How can teachers and students become more creative?

“… creativity is all about responding to the learners in the moment and without developing creativity we might as well be taught by robots!”

Language is the salient way of expressing our thoughts. We use language for planning our lives and exchanging our ideas. Globalization has given rise to English as a global language and learning it has become inevitable to communicate with the world. In many countries including Uzbekistan, English is a foreign language and it is a compulsory subject in our curriculum from the elementary level. In our country, though students are taught English at an early age, they cannot achieve fluency and accuracy in English which nowadays is pre-requisite for higher studies, getting a decent job and above all for business. The effective way to make a learner proficient in English is to develop all the four basic language skills: listening, reading, speaking and writing. In this case,creative thinking has been recent concern among English language teaching professionals. This is very much in line with the move away from an over-reliance on methods and approaches as an answer to effective learning and towards a focus on the mental processes that lead to more effective learning of languages as well as of content.

For me, teaching is not an exclusively creative process but neither is it merely a set of repeated action sequences based on blueprints. It is based on knowledge, professional understanding, technical know-how and the personal qualities of the teacher.Helping teachers to develop their ability to think creatively, including creative thinking skills training, is not going to be enough, and the effects of this training may not be sustainable unless there is a positive culture encouraging and facilitating as well as demonstrating creativity. In training lessons trainers need to have model creative behaviors themselves by using a variety of ways of handing course input, from training games to loop input an idea-not in a relentless pursuit of fun and games but in accordance with the topic and focus of each session. In addition, work on team-building, generating trust among trainees, is essential from day one and needs to be followed through systematically, either with activities such as those with social activities in a school setting or a shelf-help group.

From our perspective, creativity can also involve using existing materials in novel ways to address problems in language teaching.For this, we can take story-telling method as an example for instructing and creating well-conceptual students. In every English class textbook there was given various kinds of stories which can contribute to the global development of the child. Of course, story-based lessons can lead pupils to kindnesses in their future. For being more clearly for students, teachers should use his or her creative skills and introduce stories by action games, pair work: same and different, make pencil puppets, write a group poem, book -making project, picture dictations.It is possible to introduce a methodology for story-based work that can be applied to most classroom contexts with little disruption by applying a three-stage model. This model can be activated at three different levels to plan:

• 1.    A programme of work constituting a mini syllabus which can include up to 6-10 hours of work around a storybook;

• 2.    Individual lesson;

• 3.    Activity cycles within lessons;

A framework for story-based Methodology-Plan-Do-Review model

In addition to those ideas, a creative lesson should involve one or more of the following:

*spontaneity,*music,*colour, *variety,*fun,*humour,*movement,*personal meaning,*unpredictability,*a balance between challenge and security, relaxation and tension.

* Invite students to choose a color. Give them five minutes to check their environment and list as many things they can see and think of that have color. Then share the lists.

* Can students think of ten words beginning with the letter B? Eight hobbies beginning with P? Twelve things that make them happy?

* we can take first letter of the words: *W for wake up,*P for prolific,*M for make unusual combinations,*U for use simple generative frameworks,*C for collaborate,*S for    share,*Nfor    novel combinations,*V for visible,*P for physical movement,*Efor environment and emotions

Then we make words that start with these letters and then move the words around to make a memorable sentence.

We Produce More New Useful Cool Stuff if we Vary Positions in English Exercises

But we’ll keep working on it and see if we can come up with some better ones!

Teachers must come with these four main characteristics of the creative process for making their classes:

* producing lots of ideas(fluency);

* producing ideas of various types (flexibility);

* building on and embellishing existing ideas(elaboration);

* producing clever and original ideas(originality).

In conclude, if we remember to include collective creativity too by working with other staff and by encouraging our students to collaborate with each other, so “taking their ideas for walks”, we may surprise ourselves at how creative we all are and become!

Used literatures:

• 1 . Alan Maley and Nick Peachey. “Creativity in the English language classroom”.

• 2 . Gail Ellis and Jean Brewster. “The Storytelling Handbook for English Language Teachers”.

• 3 .”Maktab va Hayot”, 2018yil, 3 –son.

• 4 .”Umumta’limfanlarimetodikasi”, 2017yil, 5-son.

"Экономика и социум" №10(77) 2020