurine. Reasons ranged from lack of experince with the medium, to limited short to term memory retention, to students on learning support for processing disorders.
Independent students personalised their directed work, with much less encouragement, some applying the concepts in the video tutorial to a completely different subject (the video is a guided lesson that produces a bear).
This showed that some students were ready to move beyond the exemplar once it had done the job of visually reinforcing clay work skills learnt previously. These students did not need the practical step-by-step learning, while others still benefited from that.
 

Y5-6 students have choice of media for their Wall / Wow Work (for displays/artshows etc), so not all chose to create with clay following the tutorial centre, but those that did, produced impressive work.

Year 5 - based on inquiry unit Sharing the Planet (IB PYP), animals under threat

Year 6 - Independent and self directed work

 

 

What does the research say:
Groenendijk, Janssen, Rijlaarsdam, and van den Bergh (2013) examined ninth-grade students who were taught the same design strategy steps (based on Sapp (1995), involving various divergent (producing ideas and sketches) and convergent (evaluating ideas and making choices) stages. One group also had  observational learning added, where students watched videos of other students completing design tasks which showed work in progress along with 'thinking aloud' through the design steps. Results show that observational learning had a positive impact on creativity, but only for high-aptitude students. For low-aptitude students, creativity improved
equally in both the observational-learning and direct-strategy instruction conditions. (see my noted observations above with the introduction video to clay)

In their study, Yi, Plucker, and Guo (2015) considered how modelling influenced divergent thinking in a sample of Grade 8 students. All groups were asked to complete verbal and figural divergent-thinking tasks, but one group were shown creative models prior to completing theirs. These students produced work product with higher scores on creativity, technical quality, imagination, artistic level, elaboration, and overall impression. Regarding divergent thinking, viewing models positively impacted all three facets of divergent thinking on the verbal tasks (fluency, flexibility, and originality) but not on the figural tasks.

With all this in mind, I started work on a digital resource where I could load videos that can support students in learning centres. These can be videos I make as time permits or ones I link from Youtube. This works mainly for students from Y4 up as they all have personal iPads at school and can easily access on-line resources. For younger students, I would continue to model in small groups, print out exemplar images, show video on the classroom TV monitor and rotate through familiar centres. I include exemplars of work from my own students where possible. As many of the videos have my students in them, I cannot share the link to the site, but I have started linking the public ones to this blog under the Flipped-Learning link at the top.

Once I have used these a bit more, I'll share my observations with you here in a future post :)

Thank you for stopping by,
With love, Te Aroha
Timea
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