Creativity & Problem Solving: what students crave.

Overheard in the library:

Student, looking at a worksheet with questions and answers to fill in from a specific website.
"It's all right here in front of us. What, does he (the teacher) just want us to copy it out? I want a problem I can figure out."

If kids are bored are they learning?
Are they engaged in learning skills that will help them become lifelong learners?

How can we as teachers avoid the problem of bored students?
Here are three suggestions for adding to your repertoire.

Engage in the conversations going on in the Classroom 2.0 Ning. Listen to one of their weekly Classroom 2.0 Live presentations. Ask questions. Join the forum discussions.

Sign up for diigo or delicious and mine the bookmarked sites for ideas. Diigo has groups organized around topics such as Web Tools for Educators, Project Based Learning and Critical Thinking. There are 251 groups (as of today) in the Education category.

Have a look at Andrew Churches Educational Origami wiki, especially the page on Bloom's Digital Taxonomy that shows Loren Anderson's revised taxonomy.


Once upon a time (my mother's generation) teachers were trained at Normal School. According to Wikipedia: The French concept of an "école normale" was to provide a model school with model classrooms to teach model teaching practices to its student teachers.

Has our model changed since then? Have out methods? Our students certainly have!


Photo Credits:
Old School - used under a Creative Commons License by shuichiro