Creative Teaching for All: In the Box, Out of the Box, and Off the Walls [Paperback]

Read Creative Teaching for All as an antidote to rapidly growing pressures for quick and easy teacher results, and constant evaluations. Employ creative ideas to resist teaching to the (usually factual) test, and to the many choking rules, standards, cores, and state regulations that strangle motivation and destroy experimentation.

Reclaim teacher control of curriculum design and instructional methods across all fields by boldly going outside, even off the walls, where teachers have lived happier lives before the invention of rubrics and rules.

Become the truly creative teacher to which you have aspired!

Highlights of the book:

Explores and expands opportunities for engaging student conversation and ideasAdds variety and depth to your teaching methodsHone questioning and critical thinking skillsMove from lower to higher levelsReinvent instruction at home, work, or in classrooms as places of imagination and enjoyment.

Jack Zevin is professor of education at Queens College/CUNY who began pedagogical life as a teacher on the South side of Chicago. Teaching is a passion as much as a profession for Jack, and he has contributed many articles, books, and curricula to enhance and enrich instruction for those willing to try creative approaches inside and outside classrooms.

Zevin posits in part 1 that traditional teaching is failing primarily because teachers are too comfortable staying inside the box. The constrictive environment of schools has left teachers few alternatives but to provide students with correct answers to memorize, pacify students through direct instruction, and dispense information through mind-numbing PowerPoints. This has become the norm and falls short of the educational mental health that would occur through creative teaching. Citing Jerome Bruner, Benjamin Bloom, and John Dewey, Zevin proposes collaboration and an atmosphere of playfulness. Disappointingly, the arsenal of creative teaching tactics in part 1 is liló.