Year two was the year of discovery. We held a launch day for all Creativity Collaborative leads through a city adventure day in Walsall city centre led by Stan’s Cafe. Teachers visited a range of cultural and less typical venues to explore creative learning opportunities. This time and space to think allowed teachers to reflect on their school's approaches to teaching and learning and their goals for that year. We held briefings and updates for senior leaders and creativity leads to share our vision for the programme.
From this, we implemented six week long creative programmes led by Stan’s Cafe in half of the schools which explored the wicked problems in creative pedagogy. We also implemented weekly sessions delivered by Open Theatre, from September in the other schools, which targeted specific children and teachers. All schools were visited by our university partner for reflections, allowing them to get a hands on view into the work by speaking with practitioners, staff and children. To support this, we also implemented new reflection recording systems for teachers to capture the ongoing learning that was happening in their classrooms.
We saw that in year two there was more focus in the reflections by teachers and leads on creativity is in their school; a more localised approach and moving away from this as an arts project to a focus on developing teaching and learning. Additionally, the implementation of the work itself with our partners grew from strength to strength. We are delighted at the amount of progress in our understanding of what creativity is - it feels like we have really got going! Finally, many schools have embraced the unknown of this work and we are learning together.