Creativity and Innovation in Teaching and Learning, Supervision and Assessment
INTRODUCTION
Creativity and innovation is the essence of teaching and learning including in the social sciences discipline. Creativity and innovation bring about interest and motivation to learners of English as well as English teacher-trainees, which eventually lead to learning. Gone are the days of a Professor delivering a lecture while standing behind a rostrum in a huge lecture hall in a one-way communication mode where his/ her words are words of God, and students sit quietly embracing his/her words, busy taking down notes; those days have long been over and they have been replaced with more innovative and creative ways of disseminating, sharing and facilitating knowledge development in students. Our students are tired of the old school approach to learning a language – they want something practical, relevant and useful for their professional life. With computer being their flesh and blood; and living in the era where they are allowed to question on things and they are empowered to be partly responsible for their learning, creativity and innovation have been incorporated in my teaching and learning, assessment and supervision.
HOW CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION SUPPORT
Coupled with technology, newer approaches to T&L such as Outcome-Based Learning (OBE), Student-Centred Learning (SCL), Problem-based learning (PBL), Case Study (CS) have also emerged in recent decade and research has proven that many have positive impact on learning. I strongly believe in the supremacy of these approaches to teaching and learning as they empower students to be responsible for their own learning and help them to become active learners; sometimes getting hands-on experience, getting their hands “dirty” by doing things the way they should be rather than the way theories say they should be. Using some of the approaches mentioned, in the context of my area of expertise, students are allowed to “experiment” on the language and find out for themselves what is right or wrong as in the case of those attending the university compulsory English courses; as for my TESL teacher trainees attending my CALL classes, through these approaches, I facilitate them in discovering for themselves the language and communication tools available and to experiment on them to get a feel of using and incorporating the tools in their T&L in the future. These will be explained further in the following sub-sections
An innovator will constantly think of better ways of doing things; an innovative educator will constantly formulate new ways and approaches to teaching and learning to maximise the output i.e. learning.
As a strong believer in the supremacy of technology, namely the computer in enhancing teaching and learning especially to the Y-generation who grows with the technology in their background, the computer can be an effective tool, an agent, for learning as I have demonstrated over the years through research, paper presentation and publication I have written, how it can be very effectively used both in and out of the language classroom.
Source:
http://languageacademy.utm.my/fatima/innovation-and-creativity-in-teaching-and-learning-approach/
