I’m so inspired when I can work with students and I become a member of the conversation, compared to a leader. A main goal of mine is to help students to speak to each other and have diverse conversations that are driven by their questions.

Today was one of those days where I took some inspiration from my students. (If you’re interested I wrote a post on being inspired by your students, take a read.) Students were interacting with each other, asking questions, and speaking up with their own ideas without looking to me for the ok or answer. It truly was inspirational.

That inspiration leads me to reflecting on imaginative thinking. We need this in our lives, every day. John Spencer has a great post on Divergent Thinking that every educator should read. I can’t do it justice by explaining it here, so take a moment (7 minutes) and read it for yourself. After you’ve had a chance to read his post, think about where imaginative thinking can happen with your students.

Tomorrow my goal is to work with some students on thinking critically to solve some problems we are having at our school. Through the SCAMPER method we are going to be approaching these problems with imaginative thinking. A learner wants to use their imagination and when that part of their brain is activated it can evoke a pretty emotional response.

The quote below really made an impression on me. Many times we think of imagination as just an extra to add into the day, when really it should be the day. Imagination should be a central part to our learning in any subject area. Questions need to be centered around that SCAMPER method to show that we value student thinking and creativity.

Imagination permeates all the areas of knowledge

Theoryofknowledge.net

I feel this is what the classes I work with have been missing. There’s no emotion in what they are doing. Students aren’t connecting to the characters they are reading about, their writing is falling flat, conversations are dull. We need to change our culture and that starts with the imagination. I want to value student imagination and that starts with the conversations we have and the questions WE all ask.

Thanks for reading and if you have any imaginative ideas floating around in your head or ways to interact with students I’d love to hear about them in the comments.