Creative Teaching for All

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 limited to strategies, such as mock trials or debates. Refreshingly, part 2 is an analysis of six engines of creativity with many outside-the-box scenarios offered. The first engine, creative attention, is awakened through careful observation. In the second, those individual observations are aroused by inductive examination identifying concepts, categories, and metaphors. The third engine, curiosity, calls for hypotheses. Through the fourth engine, students are presented with contradictions, ambiguities, or converging views. Next, those perspectives are explored. Finally, temporary evaluations are drawn. Overall, Zevin's book is a tribute to creative teaching. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate and professional collections.

• AcknowledgmentsPart I: Introduction: Creative Teaching in the box, outside of the box, and off the walls1. Creativity and creative teaching defined2. Work and play, play and work: the genesis of creativity3. Creative teaching and learning: Theory and practice4. Dimensions of distraction and invention5. Engines for creative teaching and learningPart II: Introduction: Engines of Creativity6. Attention awakened: the power of observation and participation7. Ideas aroused: formulating definitions and building analogies8. Investigations stimulated: From puzzlement to perplexity, grasping the mysterious9. Viewpoints explored: different perspectives and conflicting interpretations10. Judgments provoked: Apathy to empathy, assessment to commitment, and evaluation to moral choice11. Rules and rationales for creativity in the 21st Century and beyondReferences