MAKING IT EASIER TO BE A BETTER TEACHER

Noteworthy News

Here’s our weekly roundup of interesting education stories from around the world:

• The UK has just launched its first teacherless, AI-only classroom - this should be fun.

• Fewer than 3% of this country’s primary teachers are male - and that might be a problem.

• What about the parents? The phone problem suddenly gets thrown back home at these Canadian schools.

TECH TALK

Visuals are always better

How can you expect your students to write creatively when we’re giving them the same prompts over and over again? 

And for the primary crowd - how do you start tackling such a complex skill when students are still learning to write?

The Solution: Azgaar’s Fantasy Map Generator

This creatively amazing website is a free-to-use fantasy world generator. In it, users can regenerate a completely new world map with the click of a button.

With every refresh, Azgaar’s Generator spits out a new world, complete with new landscapes, country names, populations, biomes, and even weather patterns - with a bunch more options on top of this.

Each of these options can be further fine tuned in the map. Users also get multiple viewpoints and can switch from a traditional map, to a 3-D satellite image of their fantasy land. The options are actually endless.

Every map can be saved and exported for easy grading. But it’s really what students can do with their new map that makes this the ultimate creative writing tool.

How About YOUR Classroom?

This site can get very busy, very fast - so take it slow the first time your students use it. Here’s how it can save your creative writing unit:

The easy route: let Azgaar generate 1 new map for you, put it on the board and watch your students create 30 different short stories with your new landscape.

The fun chaos route: have students individually create and change their own maps, and then have them build a story off of that. For extra chaos, have students first exchange maps and then write.

Since it can go from easy to complicated quickly, we recommend the easy route for our primary friends. But for intermediate and above, you can honestly spend an entire class just exploring this tool and it would not be a waste.

For teachers of geography and science, you can have students mess with the topography, population, weather patterns, and even biome temperatures of their world to see how it would react.

There is a massive fanbase for this site, so if you are looking for help, there are endless forums with plenty of users to guide you.

It’s one of those rare tools where we feel obligated to give a warning - it’s so engaging that students will want to spend more time on this than on their next unit. So use at your own risk - this one’s a fun one!

BRAINY BITS

It’s Never Too Early

Structure, purpose, grammar, and language conventions are explicitly taught at the primary level. But what about creative writing and thinking? These nuances tend to get less attention at this age.

The Study: Teaching Creative Writing In Primary Schools 

This week’s study is a systematic literature review on how primary teachers are best tackling creative writing in their classrooms.

Systematic reviews are a fun branch of research - they take in other papers and experiments and try to make larger conclusions from them. This review takes in 172 other peer reviewed studies from 2011 - 2020. 

In these papers, researchers wanted to see how other primary teachers thought about, understood, and taught the creative aspect of writing.

The Results:

172 peer reviewed studies means there are lots of results to sort through - this is why literature review papers are amazing - they do the grunt work for you.

The researchers summarized all of the papers into three conditions that kept coming up:

There are a ton of findings in this paper since so many studies were examined. But here’s how it can be summed up:

Teachers, on average, aren’t spending much time on creative thinking outside of language classes. This is leading to statistically less imaginative students later on.

In Your Classroom:

Here are some of our favorite strategies from this review to try in your classroom:

One experiment suggested to first create an environment of respect so students don’t feel afraid to try new things. Then, offer a familiar writing challenge. Finally, don’t respond to that challenge with praise, but rather, with a new idea.

For example, when they hand in their creative piece, give it a response instead of a grade, such as “what would happen if this character suddenly grew 12 feet tall - how would your story be impacted?”.

The second strategy we loved was to first focus on purpose, then throw in a creative element. This one is great for tackling cultural conditions.

For example, before students even realize it’s a creative writing task, as a class, determine the purpose of their writing - such as writing a letter to a friend about your summer vacation.

Then, throw a creative curveball once the class has decided on a topic. For example, suddenly the friend they’re writing to lives in a climate that has never experienced warm weather before - how would their letter change?

Creative writing can get pretty messy. But if these 172 studies show us anything, it’s that creative writing is supposed to be just that. So get messy!

REFERENCES

Tech Talk

Azgaar (2024). Fantasy Map Generator. Retrieved from https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/

Brainy Bits

Barton, G., Khosronejad, M., Ryan, M. et al. Teaching creative writing in primary schools: a systematic review of the literature through the lens of reflexivity. Aust. Educ. Res. 51, 1311–1330 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-023-00641-9