10 Tips to Achieve Creativity and Innovation in Education

10 Tips to Achieve Creativity and Innovation in Education

by Rafiq Elmansy · 04/16/2015
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Our current world is evolving more rapidly than the capacity of any existing education system. The challenge of learning is getting even harder for the next generations. We do not have a prediction of how tomorrow will look like, but we know that flexible process models are able to face the changes comparing with fixed-style models; we know that the ability to adapt helped our ancestors to survive on this planet for about six million years.

This leads us to the question; what is the most important skill to teach our kids in schools? The answer:  How to build creative and innovative minds that can adapt and face future unpredictable challenges. Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page provide successful examples of how adopting innovation in education can help in building creativity and better abilities in order  to solve problems.

Many governments adopt the policy of free basic education, a large base of students are privileged by this policy to learn. These policies have very wide range of standards, quality and infrastructure. Therefore, a focus strategy on the essential skills should be implemented. These skills include the following:

    Think creatively in order to compete in the market
    Find innovative solutions for existing and future problems
    The ability to evaluate current status and find better alternatives if needed

innovation in education

Design thinking for kids at ZURB Command Center (Source: ZURB)

In order to achieve the above, we need to apply creative and innovative strategies in education with a particular focus on the basic kid’s education. While education systems are varying in their capability to implement creative teaching methods and curricula, a teacher can easily adapt their teaching methods towards more creative thinking through the following tips:
Encourage children to find the answer

It is also called the Pestalozzi method. Unlike the ordinary models of giving the direct answers for questions, this method aims to encourage students to find the answers on their own. It helps the students to learn how to observe, imagine, judge and reasoning. One of the successful examples of applying this method is Albert Einstein.
Children learn, teachers observe

The current educational system depends on teacher-driven lessons, where the teacher leads the class leaving no space for students to self-develop their skills and capabilities to innovate. The Montessori method aims to give a space of students to self-learning while the teachers observe the progress. One of the successful examples of using this method is Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.