Creative Openings
Promoting creativity in learning and teaching.
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Creative Learning
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Resources
The resource bank on this page contains useful material for teachers on the issues around creative teaching and creative learning.
Covering work by Teresa Cremin, Edward de Bono and others the documents will provide powerful support as you think about these issues in day to day planning and teaching.
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The Creative Teacher/Learner
Essential understandings for the
effective creative teacher.
That learning is essentially child centred
That learning is facilitated by the informed assistance of the teacher.
That learning takes place in a social setting with language as the medium of learning.
That learners construct their own meaning and this process will define the nature of the teacher's intervention.
That teaching is essentially a creative act.
That learning is essentially a creative process.
Food for Thought
for the creative teacher/learner
Critical pedagogy schools must equip students to challenge the status quo!
This is a link to an article by Tait Coles giving a critique of the current trend towards 'cultural capital' and the methods of E.D. Hirsch Jnr.
What is critical thinking?
"Critical thinking is the process of analyzing and assessing thinking with a view to improving it. Critical thinking presupposes knowledge of the most basic structures in thinking (the elements of thought) and the most basic intellectual standards for thinking (universal intellectual standards). The key to the creative side of critical thinking (the actual improving of thought) is in restructuring thinking as a result of analyzing and effectively assessing it."
Linda Elder and Richard Paul
Key sources of information
on creativity and critical thinking
Creativity, Critical Thinking
and Pedagogy
A 'Thinking Skills' presentation, this could
be good to start your thinking.
Useful documents
Creativity, Critical Thinking and Pedagogy
Starting Points for CreativeLearning and Teaching
Click this link to the Primary Creativity Page for free teaching materials to download.
'The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.'
Carl Jung
Resource Bank
A Guide for Educators, Richard Paul
Activating Children's Thinking
Skills (ACTS) - Carol McGuinness's ground breaking work in the late 1990s
The Critical Importance of Questions
Dialogic talk in the classroom
Edward de Bono
Creative Teachers and Creative Teaching
Teresa Cremin
Creative Teachers for Creative Learners Literature Review by Dan Davies
Creativity in the early years of school
Robert Fisher (this is a MUST READ)
Robert Fisher
Creative Approaches that Raise Standards
Bookshelf
Global learning and sustainable development encompass some of the key ideas and challenges facing the world today: challenges such as climate change, globalization and interdependence.