Project overview:
Students explored the vital role of the natural environment with a particular focus on the endangered Carnaby’s, Baudin’s, and Red-tailed Black Cockatoos. Through this lens, students developed and refined their oral presentation skills, with a strong emphasis on understanding purpose and audience. They investigated environmental challenges facing these iconic species and created poems to raise awareness and inspire action.
How did we make the curriculum come alive?
Creative processes became the bridge between knowledge and advocacy. Students experimented with silhouettes, puppetry, painting, and poetry—each artform providing a new lens to express their learning. They wrote persuasive and emotive rhymes and designed bird sculptures to form part of a larger community display. Alongside this, they developed persuasive flyers and information posters to share their knowledge with the wider community.
How did we make the 5 Habits of Learning come alive?
A consistent thread throughout the project was reflection. The class built a “Bug Hotel” as a visual metaphor for their creative habits, adding colour coded sticks. The colours corresponded to the creative habit they felt they utilised during the session- Collaborative, Inquisitive, Persistent, Imaginative and Disciplined.
How did we activate student voice and learner agency?
Each activity was deliberately scaffolded to build both skill and agency, allowing students to recognise themselves not only as learners, but as advocates. The project concluded with community displays and opportunities to share the students’ work with broader audiences. Working towards students gaining a sense of agency, awareness, and responsibility.
How did we develop creative and critical thinking skills in the students?
The project began with storytelling and movement, encouraging students to embody animals and share personal experiences of connecting with wildlife. This playful entry point quickly deepened as the class engaged with Jane Hammond’s documentary Black Cockatoo Crisis. From here, the students shifted into active roles as researchers, scriptwriters, and artists, grappling with questions such as: What is happening to these birds? How can we help?
How did we link your project to the UN Sustainability goals?
This project strongly reflects UN Sustainable Development Goal 15: Life on Land, which emphasises the need to protect biodiversity, restore ecosystems, and halt species extinction. By focusing on local endangered cockatoos, students engaged directly with the challenges of conservation and habitat loss in their own environment. Their creative outputs—poems, films, puppets, posters, and public displays—became both acts of learning and acts of advocacy. Importantly, the work empowered children to recognise their own capacity to influence change and to see themselves as participants in global efforts toward sustainability.
WHAT WAS THE IMPACT?
Student: Students who struggle with traditional classroom structures thrived through hands-on making, performance, and collaborative inquiry. The project succeeded in connecting curriculum learning with authentic, real-world issues, while honouring the students’ innate creativity and empathy. The project concluded with community displays and opportunities to share the students’ work with broader audiences. Working towards students gaining a sense of agency, awareness, and responsibility—qualities that will serve them well as both learners and citizens.
Teacher: “I’ve really enjoyed Creative Schools. I’ve loved the opportunity to explore a curriculum genre in a different way—not just through explicit teaching. Using the same approaches every day can become quite repetitive, but Creative Schools has shown me you can still provide structure while also shifting the responsibility for learning back onto the children, rather than the teacher carrying it all.”
Creative: Working with the teacher this year, I’ve really enjoyed the collaborative aspect—bouncing ideas off each other, posing questions, and discussing different ways to help the students arrive at solutions. That back-and-forth has been a big part of the process.
Quotes
“Creative Schools has changed my outlook on more traditional lesson structures, and I’ve started adapting the creative learning concepts into maths, English, and other lessons. Taking five minutes to expose students to the 5 habits through a warm-up is so powerful—that’s probably the biggest thing I’ll carry forward.” (Celine Aporo, Teacher)
“In terms of the student’s creativity and critical thinking skills, I’ve noticed that giving them time to explore ideas has been important. It’s that thinking space—with small prompts along the way—that’s helped them work things through and come up with their own solutions.” (Cyr O’Neill, Creative Practitioner)
“I love learning about cockatoos. I saw a whole group of them once. We also get to learn about Aboriginal culture, and cockatoos are part of that. I love seeing cockatoos. One time, a whole bunch of them came circling around us. People are killing them—on roads, on farms—and their trees are being cut down. My sister said there were thousands, but their numbers are going down fast. That’s sad, because I don’t like to see birds die. We could grow trees to help the community and the birds survive, but the trees have to be at least 200 years old so the cockatoos can make nests and stay safe. They’re actually very smart birds—they call out to everyone, even humans, even though we’re hurting them. If cockatoos could talk to humans, I think they’d say, “We make the community happy.” They’d want to teach us to stop killing, because they’re just trying to help their families.” (Student)
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