The Future of Education

Author Name: Mia Men Stilman

Name of Institution: Montessori-Palau

Country: Spain

E-mail: [email protected]

Sir Ken Robinson defines Creativity as the process of having original ideas with an added value.

For several years, scholars have been studying Creativity as a quality teachers must promote in their students, particularly during their early life. But, what about teachers ourselves? And what about the adolescence stage? Shouldn’t we be committed as well and try to make the most of our classes?

Creativity is something teachers should take into account and introduce in our daily methodology in order to progress, although learning to be creative is not just a matter of reading research or inventing new features.

I’m deeply convinced that in order to be creative first you must ask your  students what creativity is for them and what they expect from you. Or let’s put it a different way: how could we become better teachers without listening to our pupils? Impossible. A teacher who listens to his students will be able to help them finding his own path, reinventing his own world.

This study, as a part of my PhD, is focused on how teachers can improve their creativity in Secondary school with the objective of widening students' abilities, aptitudes, talents and resources for life, not just specific knowledge; but beyond that. It is focused on my conversations with my students, trying to be receptive to their needs, their suggestions and their desires.

As a Montessori teacher I feel it’s an exciting challenge for all the one hundred Montessori schools worldwide to analyze how creativity can be implemented in teachers' daily work, (achieving the best curriculum for the adolescents), and maintaining the coherence established by Maria Montessori in the first stages (0-12 years).

Teachers, scholars and students above all have the leading role in this investigation with a common denominator: feeling passion for education. 

As Mr. Paulo Freire states, study is not an act of consuming ideas, but rather one of creating them and recreating them.