The Making of a Creative School

How often do we experience groups of children unmotivated, uninterested and underperforming?

This is what confronted me, as the new Headteacher six years ago, when I walked into my current school. It was at this point that I made a conscious decision to transform the school into a creative learning community - one where children were stimulated and excited about learning, a school which the children were proud to be a part of, one they would never forget.

In developing a creative school, I identified three key factors to enhance change:

• The development of a shared vision and philosophy: I felt that the vision must be shared by everyone: teachers, school staff, governors, parents and children. The openness of what is happening needs to be shared throughout. It is important to maintain an agreed understanding that all children can achieve at their own level, able to make good progress, and an understanding that most children enjoy the same things
• Collaborative pedagogy: I have promoted the sharing of good ideas and best practice, and encouraged staff to support each other in helping to develop creative lessons. It is vital within creativity that practices concentrate on how children learn, rather than how teachers teach
• Clear organisational structures. I believe that leadership and management are key to forming a creative school culture. It is down to leaders to provide direction and exert influence. I developed of a select group of key teachers, who proved vital in my quest.

Change can be difficult, so I needed to ensure that the steps were calculated to involve everyone and to keep children at the heart. With this in mind, I saw change take place in three main aspects of the school: the child, the environment and the curriculum. All three had a major impact on the staff.

The child

Throughout the transition one ideal prevailed through everything: “make it real”. If the children can’t see it, feel it, smell it, hear it, touch it, don’t do it.

• Children want fun and excitement, and need to understand why they are undertaking an element of work. We developed an agreed philosophy in developing a creative culture to ’make it real’ for the children.’
• We planned activities that were child centred, starting from where the child “was” (through planned assessment tasks) and developing learning so that it moved across all subjects creating ‘joined up learning’, through topic based work
• We made sure that learning activities were, as far as possible, practical, first-hand and relevant, related to current experiences. 
• As a team, we agreed that learning is about the development of skills, knowledge and understanding, whilst allowing children individual choice on how to solve real problems.
• We worked to ensure that our learning community had shared values, expectations and standards.
• We delivered the children’s curriculum entitlement, as far as possible, through topics where the children produced fewer pages of written work but experienced deeper learning opportunities and produced higher quality outcomes.
• As teachers, we enabled the children to see the relevance of new skills they developed and we encouraged emotional attachment. “Making it real” helps the learning to be transferred to the long-term memory.
• We gave the children ‘’Learning Tools”, which helped them to record, plan and develop all types of learning.
• Research suggests that learning needs to be developed through child’s preferred learning channel: visual / auditory / kinaesthetic (VAK). However, in practice, we found that children appeared to do better if they experience the full range of learning channels.

Through this approach we saw the children’s confidence and motivation to succeed improve which had, a marked effect on their behaviour and their attitude to learning.

The environment

• We developed a series of creative learning zones within the school and grounds, which was conducive to the development of a more creative, innovative curriculum. We found that this encouraged quality learning opportunities with quality outcomes. We came to see that  spaces needed to be created so that all types of learning could be undertaken: space for kinaesthetic learning; sound for auditory learning; visual stimulation for visual learning.
• We invested time, effort and resources to develop the environments to the high standards we aspired to.
• It is widely acknowledged that “stress” plays an important part in determining learners’ states of mind. Through observation and research we determined that there are key times of the school day at which children become stressed: the start of the day; play times; the last ten minutes of the day. We introduced music, question times, and a clear daily structure, which helped to dramatically reduce stress-related behaviour. The learners having a clear understanding of what is expected from them, what is coming and why it is important to them gave the children a sense of belonging and security, thus reducing anxiety.   

• Our displays took on a new identity, linked directly to the ongoing learning, growing as the learning grew – a mixture of interactive learning materials and high quality work by the children. In this way, we provided continual reinforcement of expectations and standards, as well as interest and inspiration.

The curriculum

In our development of a more creative school the planning of the curriculum played an important role. We agreed an expectation that whatever was being delivered needed to be:
• Exciting and stimulating in order to capture the children’s imagination
• Relevant to the children. We needed to demonstrate to the children a reason for their learning. For instance writing letters became a practical task through which the children themselves could generate prizes for our school fete.
• Personal; we felt that the learning should have an emotional attachment for the children; this way learning had a far better chance of being transferred into memory.
• Challenging to stretch all learners, making them think. We had to differentiate learning not only in terms of difficulty, but also in the activities that the children were asked to do, linked to the channels of learning (VAK).
• Full of action; the children needed to experience all parts of the learning, and we needed to actively engage them.
• We used repetition and order, for continual reinforcement of learnt skills. Repetition aids recall, we found that ordered learning is much more memorable than disordered learning.
• We developed learning through pictures, colour and symbols, as well as words. We tried to remember that our memory sees in pictures and not words.
Above all, we agreed that learning should be:
• Enjoyable and humorous. Learning needed to be fun for the children and the adults.
Giving the learners a reason for learning became important to us – we grew to understand that it is important not to teach for teaching’s sake. However, within this transition we never lost sight of what we had to teach. Continual evaluation of coverage was important. This gave us the confidence that every child was receiving their entitlement to a sound education.
We realised that quality learning took place when the children felt connected to the learning. Therefore it was important that when planning, we focused on how to get the children to learn, rather than on how to teach them.
Throughout, a need to develop lifelong learners prevailed throughout our curriculum, and our  planning focused on creating exciting opportunities to reinforce learning.
Activities had to have a purpose, be real, and matched to the objective of the lesson. Learners needed to be creative – we never forgot that teachers are learners too.
Planning became a thinking process rather than a written task.
We grasped and developed every opportunity for our learners to be creative. The sharing of our ideas and practices became the norm.
We invested our time in creating stimulating lessons and dynamic classrooms with informative, stimulating and interactive displays.

We learnt that in developing a more creative approach in education the success depends on commitment by everyone. Teachers need to be inspired to take a chance, to try out new ideas and to continually evaluate and reflect on their practices.
Six years on, and the excitement of learning is evident throughout the school. Children are enjoying their education and standards across the school have risen. Learning has become embedded in everything we do.

Simon Cooper-Hind has 22 years experience in Education, of which the last 10 years have been as a Headteacher.

To go to Simon Cooper-Hind's profile please click here.

Further reading – Gilbert. I (2002) Essential Motivation in the Classroom, RoutledgeFalmer, ISBN 0-415-26619-X (This book is in the process of being updated and will include a school-based work book.)