CONTEXT
Chidlow Primary School is a small school in the hills, set in beautiful bushland. After some early-project changes to the school principal, teacher and creative practitioner involved, I worked with Laura Campbell and her Year 2/3 class. Laura is a first-year classroom teacher after retraining from a nursing career, and keen to learn.
Project Overview
For the short time we worked together in Term 3, we worked on mapping and direction concepts from the HASS curriculum, culminating with a quiz project using real-world city maps from Europe and Asia. As we needed to really embed the ideas of the Creative Habits, we finished the term with teams drawing large city maps each connected to one of the habits, with another open-ended task to see what students would add to a city. Their creativity led them to appropriate city names such as "Collabracity", and we went on to use these maps in Term 4 as part of our reflection process each session.
The bulk of our sessions fell in Term 4 and we based them around a “Museum of Maths” project, where we had the students undertake various creative tasks that revised some of their key maths concepts somewhat by stealth. For example, students worked in groups to write, record and edit short videos called “A Day in the Life of …”, where they needed to incorporate analogue clocks into their scripts and shoots. We also worked on a survey of questions connected to their favourite creative activities (including art, sport and engineering) including qualitative and quantitative data from people working in those fields, and talked about presenting this data. Our warmups varied between reflecting more of the Maths curriculum concepts and working on some creative habits that required work in this class, such as collaboration.
How did we make the curriculum come alive?
Getting the students out of the classroom and conducting our warm up activities out in the beautiful natural surroundings at Chidlow proved popular with the students, and they came back into the classroom ready to learn. Using authentic and real-world paraphernalia, along with bringing in pieces of nature to work with, helped to ground our learning.
We also made use of technology including Makey-Makeys during Term 3, and then using iMovie and other iPad software during Term 4. The students were excited to learn to use iMovie and there were great moments of peer teaching during the editing phase as some students learnt first how to create titles, credits etc and were then able to explain this to their classmates.
Finally, by incorporating aspects of the curriculum into real-world tasks, the students found themselves revising recently-taught concepts – for example, analogue clocks/time telling – within a meaningful context.
How did we make the Creative Habits of Mind come alive?
Using the Creative Habits ‘city maps’ the students created in groups during Term 3, we regularly reflected on the habits used that day and I asked the students to choose their most used habit and add a coloured sticker to the appropriate map. The conversations I had with individual students as they came to collect a sticker proved insightful and over the term, helped them to really understand the habits. When our warm up of acting out an activity proved very popular, we used it again as a reflective tool, asking groups to act out a creative habit, or an aspect of one, and it was clear from this end-of-project activity that most students had really come to terms with the core messages of the creative habits.
Being collaborative proved early on to be the most difficult of the habits for the students to implement, as they were very resistant to working with anyone other than their close friends, and even then there were always students who took the lead while others sat back. Mixing up groups regularly, and reflecting together on the benefits of collaborating with others, really produced a shift in the class attitude. One student, who initially refused to participate at all, let alone collaborate, finished Creative Schools saying “I like working with other people with other ideas”.
How did we activate student voice and learner agency?
The students weren’t accustomed to being given a high degree of learner agency and when we initially presented them with open-ended tasks, some students struggled with not knowing exactly what should be done, and the high-achieving students wanted to know what ‘success’ would look like. By repeatedly offering open-ended tasks, the students began to adapt to the idea and by the final session were actually ready with their own tasks for the session.
WHAT WAS THE IMPACT?
Students:
“[I’ve learnt] creativity and good sportsmanship. Being creative is making new things in life. I’m working together with others which is different, we usually sit at our desk. Sometimes I work with people I don’t usually work with. I’m learning to listen to the thoughts of other people.”
“In normal lessons we don’t usually do warm ups we go straight into work. Warm ups help our minds get ready. If you are tired a warm up makes you less tired.”
“Teamwork is pretty hard, you want to be with your friends but you don’t always get to work with them. And then you realise you are sometimes better at working with others. Creative Schools helped me not to be silly with my team mates. Amanda told us to give working with others a chance because it might work out.”
Teacher:
“They loved that they could be outside and learning at the same time … It has also helped some of my kids who have challenging behaviour when it comes to the group work, particularly for two boys who don’t like working in a group. Through doing lots of group work activities, with different people, it has really helped them be more open to sharing ideas and listening to the ideas of others.”
Creative Practitioner:
"Working in the beautiful natural setting of Chidlow made it easy: the students who weren't keen to participate at first soon warmed to the idea of outdoor warm ups to get their brains ready, and working together with Laura to help them learn to collaborate better led to such heartwarming results, too."
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