How do you teach creativity and originality?
We want to encourage creativity, higher level thinking and deep understanding, but how do we enable our pupils to get there? Mrs Langford, Deputy Head – Academics, explains:
“Creativity and originality are key skills we know our pupils will need in their future and these thinking skills can be championed in maths as easily as English, geography or drama. In this maths lesson on ratios, instead of asking pupils to solve a page of set ratios questions, which they could do by learning the method and applying it over and over again, we asked the Year 7 pupils to write ratio questions for their fellow pupils to solve.
“By teaching ratios flipped, the pupils had to dig deep and truly understand before they could do it. At the start, numbers were plucked out of the air, for example, ‘Find 17 in ratio 3:1’ to see if it would work. However, with a bit of consideration time and space, soon they were working at a higher level of thinking in order to understand how to set a question. They started to think about how to predict, how they needed to ensure they were working with a ratio’s simplest form, and before long, they were starting to look at a ratio problem and know automatically if it was going to work before representing the ratio with animals and shapes.”
“We want our children to be original, and encourage this in our lessons, and the way we ask questions develops this skill. By teaching ratios this way, the task is truly valuable.”
