Photo illustration: Rizki Filaili
This article is part of the Teacher's Note series on the key moments of becoming a beginning teacher.
In my opinion, a teacher must have these three key elements: competence, creativity in teaching, and sincerity to lead their students to success. Competence is obtained in college, and one should already have the sincerity quality when deciding to pursue the teaching profession to educate the future generation.
This time I will talk about the second element, creativity. A teacher must have a sense of creativity so that they can find learning models suitable to apply in the classroom. A creative teacher can find the ways to solve students’ problems in the class, at school, or outside the school.
The creativity will help the teacher find good ways of teaching, an elegant classroom opening, ways to make and carry out practical assessments, proper ways to give assignments without burden the students, ways to lead classroom discussions that encourage the children to actively share their ideas, ways to administer punishment wisely, and much more.
Creativity will distinguish a teacher from the others. Students will always look forward to the creative teacher’s lesson hours.
An example is my experience when teaching at a private primary school in Wonogiri. At the time, I used different learning media from what the previous teacher used. I carried out model-based learning and sometimes took the students out of the classroom to study. Such variation apparently mattered as the students liked my learning model, which was different from the other teachers.
Another example is when I was teaching about democracy. I asked the children to play roles in discussions, in meetings, even in rallies to express their opinion outside the classroom. Such learning activity is easier for children to remember and increases their enthusiasm for learning.
When teaching comparison scales, I would bring the students outside the classroom to observe their surroundings and ask them to describe their observations on a piece of paper in groups. Students can then discuss comparisons and scales based on their observations. In my opinion, this way, students can better understand the concept of comparison scale and its use rather than just read about it in a book.
Therefore, beginning teachers must be able to improve their creativity. In addition to bringing changes in teaching and learning activities, creativity also shows that the person is competent to become a professional ideal teacher. The teacher's creativity will help students grasp the lessons quickly as well as improve their motivation in learning.
*This Note was written by HSW, a primary school teacher in Central Java.
**All articles published in the Teachers' Notes are the views of the authors. They have been edited for popular writing purposes and do not represent the views of RISE Programme in Indonesia or RISE's funders.
