Teaching

Creativity and rigour in Teaching

Balancing rigour and creativity is one of the greatest challenges of teaching. Method of teaching has an important role in building the personality of students and determines the student's academic and personal growth. The teacher is an inspirational teacher who is very interested in developing thinking skills, creative teaching and promoting teaching through multiple intelligence and rigour.

Rigour in today’s schools remains true to the classical (Oxford) definition of the term: “the quality of being extremely thorough, exhaustive or accurate,” but it also contains the modern expectation that it will demonstrate evidence of Creativity. Creative teaching benefits the a student by giving them control of his/her own learning, causing them to be self motivated and not just given task oriented exercises but causing them to look deeper to uncover answers. "Rigour in the classroom is commonly referred to as rigorous instruction. It is instruction that requires students to construct meaning for themselves, impose structure on information, integrate individual skills into processes, operate within but at the outer edge of their abilities, and apply what they learn in more than one context and to unpredictable situations.

In the twentieth century, rigour in school was typically defined by the sheer volume of content that a student needed to master. Academic success was most often measured using traditional paper-and pencil exams, many of which were quickly and inexpensively scored by machines.

In the twenty-first century, many schools are implementing a new rigour; one that is not defined exclusively by workload and is not easily measured using traditional assessments. The new rigour is a response to dramatic changes made possible by technology, in how people live, work and learn. "Rigour is not a synonym for ‘harder,’ and it does not mean moving first-grade curriculum into kindergarten or algebra into the...