Children are born with talents and skills that require nurturing to enhance it, educators play a major role in nurturing these skills to produce innovative citizens. As an educator your classroom is full of innovators, if nurtured they will become innovative out of their life experiences. They come up with innovative solutions for problems they encounter in life. To be able to have innovative solutions for the problems in our society, educators need to play the role of nurturing.

Always bond with the learners

Bonding is essential for educators and learners so as to foster good relationship and trust. The bonding process require educators to encourage learners to be inquisitive and curious so as to allow them to continually try to discover the why? And how? Behind things.

To foster this bond an educator is required to provide structure in the classroom. The educator should be able to outline the does and don’ts in the classroom and allow adjustment to accommodate trust and bonding. When teaching, the educator should demonstrate enthusiasm and passion which in turn will increase interest and passion in his or her learners. Make the class fun by introducing humor in teaching by incorporating storytelling and making use of student’s interest to your advantage.  Show interest to student’s life outside the classroom and go an extra mile to support them.

Expose the learner to variety STEM Fields

As an educator take every opportunity to broaden and enrich the learners in STEM so as to inspire the drive in them. Plan and organize for meetings and interaction of learners with individual in the STEM fields as well as learners visiting their work environments and observing how their daily routine is. In situation where learners cannot be able to meet with the experts have virtual meetings as well as get videos or simulations of the different career tracks in STEM.

After all this exposure let the learners follow their passions and interest, let them form ideas and solutions to problems. As an educator encourage them in their formed new ideas and provide open ended time. This will give them an opportunity to reflect and imagine new possibilities and allow ideas to incubate.

Narrow the learner’s interest to a specific area

Nurture the identified interest and encourage them as you make them know you are proud of their interest. Create opportunities for the learners to display their ideas and discoveries and if viable reward them. Offer necessary information pertaining the career line as well as create an environment that is okay to take risk and allow for trial and error. Learners require more time to learn from failure and adjust their ideas appropriately.

Robyn Ewing AM and John Nicholas Saunders have this to say about creativity’s essential place in modern learning “As any passionate teacher will tell you, it is possible for education to nurture key skills such as critical thinking, collaboration, problem-solving, imagination, communication, agility, and empathy. And, as many studies will tell you – or perhaps even your own experience as a student or parent – the common path to nurturing these skills is to foster fun, play, and creativity in the classroom.”

Nurture and build the skill

Create a safe environment and provide support to your students, encourage them to actively seek input from others and collaborative team work as way to discover, improve and make change. Foster persistence in learners by offering emotional support in times of failure. To achieve optimum in skill development educators should; create a compassionate and accepting environment, be there for students ideas, provide feedback, use creative instructional strategies, models, and methods, protect and support your students’ intrinsic motivation, and lastly make it clear to students that creativity requires effort.

We destroy the disinterested (I do not mean uninterested) love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards — gold stars, or papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or A’s on report cards… in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else…. We kill, not only their curiosity, but their feeling that it is a good and admirable thing to be curious, so that by the age of ten most of them will not ask questions, and will show a good deal of scorn for the few who do.

– John Holt, How Children Fail

Network and connect the learner with mentors.

Help your learner’s research and identify a right person to be a mentor. Secondly with your guidance help the learner to get in touch with the mentor and make your intention known. Together with the learner and mentor discuss the learner’s goals and realign with his/her interest. Lastly allow the learner and the mentor to have an ongoing coaching with your guidance as well as parent/guidance participation in the process.

Through the mentoring process the learner; will be empowered, get answers to questions, digest difficult concepts more clearly and easily, learn importance of sharing ideas through discussion and real-life understanding and relevance, get concrete advice about their goals, see into the future of different careers,  and confidence to dream about solving problems.