Being Creative: The Challenge of Change in the Classroom

Delta Teacher Development Series

by Chaz Pugliese

Being Creative takes you on a journey that reveals how all teachers have the potential to become creative. Whether you are experienced or new to the classroom, Being Creative allows your teaching to take flight. It shows that:
• creativity, so often overlooked, is crucial to successful teaching
• the creative potential of teachers can be developed
• creativity will almost always bring changes for the better

Being Creative contains three distinctive parts A, B and C which focus in turn on theory, practice and development:

Part A:
Looks at how definitions and concepts of creativity have developed in history and demonstrates how this links with current thinking on creative practice. In particular, it looks at Creativity and Teachers and Creativity and the Classroom, leading to a discussion about how creativity can be developed by appropriate strategies.

Part B:
Contains highly practical activities which can be added to the repertoire of any busy teacher. They follow the strategies outlined in Part A – simplicity, combinational creativity, playfulness and risk taking – and they all require little or no preparation, while adding excitement to any language classroom. Teachers will find the additional comments that accompany each activity particularly useful, providing rationales and inviting reflection.

Part C:
Looks at the challenges of bringing change to the classroom, helping teachers to overcome some of their fears and resistance to creativity. There are exercises to do alone or in teacher development workshops so you can continue your journey towards creativity as part of your continuing professional development.

250 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2010

About the author

Chaz Pugliese is a Teacher Trainer, presenter and author. He has written widely for several ELT publications, trained teachers in over 30 countries and presented at all major international conferences.

He has been Director of Teacher Training at Pilgrims, UK, and has also worked with BELL Teacher Training.
For 4 years he edited a column in the IATEFL Newsletter. Chaz has a strong interest and expertise in Motivation, Creativity, Corpus Linguistics, Multiple Intelligences, Group Processes, and Materials Development.

Reviews

[Michele · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has so many fantastic ideas related to making your lessons more interesting and also how to reflect on the idea of being creative as a teacher. I'm still trying to figure out how to work some of these ideas into my classes because I'm not sure a lot of my students would be open to these techniques, but I hope to be able to become creative enough that I can figure out a way to do it!