When planning
•Build creative objectives into your planning (you could integrate these with subject-specific objectives).
•Look for opportunities to promote creativity in your existing schemes of work and lesson plans. Could you adapt any activities so that they offer more potential for creativity?
•Devise activities that are personally and culturally authentic. Try to build on pupils’ interests and experiences (both in and out of school).
•Plan for a range of teaching and learning styles so that as many pupils as possible have the opportunity to show their creativity. Role play can increase pupils’ imaginative engagement and give them freedom to explore ideas. Hands-on experimentation, problem solving, discussion and collaborative work all provide excellent opportunities for creative thinking and behaviour.
•Never lose sight of the importance of knowledge and skills. Pupils are only able to engage creatively and purposefully with the challenges they encounter if they have a solid base of knowledge and skills.
When introducing activities
•Give pupils a clear goal that is challenging yet achievable.
•Share objectives with the pupils and give them opportunities to choose ways of working and how to shape the direction of work.
•Stimulating starting points – such as sights, sounds, smells, visits and contact with creative people – capture pupils’ interest and fire their imagination.
•Give pupils a set of constraints (for example limit time and/or resources). This makes an activity more approachable and can encourage pupils to improvise and experiment.
When teaching
•Actively encourage pupils to question, make connections, envisage what might be and explore ideas. Promote and reward imagination and originality.
•Ask open-ended questions such as ‘What if…?’ and ‘How might you…?’ to help pupils see things from different perspectives.
•Value and praise what pupils do and say. Establish an atmosphere in which they feel safe to say things, take risks and respond creatively.
•Create a fun, relaxed working environment if you want to encourage pupils to be adventurous and explore ideas freely.
•Create conditions for quiet reflection and concentration if you want to encourage pupils to work imaginatively.
•Make the most of unexpected events. When appropriate, put aside your lesson plan and ‘go with the moment’, but never lose sight of your overall learning objectives.
•Be willing to stand back and let pupils take the lead. However, make sure that you are always on hand to provide prompts and support as needed.
•Join in with activities and model creative thinking and behaviour. Showing the pupils that you are a learner too can help to create an open, constructive learning environment.
•Give pupils opportunities to work with others from their class, year group and different age groups.
When reviewing work
•Help pupils to develop criteria that they can use to judge their own work, in particular its originality and value (this can be as simple as asking, ‘What makes a good…?’).
•Stop regularly for open discussion of the problems pupils are facing and how they can solve them. Encourage pupils to share ideas with others and to talk about their progress.
•Help pupils to appreciate the different qualities in others’ work and to value ways of working that are different from their own.
•Help pupils to give and receive constructive feedback.
This content relates to the 1999 programmes of study and attainment targets.
Putting creativity at the centre
•Build an expectation of creativity into your school’s learning and teaching policy.
•Consider providing extended cross-subject projects that give pupils opportunities to take greater control of their learning, work together and make connections between different areas of their learning.
•Try to avoid over-compartmentalised teaching. If pupils see ‘the whole picture’ and are helped to recognise relationships and patterns in their learning, they will gain a deeper understanding.
•Involve all the school in an event to experience and celebrate creative learning.
•Show and share tangible changes that result from creativity.
•Encourage, recognise and reward pupils’ creativity. Ask teachers to nominate examples of creativity and celebrate these at a school or year assembly.
Providing resources
•Make sure that pupils have the resources they need to be creative (for example, high-quality materials, tools, apparatus and equipment).
•Make sure that pupils have the space they need to be creative (for example, space for dance and drama, to create on a large scale in art and design).
•Make sure that pupils have access to film, video and the internet (which help them to connect their learning to life outside school) and to first-hand experience of objects and environments (which stimulate their curiosity).
•Agree and provide key entitlements, such as working with artists and other creative professionals, going to the theatre or learning a musical instrument.
•Involve pupils in creating a stimulating environment. For example, they could help to redesign the playground or improve the school’s natural spaces.
•Work with higher education and other agencies to get access to resources.
•Tap the creativity of staff, parents and the local community.
(National Curriculum,2010)
What are conditions are necessary for a creative curriculum?
1.A programme-long approach
2.Progression (arrangements that help students become comfortable with ‘tools’, get them to use tools with less and less help and guidance, and end with them identifying for themselves situations which can be handled well by the use of a combination of the tools they have to hand).
3.Openness to choice. There may be limited choice between modules, but there can be a lot of choice within modules if they are designed on a core-and-application basis. (Teachers introduce the key tools concepts, strategies, information sources and then have students practise them on problems that they, the students, choose/identify).
4.Novel tasks. Where students are set fresh tasks that require them to draw from their learning in several modules and when these are not convergent tasks but ones that allow a variety of good responses, then creativity is favoured. Teachers might find themselves considering the plausibility of the solutions and then awarding marks on the basis of students’ accounts of their problem-working strategies. (NB. It is not a good idea to join the phrase ‘problem-solving’ with ‘creativity’. The one is convergent, the other isn’t.)
5.Differentiated assessment. Narrow, summatively-driven assessment practices will smother creativity.
6.An emphasis on learning for understanding rather than learning for extensive content mastery. There is evidence that an emphasis on coverage encourages superficiality. Superficiality is not conducive to creativity. Understanding, which comes from covering less ground with more emphasis on the underlying concepts, strategies and assumptions, is conducive to creativity. Put it another way: cover less material but in ways that help students to understand more about the domain and its complex learning outcomes.
7.Knowing students. If students understand the ‘rules of the game’ and why the programme is as it is, then they are better placed to reflect and enter into the spirit of the creativity game. Students who do not know the rules are likely to try much harder to bargain it into familiar and safe shapes (Doyle, 1983).
8.Portfolios. Owned by the student and central to metacognition, they encourage learners to sustain their own claims to achievement convergent and divergent in their own ways.
9.Openness to innovation. Possibilities for change need to be designed into the programme from the beginning.
10.Sound evaluations. It has been implied that programmes that favour creativity are rigorous ones. Good programme evaluation practices, ones that go far beyond the standard module tick-list approaches, support rigorous academic practices. (Knight,2002)
Note:The picture is from this source.
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