Creativity

Creative history teaching

Flying machine - see the bottom of this page for the whole scene Creativity in teaching takes many forms. It is often associated with the arts, but this is to ignore the myriad ways in which teachers can teach creatively across the whole curriculum.

Teaching creatively through history means treating history first and foremost as an active process of enquiry by children. It involves the use of the creative imagination grounded in evidence, where the teacher:

• sets up open-ended and wide-ranging investigations
• stimulates children to think actively and constructively, putting together different sources of evidence to construct a picture of the past
• challenges children with mysteries to solve
• asks children to pose questions, to form hypotheses, then to test these against the evidence
• encourages discussion and debate
• engages pupils' imaginations through storytelling, simulations and drama

What is creativity in teaching?

The Government has been promoting creative teaching for some years now: the QCA's creativity project found that teachers could promote creativity through all the National Curriculum subjects without changing their planning and practice radically. The key lay in encouraging and actively responding to children's creative ideas and actions (Excellence and Enjoyment, DfES, 2003, p. 31).

Creative teaching is done by teachers who are confident, innovative, interested in learning, and who encourage children to ask questions and explore ideas. This does not mean abandoning standards, rather it is an invitation to think of new and more stimulating ways to meet them - closed worksheets where children fill in missing words from a given list are the opposite of creative, and Ofsted has consistently criticised the overuse of dull worksheets in class. In the Ofsted report The curriculum in successful primary schools (HMI, 2002), a key factor in the success of these schools was that they took control of the curriculum, and adapted it in innovative ways to give their pupils broad, rich and stimulating learning experiences.

Dennis Hayes' book (Inspiring Primary Teaching, Learning Matters, 2006) contains a useful and thought-provoking chapter on creativity and imagination in the classroom. He stresses that there is no recipe for creative teaching, rather it is done by teachers with the sensitivity and imagination to seize opportunities as they arise, going beyond a mechanical input-output model of teaching. But neither is creative teaching chaotic and random: good creative teachers provide a framework and purpose for active learning by children.

Creativity and the Nuffield Primary History website

Many of the lessons on this website show creative teaching in practice.

The lessons listed above right exemplify a range of different approaches to creative teaching, incorporating questioning, investigations, storytelling, role-play, expressive movement and drama, hypothesising, discussion and debate, decision-making, synthesising and the use of the informed imagination by children.

Jacqui Dean says: The year 2/3 topic was 'Flight' - mainly history and science. I was preparing to tell the children the Icarus myth as the intro, but I wanted them first to think about how to design a flying contraption without using modern materials such as plastic, or using engines. Here is one of my favourites.