Assessing Creativity

I had a lovely chat with three colleagues from Burnside School in the North East on Friday afternoon. Despite a dodgy Skype connection we managed to discuss our respective school contexts and the issue of how to establish and assess creativity and/or creative learning both within and beyond the arts.

At Burnside they have developed, in partnership with the excellent Susan Coles (@theartcriminal on Twitter) a framework for assessing creativity as a separate subject within the arts curriculum (see images above). The one hour a week course blends aspects of the arts disciplines taught at the school - art, music, dance and drama - but with an explicit focus on developing creative capacity and learning skills. We discussed the pros and cons of teaching creativity within the arts and the responsibility of other curriculum areas for teaching and assessing creative learning attributes.

I shared out brief flirtation with a Creative Learning APP framework and the Creativity Wheel that was created by the Centre for Real World Learning at the University of Winchester. I also talked briefly about our Tallis Lab experiments at KS3 and our commitment to creative learning in the context of ICT.

I really hope we can continue to share ideas and thinking about this area of curriculum development. I also hope that the team at Burnside is able to create a blog to document the progress of their work in this area. I am sure colleagues across the country would be interested in what they have to share.Thanks again to Susan for putting us in touch.