Why every School needs to have a Creative Club (2024)

Focuses on the creativity gap and its importance. Provides actionable solutions which can be implemented in schools to achieve tangible results

What’s common between Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Beethoven?

Between a scientist, an entrepreneur and a musician, what could be common?

They were born to normal parents. They grew up in normal circ*mstances. But they turned out to be among the very few who pushed the limits of human creative brilliance.

So what was their secret? Why can’t all of us reach our creative potential.

It all comes down to one misconception: “Creativity is something reserved for just the artists.”

What we don’t realise that it’s actually an innate requirement to excel in any field!

The Industrial Revolution was a giant leap forward for humanity. Unfortunately, it also left us with the Factory Method of Education.

The Factory Method of education was introduced by the Prussians to create obedient factory workers. It did not encourage any effort to nurture children so that they can achieve their full creative potential.

Though things have changed a lot, the aftermath of the factory method still continues to haunt us.

Just think about it:

Why is it that only some students in your class are really creative?

Every human child has a creative seed within. A seed with the potential to become a fruit bearing tree tomorrow. It’s our duty to create an atmosphere to nurture these seeds.

So how can you do this?

After talking to thousands of educators the most popular solution was:

Creative Clubs!

Creative Club is an initiative to make classroom environments more creative and interesting!

Here’s a list of things you need to do:

• Find a Clubhouse
• Set up your Clubhouse
• Digitize your club
• Set Goals
• Measure Results

Find a Clubhouse: You can either set up the Creative club in your classroom or even find a separate room just for it! In many schools, there are a lot of unused rooms that can be converted to Creative Clubs.

Set up your Clubhouse: Paint the walls of your club by organizing a creative painting challenge! Once you’re done with the painting, it’s time for decoration!

You can even ask students to create Motivational posters using our free poster creation tool! In short, make your clubhouse, lively and creative!

Digitize your club: The younger generation has had technology as part of their life since birth. In a private education survey, 93% of them agreed that technology is essential in classrooms to help prepare them for their careers. Also, 89% of them stated that creativity will be a big part of their success. So with the right digital tools, we can help students hone their creative skills.

One such powerful tool is Animaker Class. Created with the ideas and feedback of 200,000 education users within the Animaker community. So how can Animaker Class help?

For students, it’s the Swiss army knife of creativity. If they can imagine it, they can create it using the creative tools.

For teachers, it helps them to assign creative tasks and track them.

It’s like the secret ingredient to cook a Creative Classroom.

Set Goals:

Once the Creative Club is in place and has the right digital tools, you need to set goals you wish to achieve through the Creative Club. It is advisable to split your goals into two:

Primary goal: Marrying creativity with the curriculum

Secondary goal: Nurture and improve creativity with personalised topics

The Primary goal can be achieved with the help of daily challenges and weekly challenges.

Example of a Daily Challenge: If you taught them Newton’s Laws of Motion one day, challenge them to create a video based on what they understood. This will improve creative thinking while also improving learning retention.

This will also help you understand how each student understands concepts in their own way. Based on their current understanding, you can guide them to learn better and help reach their full potential.

You can also give students a team based task for the Weekly challenge.

Example of a Weekly Challenge: Ask them to do a quick recap of the lessons you have taught over the week. Pick key topics and assign tasks to each group in your class. The task could be to create an animated video, an infographic or anything creative. . This will improve collaboration and teamwork among students. Moreover, it’ll be a creative recap of whatever they learnt that week.

As you can see from the learning pyramid, group discussion, teaching others and practice by doing is one of the best learning methods. Since your creative club involves all three levels of the pyramid, it improves the creativity of students as well!

It is advisable to spend at least 2 hours a week for the weekly challenge. Divide your students into groups. Each group can contain 4–5 students. It will improve collaboration and teamwork. Also, ask the groups to come up with Creative group names for themselves.

Now, apart from the primary challenge, the students can also be given secondary challenges. All work and no play makes students dull! The secondary challenges can be optional. Secondary goals can be made to enhance the creative skills of students in a fun and competitive way.

There are two types of secondary challenges you can give:

• Seasonal Challenges
• Monthly Challenges

Example of a Seasonal Challenge: Run a competition among students to create a Christmas Greeting Card/Poster. Feature the best poster on the school notice board. In a way, it’ll not only improve their creativity but also incentivize them to stay motivated.

Example of a Monthly Challenge: At the beginning of every month, give five creative challenges that are not related to the curriculum. Things like “Create a Poster of your Favourite Superhero visiting Mars” can be a challenge. While this need not be mandatory, you can encourage everyone to take part in it by announcing a price for the winners [may be a free ice cream for everyone who completes all five challenges by the end of the month!].

Measure Results:

Once the goals are set, it’s time to track progress and measure results.

It is obviously impossible to measure something like creativity. But you can always get an idea of the progress.

For example, you can look at the creative elements students used during their challenges. They new ideas generated also give a good sense of whether there has been some progress. Here are other questions that can help

• Are they using the props in a creative way?
• Are they able to depict and reproduce the concepts taught using visuals?

Check out this simple template to measure your results:

You can even customize it according to your goals!

Many teachers share this with their school management and parents to let them know about the child’s progress.

The main objective is to improve the creativity of students. So it is essential that the feedback is constructive. For example, your metrics can be :

• How many Weekly/Daily challenges did the students complete individually?
• How many Weekly/Daily challenges did the students complete as a group?
• How many Monthly challenges did the student participate in?
• Has the creativity improved from Day 1 to current date?

I wish I had a more creative environment and the right tools while I was in school. These days when I help schools around the world set up Creative Clubs — suddenly, as if by magic — I feel like a kid again! :)

Over to you now:

Students are like seeds. you need to nurture them to reap the benefits. Let’s join hands for a Creative generation tomorrow.

Spread the word and Start your Creative Club now!