Here's an article published in Modern English Teacher,

April 2007--Creative Thinking in Teacher Education?--   

Introduction

I went into English teaching vaguely thinking it would be a creative career, but, perhaps like other teachers, I became frustrated. I wanted something more than the course book, and I knew the the students did, too, but was not sure exactly what. Early in my career I discovered resource books on stories, speaking practice, grammar practice, games, fillers, newpapers, poetry, pictures, discussions, video and other things. However, there often seemed something not quite right with many of the ideas offered, sometimes for cultural reasons. At other times, access to photocopiers and preparation time was a problem, and good ideas in theory were not always in practice. As more books are produced, the sheer number of ideas can be overwhelming. The ideal activities would easy to prepare, simple to explain and set up, fun, but with a serious learning purpose. These seemed to be elusive.

Pictures: Tools for different types of activity

I liked using pictures in class and I had a collection of interesting ones which the students enjoyed. However I seemed to be using them in a very limited way, mainly for descriptions in information gap activities such as picture dictations.

Gradually I began to realise I could use pictures for other things, drills, for example. I could say things that were obviously wrong about a person in a picture and ask students to repeat with disbelieving intonation. I could describe a picture upside down: the sky is under the grass, ask the students to visualise it and tell me which way up it was, the right way up, upside down or on its side. I could put pictures of different people on the board, and give each a catch phrase. Students roleplayed the people, using the catch phrases to fill in any silences or gaps in the conversation.

These rather simple ideas, by no means totally original, were my first steps into creative thinking. It meant using pictures, not just for descriptions, but as a stimulus for a range of activities: drills, intonation, speaking practice and grammar practice, often with a new twist or adaption to hold the students’ interest. These in turn led me to new areas of exploration as I learnt more about language, teaching methodology and thinking techniques.

Creative thinking techniques

By creative thinking I mean any method that brings new ideas. De Bono stresses the difference between artistic creativity and idea creativity; it is the latter that is of interest to him, and us as teachers. Making connections between things that have not previously been linked is the essence of idea creativity, irrespective of how this is achieved, and many methods have been described. Creative thinking is a skill rather than being a natural talent or intellectual abstraction, and like other skills, it can be learnt.

Creative thinking philosophy acknowledges that people are creatures of habit and that once we adopt a certain outlook, a certain way of thinking, we will tend continue in that way unless we deliberately and consciously try to change it. Creative thinking can be described as a range of techniques used to help people see problems and issues in different ways, and includes: synthesising existing ideas, reapplying ideas from one field to another, using random association techniques (lateral thinking), starting a process at a different point, such as beginning at the end and working from there to the begining, and using metaphors. It is not my intention to describe these thinking techniques systematically, but to look at innovative teaching ideas, relate them to these concepts, and briefly examine some of the principles involved. Finally I suggest that a knowledge of thinking techniques could benefit teachers by increasing the number and range of teaching ideas we are able to generate.

Drills: Repetition with a purpose.

The problem with drills is that students can repeat without understanding, for this reason meaningful drills are recommended by most teachers guides. Getting students to make the right sounds is an important aim, but drills can have many other purposes.

Having written a sentence on the board, the teacher can indicate the way the sentence is to be said by holding their hands out in front of them held together, then moving them in opposite directions. Students say the sentence at the speed the teacher moves his hands, finishing when arms are at full extent. The teacher can vary the speed, even include hesitations and repetitions by stopping the movement and going back over bits of the sentence by bring hands back together. Native speakers do not say every word at the same speed, they often stop in the middle and go back to the beginning, and they repeat words and phrases. Why should not students to do the same?

Teachers could use drills to make students aware of ellipsis and reduced forms. The sentence Saw a fox going to work is confusing because, with the pronoun omitted twice it sounds like the fox is going to work! So we could set up a drill as follows:

A: Saw a fox going to work

B The fox was going to work? (puzzled)

A No, I saw a fox while I was going to work.

Other examples: Broke a tooth eating an apple/saw an accident going to the bank etc.

The students see the relation of the reduced and full forms, take part in a transformation drill and learn about humour in English, too.

Another way of making students think carefully while repeating is asking them to only repeat the essential information. This would encourage them extract the main idea and show them that some parts of the message are more important than others, e.g.

T I’ve decided that most probably I’m going to cancel the French trip, unfortunately.

S I’m  going to cancel the French Trip

Repetition is claimed to be artificial, but it is used naturally is certain contexts, e.g. when toasting. We could set up toasting drills to people: The prime minister/the headmaster, to our hopes and wishes: A long and happy life/a successful term, and to occasions: Happy birthday/anniversary’, thus giving cultural information as well as language.

Pronunciation: Sounding English.

This selection of drills and pronunciation ideas illustrates several recurring creative themes, the synthesis of existing teaching ideas, e.g. listening and drilling, innovations in learning activities borrowed from or inspired by the world around us, and changing established starting points to find new perspectives.

Free speaking: Inspiration from real life

The obvious aim of speaking activities is to get students using the language they have learnt. Yet if we look at speaking from another perspective, there are skills we could be practising other than general fluency.

Another possibility is having more than one conversation at the same time and switching back and forward between conversations, like a person having two telephone conversations at the same time.

Students can be put in groups and left to decide their own turn taking, for example, students can choose which questions to answer and which to ignore when faced with a barrage of questions (as at a press conference). The skill need will be to control the flow of questions, answering some straight away, delaying others: Hold on a minute! and ignoring others altogether: Sorry, I can’t answer that.

Alternatively, the teacher can control the turn-taking. Take three pictures of individual people and put students in groups of three to roleplay these. The teacher holds up one of the pictures to show that person’s turn to speak, then changes the pictures at intervals. We could have two people talking and one listening, then one talking and two listening, silent periods where noone talks, and times when all three are talking together, as sometimes happens in authentic conversation.

Creative thinking will probably be more useful in looking at the ways students talk to each other, the skills they need in real life, e.g. turn-taking and switching between partners, than the actual topics of conversations themselves, which are already well covered by material. The formats are motivating and fun, but also have serious purpose in teaching specific skills.

Roleplay: Matching language and situations.

New ways of thinking may help us find situations to practice specific language items. The aisle/I’ll homophone suggests a roleplay where students use I’ll for offers in some kind of aisle. We can create an aeroplane aisle in the classroom, where students playing stewards respond to passengers’ problems (I’m cold/hungry/thirsty/ hot/ sleepy/bored) with appropriate offers (I’ll get you a blanket/ sandwich/ glass of water/cushion/ newspaper). Thus we have an authentic situation emerging from a chance similarity in pronunciation

Line up the students and tell them they are prisoners waiting in a lunch queue. They have to pass information verbally down the line.The information is about an escape planned for that evening, a card with instructions such as meet at 0100, bring a torch, wear strong shoes is given to the person at the end of the line. The teacher is the prison guard, and walks around listening, so when he is close the prisoners should make innocent conversation. When he moves out of earshot, they pass the messages on.

This last activity has elements of Chinese Whispers and children’s games are a good source of inspiration, although we adapt them for our own purposes. We can modify Simon Says: the new, more authentic version is set in the doctor’s surgery, the doctor gives instructions, breathe in, relax, cough, open you mouth, put your tongue out etc. Doctors often use an uh–huh sound to indicate that the examination connected with a particular action is complete, so students should only perform the next action if they hear this sound. If they do the next action without this signal, they are out.

Mixing free and controlled elements in activities, or adapting existing games are simple routes to innovation, again confirming that a large part of idea creativity is the modification and integration of existing ideas rather than designing radical new ones. Innovations can also come from finding (or making) links between different language items, and connections between language and situation.

Vocabulary: Different aims, different activities

This area has received a large amount of attention in terms of games and activities. However, even here there is potential for new ideas.

Write words on pieces of paper, holding them up for students to repeat, then screw the paper into balls, so that the balls now represent the words. Put the balls in a line and get students to remember which is which. The balls can be thrown from student to student, with the thrower saying the word each time. The paper becomes a ball which is a memory hook, a three-dimensional object that represents the word. Thus, a negative factor, the tendency of students to throw paper in class, is turned into an learning technique by a change of perspective!

After writing fifteen or so words on the board and marking syallables, main stress and word class for each, put students in groups of five. One chooses a word and writes it on a piece of paper. The second member of the team writes the number of syllables on the other side of the piece of paper, passes it on to the next, who writes the stressed syllable (first, second, etc), another writes the class of word (adjective, noun, etc). The fifth student looks at the information, then at the board, says what the word is, and looks on the back to check. Students change roles for the next round. Breaking a task down into separate stages and assigning parts of the task to different people is another area for exploration.

We could start the process of spelling in the middle of a word. Without telling students which word you are thinking of, give the middle letter of a word, eg e, and then give the letter on either side, in this case r and g. Ask the students to guess which goes in front and which goes behind e, in this case ger. The next pair is o and n, again ask them to place the letters on either side, giving ngero. See if they can guess the word (dangerous) at this stage, before giving the last pairs, u and a, and d and s. Starting from the middle makes the students think about possible letter combinations and encourages them to visualise the word.

Vocabulary activities can have different formats, depending on what we want to focus on: stress, spelling, word class or meaning. Thus, by expanding the number of possible activity types, we can choose the ones that best suit our aims, or looking at it the other way, thinking carefully about aims can help us develop new games.

Playing with sentences.

One technique already mentioned is to reapply an idea from one context to another. Sentence hangman is like normal hangman, except that there is a sentence instead of a word and students guess words instead of letters. This simple reapplication leads us to consider the potential for more games at sentence level.

Mix up the words in a sentence and get students to swap the positions of two words each turn, until the sentence is in the right order. Limit the number of turns allowed to make it more interesting and increase concentration.

1 David lives eight kilometres from the farm

2 Davil divee sighk hilometref srot mhf earm

3 Davil earm sighk srot divee mhf tilometref

Write the mixed up sentence on the board and explain that David is the first word. David ends in d, so change the l and the first letter of divee to get David livee. See if students can work out the original sentence. Replace the last e of livee with the s in sigk and you get David lives eighk, then change k and t: David lives eight kilometref and so on. more fun and easier rather than more complex.

An English sentence is composed of short words in predictable order, so it is ideal for sentence games. They appeal especially to logical learners, making students focus on possible word combinations. Their usefulness seems to lie in revision, however. The presentation of grammar calls for different approaches.

Making grammar memorable

Identifying something about a piece of language which makes it unique is a way of making grammar memorable. For example, an important use of present perfect continuous tense is for actions that are temporary, so it makes sense to practise it in relation to actions that by definition are temporary: he’s been holding his breath for 40 seconds, she’s been standing on one leg for a minute, so practise these rather striking actions in class with a commentary.  

Each piece of language has a unique meaning, and this fact may help us to find ways to make it memorable. It is unlikely that all grammar items can be associated in this way, though. Another approach is to find associations for structures by looking outside language itself.

Metaphor: Explaining grammar

The new information, ie a grammar point that is unknown to students, can be connected with something that they do know about. Football springs instantly to mind.

We could use the idea of substitution of players to explain extra information relative clauses: Last night we went to a party. We  really enjoyed it becomes Last night we went to a party, which we really  enjoyed. Which is brought on to substitute for it. You cannot bring on a substitute without removing another player, so it must go off. In this case, we could say that which is the better player becasue it dominates the centre of the sentence, like a midfielder. The pronoun it is stuck at the end, therefore is not such an effective player.

Stative verbs are like opening beer bottles, they are either open or closed, there is no duration. Action verbs are like opening wine bottles with a corkscrew, it is a process which you can see happening.

When explaining irregular verbs we could say some are more deviant, or criminal, than others, so need special treatment, just a prisoners are put in different types of prison according to their crime. In this metaphor, play/played/ played is innocent, sleep /slept /slept is a minor offender, see/saw/seen a serious offender and go/went/gone is a danger to society.

Grammar is comparison: past vs present perfect, irregular vs regular, state vs action verb. If we look outside language to processes in the world around us to ‘explain’ these differences we are more likely to capture students’ interest. The value of metaphor is that it could support traditional explanations with something more familiar and less abstract. These are classic lateral thinking solutions to grammar explanation, the deliberate connection of concepts that ordinarily have no relation to each other.

Realia: Mapping language activities onto objects.

One idea leads to another, and metaphor leads to realia, simply because metaphor deals with objects and processes in the real world. We can make use of the objects around us. Elastic bands can be used to explain ‘extreme’ adjectives. You can stretch interesting- quite/very/really interesting, but you cannot stretch fascinating! Fascinating means extreemly interesting, and they are both already stretched as far as possible. 

An empty water bottle is a resource we all have access to. Say several words into the bottle and put the lid on. Open the lid and let the students say the words one at a time a they ‘come out’, but in reverse order, of course, because first in, last out! Say four words, shake the bottle, and tell students the heaviest (ie longest) words have sunk to the bottom ask them to remember the new order. Say a sentence in to the bottle, and put the lid on. Pass the bottle round the class asking students to let the words out one at a time, reporting it to the class.

Blowing up balloons may be an effective way of reinforcing the rule for pronouns in multi-word verbs. Each student has a balloon. Blow up the balloon, blow the balloon up, blow it up should all signal that students to blow, but *blow up it should bring the opposite reaction, letting air out, to show that its wrong. Blowing the balloon affirms correctness, letting air out shows incorrectness and the action is related to the content of the utterance.

If we can find teaching uses for everyday object such as bottles, elastic bands, balloons, erasers, paper clips, umbrellas, rulers and tennis balls, teachers will have resources easily to hand which will not only not cost anything, but because they are familiar to students are likely to get students’ attention. The combination of realia and metaphorical thinking is a powerful one. 

Non-verbal Communciation: Showing attitudes
Non-verbal communication, ie body language, intonation and sounds which are not words but have meaning, are more important, researchers tell us, than the actual words in conveying meaning. In spite of this, they often get overlooked in lanaguage teaching, perhaps because tests are usually paper-based.

Sometimes there is a direct link between words and gestures, as with the shoulder shrug and just, as in I don’t know why I took it, I just did, which could be practiced with a shrugging drill. Other gestures may be harder to relate to individual words, but we could experiment with dramatic ways of speaking. At a very basic level, children can be asked to show their attitude to vocabulary items as they repeat them. We might even teach interjections in drills:  T Biscuits Ss Biscuits, mmmm! T Boiled potatoes. Ss Boiled potatoes, yuk!, bringing in a meaning-focused element into an otherwise mechanical repetition. 

In addition, some phonetic symbols are almost the same as sounds that, while not words, do have meaning: /ʃ/ (shhh!) means be quiet, /oi/ (oy!) shows anger, /au/ (ow!) shows pain, /a:/ (ah!)conveys pleasure/sympathy, the schwa shows indecision and so on. We could use these symbols to elicit appropriate non-verbal sounds to be used in dialogues, or as a ‘chorus’ to stories: T …and then I hit my head. Ss Ow!

Error Correction: Unobtrusive prompting

Non-verbal communication can have another function. When correcting writing, many teachers will put a symbol for students to correct themselves. If we reapply this technique to spoken English, we could give students unobtrusive signs while they are speaking to help them self-correct.

This means a kind of non-verbal sign system. A student says *I going, the teacher says mm? both to alert the speaker that there is something wrong, but also give the student the sound that is missing: I’m going. Prompts for common errors could include with/by: wave at the student- the wave means bye which sounds like by indicating a wrong preposition: *with bus. To indicate that to is unnecessary, show the number two (two fingers) then turn them into a scissors symbol to show it should be cut: *go to home,* go to

Conclusions: Creative thinking education for teachers.

The world around us, how people use language, in conversation, in jokes and in different situations can lead to new ideas. Furthermore, innovations may be inspired by thinking about the language itself, both its form and meaning. We have teaching aids: pictures and realia, and even the board itself, which can be used in different ways. Language is changing and our knowledge of language is evolving, so areas such as non-verbal communication and also the grammar of spoken English, including hestitations and interjections, may lead us to develop new activities. There is a great deal of potential for innovative approaches, but there is the question of how to get new ideas.

Creative thinking is not a new teaching method, intended to replace course books, and I am not suggesting that teachers produce all their own material. However, when it comes to the items that can be added to lessons: short fillers, extra explanations or examples, pronunciation practice, end of lesson games or quick revision activities, there is much that teachers can do using their own imagination.

Can we improve on the ideas we already have, and if so, does this mean the material on offer is not good enough? Much of the material is excellent, but of course we can always consider doing things in different ways. As psychologist and creativity expert Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says: ‘It is always possible to find a better way of doing something... that’s why creativity makes a lifetime of enjoyment possible’.