The creative teaching learning resource book

Our original book The Creative Teaching & Learning Toolkitt began us on a journey. Neither of us could know that our research would come to demystify creativity while still maintaining its magic. The original book has benefited from the input of a wide range of people, and this subsequent Resource Book has been informed by their thoughts and reflections. The following made valuable contributions to the Creative Teaching Framework: Anthony Blake, Sophie Craven, Barry Hymer, Geoff Petty, Dan Varney and Belle Wallace. Thanks to Jo Horlock who has provided inspiration through her bookmark cards, and to Tara Mawby for her enthusiasm, inspiration, creativity and friendship. Brin Best is very grateful to his wife, mum and dad for many years of unfailing support during his career as a teacher, adviser and consultant. He would also like to place on record how much he has learnt from fellow teachers throughout this time. Will Thomas would like to thank Richard, mum, dad and Sal for their ever present support and encouragement. He also wishes to thank Nicky Anastasiou, Penny Clayton, Gavin Kewley, Sarah Mook, Nick Austin and Simon Percival for their continuing support, encouragement and innovation. Grateful thanks to Florence the cat, curled up on the desk, keeping Will company during long sessions of writing. Grateful thanks also to Paul Hutchins for his friendship and support. To Elsie Balchin and Robert and Margaret Hunter for their encouragement in the formative years, grateful thanks. The support and enthusiasm of our original editor Alexandra Webster has been very significant, as has Christina Garbutt in the later stages of the book. We have been continually inspired by their faith in this project, and buoyed up by their positive approach to shaping the book. It is again fitting that we can pay tribute to them and the team at Continuum here. Finally, we would like to emphasize how important the love and support of our families and friends have been in allowing us to see this project through to completion. They have all helped us through the inevitable highs and lows of getting things right. 10 www.ATIBOOK.ir When we began exploring the topic of creativity five years ago, we had no idea quite how deep our research would go and just how much learners and teachers were crying out for a new order. That new order consists of the purposeful use of innovative approaches to teaching and learning, in ways that allow individual learners’ creativity to be developed. It is not just about necessarily providing more enjoyable activities in classrooms, although it is often a positive by-product of creative approaches; instead it has much to do with stretching learner thinking to encourage higher-order processing. We believe that creativity needs to permeate our curriculum, and while it is not the ‘beall-and-end-all’, it is vital – if young people are to develop problem-solving and generative thinking skills – that there is opportunity for them to tap into and develop their creative abilities. As researchers, teachers and authors we have approached writing the book in creative ways. We have used logo-visual thinking approaches to combine our ideas and research. We have found our own most creative states and times of day to work. We have met together despite geographical challenges and discussed and reviewed, envisioned and reflected at every stage. What we bring you is not only a book that provides hundreds of creative ideas for you and your students, but also a book which supports your continuing development as a creative practitioner. For us the creative practitioner is the teacher who does not wait for the next book to come out to extend their repertoire, but takes what they know and combines ideas together to meet the challenges of the classroom environment; that teacher is inventive, inquisitive and learns from the highs and the lows along the way. This book seeks to provide stimulus for teachers to scatter seeds in the wind and reap the harvest that results. Our research and development has gone beyond purely creativity. It includes a robust model which supports high quality learning and teaching, looking at every aspect of the effective practitioner, and providing the fertile ground upon which to sow seeds of creative practice from which the new generation of citizens will emerge. Will Thomas and Brin Best 11 www.ATIBOOK.ir Overview of this book T r p AND PERSO NAL Tools to enhance teaching and learning Tools to enhance professsional and personal domain www.ATIBOOK.ir AND PERSO NAL ‘I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind’ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Message to the reader that elephants were tamed in ancient There is a wonderful story about the way India. ered to large wooden stakes driven into When they are very small elephants are teth small elephant, despite its attempts to the ground. These stakes are ample to hold a elephants tire of the struggle to break the As nd. grou the from e stak the rip and tug cease to try to resist. These elephants free they learn the limits of their stake and size and weight they were when they grow into enormous beasts, many times the e like a matchstick … but they never were first tethered. They could break the stak ts. do, for they have learned their perceived limi s and expectations, about stretching the tern pat old of out king brea ut abo is k boo s Thi t. This book, and The Creative Teaching limits of what is possible, and how to do tha ut growing a new and inspiring future & Learning Toolkit which prequels it, is abo one another and where learners and port in schools where creativity and purpose sup free in the glorious land of learning. m teachers break free of their stakes and roa 13 www.ATIBOOK.ir The Creative Teaching & Learning Resource Book This book is a companion volume to our The Creative Teaching & Learning Toolkit (Continuum International Publishing, 2007). It aims to provide you with hundreds of practical tools, strategies and ideas that can help you further improve your teaching. While it takes key reference from this first title in our Creativity for Learning series – and is also designed to sit alongside the second, our Everything you need to know about teaching but are too busy to ask – Essential Briefings for Teachers (Continuum International Publishing, 2007) – it is very much a stand-alone book, that can be picked up and used by teachers straight away. Indeed, this is our vision for how the book should be used and our hope is that it will soon become a well-thumbed volume, and a familiar companion in your classroom. We’ve included concise introductions to all the main frameworks and models contained in the first book here, so you can see how the practical strategies relate to the bigger picture of effective teaching and learning. Much more detail on those big ideas is, of course, to be found in The Creative Teaching & Learning Toolkit. The book is split into six main chapters. The first five correspond to the Five Domains of Effective Teaching as introduced in The Creative Teaching & Learning Toolkit – Vision, Climate, Teaching and learning strategies, Reflection and Teachers’ professional and personal domain. Each chapter has a wealth of resources that can be dipped into, or used when you need inspiration on a particular topic. The Five Domains of Effective Teaching model is embedded in the Creativity Cycle which represents a process by which creativity takes place. The model is represented here as a whole: '' PROFE SS AND PERSONAL DO IONAL REFLECTION TEACHE M RS Idea selection VISION Reflection od ify or n tio ra ne ge re -in ve ea Id nt Vision / purpose CLIMATE MAIN Pl e an n in g m co ut fo O ra ct io n TEACHING AND LEARNING STRATEGIES Action through Figure 1: The Creative Teaching Framework While we’re convinced that resource books such as this can do much to expand the repertoire of teachers, we also wish to encourage readers to cement their place as skilled and discerning professionals by designing high quality teaching and learning strategies themselves. A disempowering scenario would be if teachers were to come to rely on such books of ideas, eagerly awaiting the next offering. For this reason the final chapter, ‘Sustaining Creative Practice’, deals with approaches that will support you to design your own inspiring learning experiences. One of the central themes running through our Creativity for Learning series is that by taking ownership of your own professional development, you’ll acquire more quickly the precise knowledge and skills you need to teach more effectively and creatively – and your students will be forever grateful that you did so. 14 www.ATIBOOK.ir Introduction Organization of entries The book is made up of a series of tools, strategies and ideas, each explained carefully so you can begin using them immediately. Entries follow a common format as outlined below. Title Challenge: This provides a practical demonstration of how each entry is relevant to the day-today work of a teacher Innovation rating A rating out of five is provided to provide some sense of how innovative the particular tool or strategy is, with a score of 5 given to the most innovative. Readers may wish to consider that while innovation is a good thing in teaching it will need to be balanced with routines and rituals which make the learning environment safe and purposeful. Techniques which are more innovative also tend to bring with them more risks. These risks bring great opportunities to learn for both learners and teachers. You must always ensure that you manage the risk and balance it against the learning potential. Since this book provides stimulus for learning activities and encourages you to experiment, it is always your responsibility to manage risk in your context. Summary Here we provide concise information about the tool or strategy, helping you to quickly grasp what it’s about and how you might benefit from it. Who can use it? A list is provided showing who could benefit from the tool or strategy. We also include reference to teaching assistants and school leaders where appropriate, partly to show that these people are key partners in classroom learning and partly because they are likely also to constitute a subset of readers of the book. Intended outcomes Here we give in bullet-point form what we hope you or your students will gain from the tool or strategy. Timing and application This gives details of how long you’ll need to work on the tool or strategy, or the implications of timing for your classroom. Further information on how it can be used is also given. Thinking skills developed For tools or strategies which are focused on students rather than teachers we provide in tabular form a checklist of which National Curriculum thinking skills are developed by using them. Up to three stars are given to show the extent to which particular thinking skills are developed. 15 www.ATIBOOK.ir