building creativity

Last year in my classroom, I took on the challenge to bring more creative tasks into my classroom. One of the activities we did at the end of grading quarter. We celebrated our hard work for the year by having a Lego challenge day. Students were put into groups to work on various problem solving challenges. Each group was given a large box of basic Lego building blocks and approximately 10 different challenges. Each group could decide which challenge they wanted to work on, but they had to work together as a group to accomplish that challenge before moving on to another challenge. What fun I thought, the kids will absolutely love this! And I was partly right, some kids did love it. I saw some really creative solutions to the challenges from those kids. But for the others, it was painfully apparent they could not complete their task without seeing what the end result should look like-they wanted the Lego instruction booklet so they could make the object from the purchased Lego kit. I was even surprised by which kids actually had the most difficult time with this activity. The challenges seemed the most difficult for kids that usually wanted to be the first ones done with assignments or the kids that have an easier time with traditional school tasks. It should have been no surprise that the kids who really excelled, enjoyed the different tasks. They worked together with their collaboration teams and were willing to try multiple strategies to accomplish the tasks. As the kids became more comfortable trying new and novel ways, the Lego challenge day became more successful. They were more comfortable trying new things and learning from their processes but also their failures. As I continue to foster creativity through activities like the Lego challenge , I will make sure that my priority is about the journey of creativity (successes but mostly what we learn from the failures) not the end results.