Creativity: Ideas And Posize: The Effects Of Classroom Size

The Effects of Classroom Size

Only one year has passed since I had witnessed the effects of a large classroom size. At the age of seven and eight, the children in the Grade 2 classroom that I was tutoring were full of spirit and enthusiasm. With such a large amount of children, there is only so much a single teacher can handle. Ideas and creativity had been easily shut down, causing misbehavior within the classroom. There have been numerous studies looking at the results of smaller classrooms, many of which showing positive results. In this research paper, I will examine how smaller classroom sizes benefit students by heightening the engagement level, receiving individual attention from the teacher and allowing students to express their creativity.

Engagement Level

Active student engagement within a classroom is one of the most important results one can hope for when building the best student

A model that the two have come up with is the Four C Model of Creativity, “mini-c”, which focuses on personally meaningful insights, “little-c”, which is referred to as everyday creativity, “pro-c”, which is expert-level creativity, and “big-c”, being genius level creativity. It is important for teachers to understand these levels of creativity in order to support their students (Beghetto & Kaufman, 2014). In a study done by Westby et al, it unveiled that students who show creative behaviours tended to be more of a burden to teachers rather than the ones who didn’t. Teachers’ attitudes would change towards these students, possibly causing them to lose some of their creativity (Westby & Dawson, 1995). If a classroom is filled with 30 students and about one third of the students are expressing these behaviours, a teacher will not have the ability to handle all of them. Smaller classroom are able to allow so much more room for these