Engaging Students Through Creative Exercises: 5 Practical Strategies
[Part 2]
In Part 1, we looked at creative exercises that lay the groundwork for student engagement by building trust and encouraging collaboration. But once that initial connection is formed, the question becomes: How do we keep that creative energy alive?
Sustained engagement doesn’t happen by accident, it’s the result of thoughtful structure, shared experience, and a sense of purpose. In this section, we’ll explore how continuity, collective culture, surprise, and joy can work together to transform your classroom into a dynamic, evolving space where students feel empowered to take creative risks again and again.
CONTINUITY
Particularly if you don’t have access to your students every day (or they don’t have access to one another), drawing a continuous thread between meetings of your class or group creates the essential glue of community. In less formal settings like clubs or enrichment groups, it can be tempting to “change it up” every time you meet by altering the structure of your time together, but this can create a disjointed experience for students that ultimately ruptures trust.
Continuity brings students to a stronger sense of psychological safety, helping them feel stable enough to explore.
Strategies to promote continuity
Take notes after class meetings
This small measure goes a long way to help create a sense of continuity both for your students and for you. Did someone say something that made the whole group laugh? Did a student express nervousness about an upcoming test or game? Did the group respond particularly well or adversely to a certain exercise? Keeping a log of classroom experiences helps create callbacks and rituals (below) that feel organic, rather than superimposed.
Callbacks are key!
Referring regularly to previous classes or meetings can be a subtle way of reminding students that your time together has a definitive shape (more on that below) and that they can trust that you, collectively, are in control of it. Callbacks also help remind individual students that they’re essential to the functioning of the group: “Remember last week when Harriet made that really great point about commas?” “We all remember when Enrique made that amazing joke.”
Create an overarching narrative, journey, or theme for your time together. Bring it up often.
Students of any age appreciate reminders that what they’re doing has a point. Even if the point is something straightforward, like “learning geography,” emphasizing that every class meeting is a unique and valuable step in that journey can infuse a student’s experience with meaning.
Students may enjoy a group theme; I’ve painted my class as a hero’s journey, a social experiment, the birth of a writing collective. Whether you’re asking students to take off on a rocket ship or regard your class as an evolving quest, mentioning the shape of the experience and your progress within it can help students feel grounded and encourage them to take advantage of opportunities to share or explore.
Egg carton model
Especially when I run weekly writing clubs, I think of the semester as a carton of eggs, with each week’s meeting fitting into one slot. Now, I happen to be an egg snob; I’m not satisfied unless each egg is a unique shape, color, size, experience. Similarly, each class meeting has its own individual hue and flavor. But in the end, I open up the carton expecting eggs, and I get them. Students should have some confidence in the overarching class experience, even if every day is different.
COLLECTIVE CULTURE
Your students may be a group of people who see each other every day. Or, they might only meet in your class. Studies indicate that affinity among students and between students and teachers breeds trust and better learning outcomes. As educators, we’re obliged both to encourage students to recognize their existing affinities and to create new affinities through collective experience that bond the entire group.
Examples of collective culture
Inside jokes
They’re not just for kids! It may seem silly or an unproductive use of your time as an educator to develop class inside jokes, but these can help improve recall of material as well as remind students that they’ve shared experiences that no one outside of the class has.
Call and response
This can be something as simple as, “Hey 4th graders!” “Hey what?” A team chant that’s different from what students may use in other areas of school can help forge a sense of shared identity. This technique is especially effective with elementary students.
Dividing into teams
While this may seem like a practice best suited toward the youngest students, groups of any age love a bit of spirited competition. On the first day of class, you can divide the group into teams based on any metric (sweet breakfast/salty breakfast/no breakfast is one of my favorites) and allow those teams to meet regularly throughout the semester or year and compete with the others. Their collective identity will deepen as their time together progresses.
Community agreement
More than just rules, a community agreement can be an opportunity to define the group’s culture. So, in addition to the usual, “Respect one another’s space,” be sure to include things like, “Members of writing club are the type of people who clap when their friends read aloud.”
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Rituals
When I taught at an academic/residential summer camp, my class incorporated some combination of each of these rituals into each of our eight-hour days together. Even with much less time on your hands, building regular ritual into the classroom helps build culture and gives students an emboldening sense of routine. Try just one of these, for just 5 minutes of every class, and see what changes.
- Morning/early check-in
- Journal prompt
- Stretch/movement
- Meditation
- Out-loud reading/sharing
- Vocal exercises/improv games
NOVELTY & SURPRISE
Copious research has confirmed that people have better recall when under novel or surprising circumstances. For this reason, faculty have turned to everything from splashy first-day exercises to elaborate costumes. When it comes to novelty, what really works?
Creating a sense of play or surprise within the context of a safe environment can help students retain material and remain willing to take risks in experiential exercises.
Tips for using surprise in the classroom
- Surprise is best when it’s used sparingly and for added effect. You can only leap onto the table to make a point once or twice before it just becomes that weird thing you do.
- Create novelty within an existing structure. Do you play music at the beginning of each class? Can your music be a hint as to what you’ll talk about that day? Or perhaps you bring a costume or prop that gives people a hint.
- Telegraph the surprise. Especially for students who benefit from knowing things in advance, it can be helpful (if not crucially access-granting), to let students know that a surprise is on the way. For example, Professor G. James Lemoine will tell students at the beginning of the semester that, during the course of their time together, he will lie to them once. Students are then challenged throughout the semester to pick out the lie.
When I went to graduate school for fiction, I was given the advice that the best ending to the story is the “unexpected inevitable,” something that gives us the sense that it’s exactly the way the story was meant to end, but it still manages to evade predictability. When introducing something novel to my classes, I like to keep this concept in mind. Not just, “Will this surprise them,” but, “Will this surprise them in a way that resonates with the rest of our experience together?”
JOY
Joy is more complicated a concept than it’s often given credit for. More than merely a synonym for happiness, joy implies a sense of transcendent exploration, of being tuned in to the complicated abundance that surrounds us. Here are some quick ways to infuse joy into your learning space.
Exercises to foster joy
Gratitude journaling
This can be done regularly or occasionally. I often give students prompts like, “What’s one thing you’re looking forward to in the next week?” or “Describe something you noticed recently that’s really cool.”
Music
Even if it’s just for a minute or two as class is getting started, music can infuse joy into any teaching space. Even if the music isn’t upbeat, its presence lets students know that you’re not in a sterile/silent learning environment.
Check-ins
This can be like a verbal iteration of gratitude journaling. At the beginning of a class meeting, ask students to share something that’s making them happy; it can be related to the course/topic, or not.
Humor
If it works organically with your teaching persona, humor can be a great way of infusing joy into any classroom. Whether you choose to wear a whimsical accessory or use silly examples in an exercise or activity, humor can help lower stakes and invite students to take a more participatory role.
Conclusion
Incorporating creative exercises that foster community, continuity, collective culture, novelty, and joy can transform the classroom into a vibrant space where students feel safe, connected, and inspired to participate. By thoughtfully building trust and encouraging experimentation, educators can bridge the gap between passive learning and active creative engagement. Ultimately, these strategies not only enhance students’ learning experiences but also cultivate an environment where creativity thrives and lasting bonds are formed.
