Shared PLD with Hadlow School: Creativity in Core Learning

Term 3, Week 6. 3rd session for the year with Hadlow. This time Jane and I chose to focus on creativity. She has been reading some of Sir Ken Robinson's work, and we chose Creativity as one of our school's 4 Core Beliefs last year. We wanted to focus on the 'core learning areas', as we felt that it would otherwise be too easy to say the children have Art opportunities, music, singing, Options etc...but to me this is 'timetabled' creativity...you're only allowed to be creative at 1.30pm on Fridays.

Robinson's TED talks, and an article (see professional reading log) were the pre-reading,and gave staff something to discuss as we had afternoon tea. The videos worked well, enough content while being fairly entertaining. After the starter we ran a quick exercise...everyone was given a sheet of paper with a triangle on it. Half the staff had the instruction to 'complete the painting, you will earn points the closer you get to the correct answer', and half just had 'complete the painting'. The idea was meant to be that having a correct answer would limit thinking/creativity, whereas the more open/free task would encourage it. As an exercise it didn't quite work that way, but the message got across.

As with the last two sessions we split into discussion groups, and had a recording sheet to try and structure the discussion. Some good ideas discussed and debated, in particular...what do we mean by creativity. As always, not long enough for these discussions. Ended the session with a quick look at Creative Flow (see other blog post).

My takeaway from the session came as people were sharing what they do to promote/allow creativity...and all were describing either open/rich tasks, or setting conditions for the learning and then getting out of the way. Either way, it was releasing the responsibility back onto the learner and allowing them some freedom. After the sessions I've decided to have a 'blank' task that my literacy class have, they can choose what the task will be and how it will look.