Following An Educator
The educator that I followed over the course of this semester is John Spencer through his podcast The Creative Classroom. He is passionate about trying to help schools embrace creativity and design thinking. Through The Creative Classroom, Spencer tries to explore the overlap of creativity in the classroom and help maximize student learning.
One idea that I learned a lot about through Spencer’s podcast was the idea of AI and how to best incorporate it into the classroom. This is a highly contentious issue, but Spencer lays out in simple terms why AI should be used. AI is here to stay in this world, and because of that, we need to prepare students to adequately use it and the best way to do this is to incorporate it into the school curriculum. If we ignore it as teachers, really we are just limiting how successful our students can be in their future as their jobs may use AI in the future. It is also a tool that can also ease some stress in the classroom, for both teachers and students. There are so many ways that it can be seen as enhancing learning instead of just being a tool for cheating. It was very interesting to explore the uses of AI in the classroom.
I also really liked his podcast on self-doubt and how that can limit students in the classroom. This is something that can kill creativity before it even has a chance to blossom into something beautiful. The fear of failure is so dangerous and is something I feel has limited me in the past so it was really interesting to listen to this. In this podcast, he discusses how to overcome these doubts. His main points centered around the ability to be vulnerable, always having a growth mindset, and the “Snailed It” approach. Vulnerability is so important to have as it allows you to open yourself up to potentially suffering from failure, but that’s ok, all failures can be seen as growth and just a step in the process. This plays into the growth mindset where you are just trying to always do better than what you did last time and see all things as a pathway towards growth. The “Snailed It” approach does this as well, as it shows that there are going to be slow moments, progress may be slow, and the result may seem a million miles off, but eventually, you will get there. This was so good for me to listen to and something to think about for my classroom to help students increase their creativity.