Creativity

 

Cragside is delighted to be part of a national cohort of Creativity Collaboratives, testing a range of innovative practices in teaching for creativity.

Cragside is the associate lead school for the Northeast Creativity Collaborative led by The Duchess’s Community High School in Alnwick.

The 3-year project tests approaches to embedding teaching for creativity in all subjects in the curriculum including, science, technology and English alongside arts-based subjects.

Working alongside existing school structures, teachers and educators will co-develop creative strategy and pedagogy, test out approaches to teaching and learning, and evaluate their impact on pupils, schools and communities.

Schools in the Northeast Creativity Collaborative (NECCN):

Duchess’s Community High School; Cambois Primary School; Seahouses Primary School; Swarland Primary School; Cragside Primary School; New York Primary School; Fordley Primary School; Greenfield Community College and Sunningdale School.

The launch of the network responds to one of the recommendations of the Durham Commission on Creativity in Education which sought to investigate the role of creativity in the education system and find ways to make creativity a bigger part of young people’s lives in education and beyond. Click on the link to read the report in full.

To find out more about creativity collaboratives and the work of the Northeast Creativity Collaborative, click on the links provided. 

 

 What is creativity? 

 

Creativity is all about inventing, experimenting, growing, risk-taking, breaking rules, making mistakes and having fun, all for the love of learning.  Creativity promotes curiosity, banishes passivity, improves engagement and increases productivity as well as deepening knowledge and comprehension.

When seeking to introduce creativity into our classrooms, we look to the five Creative Habits of Mind:

 

Imaginative     

Inquisitive       

Persistent       

Collaborative  

Disciplined      

 

These dispositions are drawn from the five-dimensional creative thinking model developed through the work of Professor Bill Lucas, Professor Guy Claxton and Dr Ellen Spencer. The diagram below outlines the five key Creative Habits and 15 sub-habits essential for the development of well-rounded, creative students. 

 

 

 

To find out more about the Creative Habits of Mind model, click on the link below: 

Tallis habits

 Why teach for creativity? 

According to Sir Ken Robinson (2009), “creativity is as important as literacy’ and just like any skill, it must be exercised, practised, developed and honed. So, if we are to find solutions that haven’t yet been thought then we need learners to be increasingly creative, which means challenging them at every opportunity whether they are writing poetry, music and prose, designing graphics or clothing, or developing lines of computer code. That requires making creativity a regular feature of the classroom which is then interwoven through everything giving learners the chance to synthesise knowledge and apply it in different ways. By doing this, students will forge powerful links between prior and new knowledge, skills and understanding which in turn will develop their independence and boost their confidence and self-esteem by encouraging self-expression that produces unique solutions to set tasks.

What does creativity look like at Cragside?

Creative classrooms

Staff at Cragside are working hard to develop creativity in all subject areas. Remember, creativity is all about inventing, experimenting, growing, risk-taking, breaking rules, making mistakes and having fun, all for the love of learning. Creativity promotes curiosity, banishes passivity, improves engagement and increases productivity as well as deepening knowledge and comprehension.