First meeting of the new academic year

The Creative Tallis Action Research Group met for the first time this academic year this morning. We have a great combination of new and existing members with the adults outnumbered by students. We really appreciate the students attending this morning since they would officially start school today an hour later. Some of them, in fact, only came in at all because they belong to the ARG. Very noble!

Our discussion focused on three things:

1. What do we want to achieve this year?
2. Who do want to collaborate with?
3. Who will benefit?

After a detailed and lively discussion we agreed to three foci for the year:

1. Developing a creative learning conference/Teechmeet and supporting the whole school creativity festival in the summer term
2. Establishing a creative learning project with a groups of Year 7 students (and their parents/carers) using handheld technologies. The idea would be to encourage the students to document their positive experiences of learning so that these can be shared with the whole community and inform the development of our pedagogy.
3. Working in collaboration with the maths, English and science faculties to develop inter-disciplinary creative learning strategies, possibly through a Teacher Exchange programme.

Thanks for everyone's contributions today. It promises to be a very exciting year again for us.

Creative Agents Conference Invitation

We've been invited to do a small presentation to all the London Creative Agents at a special conference on 1st July. The venue is the October Gallery (the gallery specialises in promoting the Transvanguard and is currently hosting an exhibition of the work of Gérard Quenum, hence the image above).

Anyway, Judith Ackrill sent me this email today confirming some of the arrangements and suggesting a couple of themes for us to get our teeth into:

Dear Jon

Great to speak to you just now, and thank you again for getting involved with this creative agents day.

We agreed that the theme of the students presentation would be along the lines of 'how do we communicate with each other and with the school about creativity and what effect is this having?' In other words, a sort of case study for the AND creative agents to hear about.

The session could include a projected presentation from a laptop (we can provide the laptop); we are also checking whether the broadband signal is good enough to use live on-line examples, and I'll get back to you about this. You might also bring handouts.

The creative agents enjoy active sessions, and we agreed there should be time for questions and discussion.
One of the topics you would like to cover, either in the presentation or as a question back to the agents, is 'how can we promote this way of working to other schools and groups?'

If the students would like to include an activity for the agents as part of the session that would be fine too. Let me know if you need flipcharts.

We agreed you would talk to John on Monday about how/whether he would like to be involved, perhaps introducing the school or taking part in the session. Also you'll speak to John about the idea of the students leading an active warmup for the agents for 10 minutes at 10am; if they would rather not do this pls let me know and I'll find someone else.

Nuts and bolts: The session (including the 10-minute warm-up) runs from 10am to about 11. The room is upstairs and there will be about 30 people in the 'audience'. We can provide squash and coffee and biscuits after the session, and I understand there may be 6+ people in the group including yourself. Ideally you should arrive a little early, in time to check out the technology and get your bearings - say 9.45?

I'll forward information about the October Gallery next week, with the names of the creative agents and AND team and final news on the broadband question.

It would be good to know how many of you are interested in taking part in this presentation. It would be a great bit of evidence for your Arts Award portfolios and I'm sure you'd all do a great job. I'm seeing John on Monday, so if you could let me know over the weekend either by email or via a comment on this post, I'd much appreciate it.

Five Years' Time

Our Creative Agent, John Riches, ran a workshop at this year's staff conference in which he explored the notion that young people today know more about the world than their teachers did when they were young. The resulting debate was fascinating and resulted in those present making a video statement about the skills they would like young people to have in five years' time and their role in helping to make this happen.