Hi folks and a belated welcome back to the new year at Tallis.
Just thought I'd pose a couple of questions to get you thinking about our plans for this year. If you could return your thoughts via a comment I would be most grateful:
- What do you think should be the focus of our investigations this year?
- Should we expand the membership of the group? We've lost a couple of very valuable Year 13 members (although I'm hoping Tom will continue to play a part in our discussions. Who else should we invite to be in the Creative Tallis Action Research Group?
- What do you think about the idea of continuing our collaboration with Tangled Feet in some form? Could we create some kind of community, site-specific performance together? How else could we work with visiting artists/practitioners to explore creative learning?
- Are any of you interested in doing the Arts Award based on your involvement in Creative Tallis? We looked at this last year but didn't get very far. Should we have another go?
- Do you think it's a good idea to set up a kind of Creative Learning Council for students. My thoughts here are that we could empower students to create briefs and commission work from visiting (or in-house) creative practitioners using the School of Creativity budget. The students would be responsible for identifying the scope and aims of the partnership, negotiating with staff members about the curriculum focus, writing the briefs, documenting the projects and evaluating the outcomes. Obviously, they would trained in these skills and have support from other members of staff. What do you think?
5 comments:
Hi all,
It seems a long time since we met, so it will be great to catch up again. The group had a massive impact on the school and its thinking last year and there is no doubt in my mind that the group will play an important role again this year - raising the profile and understanding of creativity, and also working to ensure that students have a wider range of creative experiences and opportunities at Thomas Tallis.
I think we could make a concerted effort to try and ensure that we get the Arts Award scheme up and running - I'd love to see the work and projects you undertake receive appropriate recognition and reward.
I would also like to think about how we broaden the student representation in the group. What is going to be the best way of sharing our work with other groups around the school?
I also like the idea of students acting as creative 'curators' or 'commissioners' and there would be lots of interesting ways of documenting and charting that process.
Looking forward to catching up,
Soren
Mr Hawes, it's appearing that you have changed your name to Dawn Coulter?
I definitely think that we have a massive impact in the school, however I don't often see this. Some teachers still seem to be giving us work to copy out of a text book (maths).
Surely there's a more creative way of learning.
I like the idea of creative tallis meeting with head of faculties to help them plan creativity into there teaching syllabus.
so we can continue to have a big impact within the school we should suggest to Mr Thomas about him buying all the students within the group a mac book :D okay maybe a bit aspirational but "impossible is nothing"
I think Billy makes a very good point. I think one of the real successes of last year was getting people to engage with creativity, discuss its importance and share examples. That doesn't mean that there isn't still more to do and that there isn't an agenda or mission for the group. I think the students' perspective of the opportunities for them to be creative is one that is so important. We need to find ways of allowing for students to articulate and share what their experience of learning is like at Tallis.
Mr. Hawes (or at least I think I am!)
i also agree with billy and miss coulter.. um i mean mr hawes in that one of the key topics of last year was the engagement of students and teachers and letting them have a vital part of the prosses. i think mr nicholls idea of having a creative student council would be really interesting and would continue the progress we made last year
I also like the idea of Creative Learning Council. We need to make ourselves more visible, louder, more courageous.
Inviting head of departments seems like a reasonable way of getting more teachers involved without patronizing and scaring them with the idea of creativity that is imposed on them.
I'm sure they feel like that sometimes- enough to go back to the staff meeting we al took part in.
Danuta
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