Creative Teaching: Designing Culturally Relevant Instruction

For the Final Project, you will assume the role of a classroom teacher applying for a $10,000 Teacher Creativity Fellowship Grant. This award provides financial resources to teachers, which allows the recipient to spend time during the summer months developing an instructional experience that will be implemented and evaluated during the upcoming fall semester. This year's grant recipients are awarded funding on the condition they develop instructional experiences and programs to support the learning of 21st century skills, specifically, creative and innovative skills.

To further prepare for your Final Project, imagine you teach in a culturally diverse school, and you recognize a need to develop more culturally relevant instructional experiences that promote creative and innovative thinking. After carefully examining the information in the request for proposal for the grant described above, you realize the funding awards are based on the clarity and details of a ten-part form submitted for evaluation. After careful deliberation, you decide to apply for the grant to finance your time and help you obtain the resources needed to develop the proposed instructional experiences. A primary component of your plan requires consideration of the culture and specific needs of each child enrolled in your class (or one of your classes) for the upcoming semester.

Writing the Final Project

Create your Final Project to meet the content and written communication expectations below. The content expectations include the ten parts of the request for proposal. If you have questions about the expectations for this assignment, use the Ask Your Instructor discussion section in the left-navigation pane of your course.

Content Expectations:

Part I: Audience and Rationale : Write an overview of the class and target population, including the age range, grade and/or subject area, and other relevant attributes of the culture in which school is situated.

Part II: Outcomes : List the instructional outcomes (i.e., learning objectives) of the instructional experience including (a) Content Outcomes, (b) 21st century skills with an emphasis on creativity and innovation and the International Society for Technology in Education technology skills, and (c) cultural competencies explicitly facilitated within the planned learning experience.

Part III: Assessment : Describe how you will measure the degree to which the learners have acquired your targeted outcomes. You do not need to develop the assessments, just describe what they would be in some detail.

Part IV. Context Description : Describe the nature of the overall instructional context established by addressing (a) creativity (i.e., learners involved in making or creating something), (b) problem solving (i.e., overall activity focuses on solving a specific or ill-defined problem), or (c) a real/simulated experience (i.e., activity consists of performing tasks that are part of a real-world experience or an experience designed to simulate real-world activity).

Part V: Instructional Plan Summary (2 points): Summarize the planned instructional experiences, providing a justification for the need to employ a culturally relevant framework to help facilitate both creativity and innovation skills and the content-area skills the instructional experience addresses.

Part VI. Evidence of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in the Instructional Plan (8 points): Describe the planned learning experiences in detail. Ensure the plan includes at least four of the following nine strategy options:

Maximizing academic success through relevant instructional experiences

Addressing cultural competence through reinforcing students' cultural integrity

Involving students in the construction of knowledge

Building on students' interests and linguistic resources

Tapping home and community resources

Understanding students' cultural knowledge

Using interactive and constructivist teaching strategies

Examining the curriculum from multiple perspectives

Promoting critical consciousness through opportunities to challenge predominant elements of the students' social norms

Part VII. Creativity/Innovation Strategies in the Instructional Plan (6 points): Ensure the planned instructional experience provides four or more of the following ten strategies for facilitating creativity and innovative thinking:

Encouraging students to believe in their culture-influenced creative potential

Nurturing the confidence to try

Helping learners find their creative strengths

Promoting experiment and inquiry and a willingness to make mistakes

Encouraging generative thought, free from immediate criticism

Encouraging the expression of personal ideas and feelings

Conveying an understanding of phases in creative work and the need for time

Developing an awareness of the roles of intuition and aesthetic processes

Encouraging students to play with ideas and conjecture about possibilities

Facilitating critical evaluation of ideas

Part VIII: Timeline : Explain when the following steps will occur:

(a) development of instructional materials (including both formative and summative assessments),

(b) Implementation of the instructional experience, and (c) evaluation and reporting of results.