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. These instructional experiences could include large projects, field trips, or simply improved daily or weekly lessons. 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.

A good example of this type of award competition in the real world is the Teacher Creativity Fellowship. Spend some time reviewing the information provided at this site to get a better understanding of a teacher grant request for proposal (RFP).

To further structure and define 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 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. Keep in mind that 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 seven 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.

The following seven sections should be used as headings within your paper.

Content Expectations:

• Part I: Audience and Rationale (1 point): 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 the school is situated. If you are not currently teaching, you may use a prior class, a peer’s class, or invent the demographic information.

• Part II: Outcomes (1 point): List the instructional outcomes (i.e., learning objectives and standards) of the instructional experience including:
  1. Content Outcomes,
  2. 21st century skills with an emphasis on creativity and innovation
  3. Cultural competencies explicitly facilitated within the planned learning experience.

• Part III: Assessment (1 point): 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 the format and what they would be in some detail.

• Part IV. Context Description (2 points): Describe the nature of the overall instructional context established by addressing
  1. Creativity (i.e., learners involved in making or creating something)
  2. Problem Solving (i.e., overall activity focuses on solving a specific or ill-defined problem)
     OR
  3. 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:
  1. Maximizing academic success through relevant instructional experiences
  2. Addressing cultural competence through reinforcing students’ cultural integrity
  3. Involving students in the construction of knowledge
  4. Building on students’ interests and linguistic resources
  5. Tapping home and community resources
  6. Understanding students’ cultural knowledge
  7. Using interactive and constructivist teaching strategies
  8. Examining the curriculum from multiple perspectives
  9. Promoting critical consciousness through opportunities to challenge predominant elements of the students’ social norms

• Part VII. Creativity/Innovation Strategies in the Instructional Plan (7.5 points): Ensure the planned instructional experience provides at least four of the following ten strategies for facilitating creativity and innovative thinking:
  1. Encouraging students to believe in their culture-influenced creative potential
  2. Nurturing the confidence to try
  3. Helping learners find their creative strengths
  4. Promoting experiment and inquiry and a willingness to make mistakes
  5. Encouraging generative thought, free from immediate criticism
  6. Encouraging the expression of personal ideas and feelings
  7. Conveying an understanding of phases in creative work and the need for time
  8. Developing an awareness of the roles of intuition and aesthetic processes
  9. Encouraging students to play with ideas and conjecture about possibilities
  10. Facilitating critical evaluation of ideas

Written Communication Expectations

• Page Requirement (.5 points): Submit eight to ten pages, not including the title and reference pages.
• APA Formatting (.75 points): Format your paper according to APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center.
• Syntax and Mechanics (.5 points): Display meticulous comprehension and organization of syntax and mechanics, such as spelling and grammar.
• Source Requirement (.75 points): Reference three scholarly sources in addition to the course textbooks, providing compelling evidence to support ideas. All sources on the references page need to be used and cited correctly within the body of the assignment.