Developing The Creative Potential Of Students Through Group Activities

Promoting Creativity in The Classroom

Is creativity for everybody? What do teachers do to cultivate a creative environment? The collaborative classroom may be the answer to these questions. Teachers must have a creative approach of objectives and goals and they must project strategies that involve collaboration: “Be intentional about designing the types of learning that not only meet the needs of your students, but also engage them in creative thinking and collaboration” (Maslyk, 2019, p. 114). The author also points out the importance of classroom culture and the presence of trust in any learning groups. Teachers must build trust in the classroom by recognizing the individual abilities of each student and the benefits of the different points of view in opinions or visions. In other words, the teachers are the promotors of the collaborative or competitive tasks. They set up the conditions that lead the entire activities.

So, if there is a safe space for personal expression and development, the pupils are rather challenged to engage in tasks that requests new ideas. Knowing the fact that there is no undesirable consequence of their expressions, the students will be open to mix their own ideas or the pair`s ideas and share them to the group, no matter how funny they may seems. The experiences children have during their first years of life can significantly enhance the development of their creativity on long-term. For this reason, it is important for children to have the best opportunities to reveal their self. And sometimes that revealing can be easily expressed through the agency of the pair (partners).

Drapeau (2014) suggests teachers to make creativity a habit by practicing creative thinking in classrooms. But first, one must establish the classroom climate, that include ”a safe environment where the teacher supports unusual ideas, provides choice, uses creative strategies, encourages multiple interpretations and solutions, and provides constructive feedback” (p. 9).

The sense of community is very important in the creative classroom because the students learn to value others colleagues’ skills better when they work and learn in collaborative groups. Drapeau (2014) identifies three types of groups where creativity can be promoted: ability groups based on the student’s ability in a specific content, cooperative groups based on the students’ interest, and flexible groups formed and re-formed by the students’ needs and preferences.

Lucas (2016) elaborates a model of creativity that reunited five creative habits of mind (CHoM): imaginative, inquisitive, persistent, collaborative, and disciplined. For the collaborative component the author integrates the following abilities: sharing the product, giving, and receiving feedback and cooperating appropriately. It is important to establish a creative environment in classroom. That includes some habits easy to follow and to maintain: (1) Creativity can be promoted through all school subjects; (2) Influence creative thinking through well-designed learning spaces; (3) Increase the use of open-ended questions; (4) Engage learners in meaningful and authentic activities; (5) Collaboration enhances creativity; (6) Make efficient use of educational technologies; (7) Allow for mistakes and sensible risk-taking; (8) Learn how to assess and reward creativity (Kampylis & Berki, 2014, as cited in Lucas et al., 2021).

The social dimension of the creative process is recognized as a phase of the creativity once again. It is important for the students to know every idea or thing is appreciated and has value. The students learn to express not only their thoughts like in the brainstorming activities, but their feelings, emotions, cares, or anything that can enrich the process that aims the creative product. They also learn to cooperate appropriately and to use empathy in actions. The students may act like a team and work like one: if some of them lack any important ideas at a certain time, there will be for sure some others who will save the team through their own ideas.

We tend to believe that the creative personality is more orientated to the individual work, but the inspiration may reveal when they work with others. Roberts (2019) describes some essential facts in creative schools:

the opportunity for students to work in teams as well as individually;

the assessment is ongoing rather collaborative then standardized.

The results of the students play or work and the process of that mast count equally, because “the novelty of the performance is the true measure of their commitment and inspiration” (Roberts, 2019, p. 112). One of the key elements to having creative schools is including all students in the design of that educational strategies, not only the gifted ones.

Modalities to Develop Students’ Creative Potential Through Group Activities

There are many ways in which imagination and creative potential can be stimulated in children. Among the active methods that stimulate creativity thinking, based on students' own experience, but also develop communication and relationship skills, mental deliberation and aim to form an active attitude, we mention brainstorming, role play games, project-based learning or debates. School is not the only place where the child learns. When they come to school, the little schoolers already have a certain experience which they continue to enrich. The teacher must find the place in a process that has its own dynamics and continuity. So, educating the creativity on young students can be achieved by using some specific games, most of them organized in peer groups. In primary grades, the students' thinking is trained gradually, systematically, by solving exercises and problems, by using interesting and entertaining mathematical activities. In this case, it is necessary to request the intellectual qualities of the child, to stimulate intelligence, the spirit of observation and creative potential in finding solutions. In this context it is worth mentioning the importance of including specific activities through the arts classes because multiple forms of creativity include visual arts and fundamentally the creativity is associated with arts. And most of the pupils love the crafting or visual art programs.

The following statement “An education in creativity lies in the sweet spot between unstructured play and imitating models” (Eagleman & Brandt, 2017, p. 217) lead us to including in our paper suggestions for primary teachers to involve pupils in free play (this type of play is exclusively associated with the kindergarten activities). Catalano (2018) suggests that it is necessary also for the primary teacher to allocate some free time during the daily program, because they have time even in the given teaching-learning-evaluation activities (duration being approximatively 30 minutes in the Curricular Cycle of Fundamental Acquisitions, preparatory- II classes), not only in recreational activities. Thus, in the remaining time, the teacher should provoke pupils to use some space and the materials in the classroom especially designed for an optimal performance of the play, to exclude injuries or accidents in classroom. In fact, the children are creative in their games and creative play is a big part of the learning process.

The joy of playing can be obturated for a creative mind by the rules of the game. The teachers can suggest the aims of the activity for the students’ groups without putting the boundaries for the subject, objects or even time for the game, just suggesting being for one hour, for all school day or even for the entire week. We suggest the name for this kind of activities:The big provocation for the students being to find the best possible game that can be play in their groups or with their pairs. The pupils can play by their own rules, can invent some magic formula for playing etc.

The imitation is also so valuable, not enough appreciated or encouraged by the students. But the models can provoke the change, the old can generate the new. Even the most gifted students cannot start anything from zero. They need a point of inspiration or maybe a confirmed model to be the root of the creative products of their minds.

Proposal of Group Activities for Primary School Students

The most important thing in the elaboration of tasks that support the development of creativity in group activities is choosing the right activities. In the following, we present some ideas of activities that could be included in a program aimed to activate and to stimulate the creative potential of students.