In year two we onboarded five new schools, starting with a second launch conference for those schools. We also expanded the work with our original cohort of schools, through a whole school INSET event on teaching for creativity, to those schools.
The new cohort of schools were quickly brought up to speed by a combination of dedicated professional learning opportunities, tailored for those schools, along with opportunities to learn from the experiences of teachers and leaders in our initial cohort of schools, through sharing of practice at teacher research groups.
Teachers focused on developing units of work, in different subject areas, that used our framework of teaching for creativity. These units were discussed at teacher research group meetings. Additionally, in-school support was provided by our creativity champions, who visited teachers in their own schools, offering support with planning and opportunities to reflect on successes and develop further. Additional inspiration and exemplification of practice approaches, came from working with visiting specialists. These were practitioners with expertise in teaching for creativity in specific areas, such as creative writing, who visited the schools to work alongside them and develop practice.
By developing and embedding pedagogies of teaching for creativity across the curriculum, we have worked at fostering creativity within the classroom. A key lesson from the first year of our collaborative was that it was really important that leaders and teachers worked together to develop their approaches to teaching for creativity in their schools. This was supported by bringing teachers and leaders together on teacher research group days so that they could plan together. This ensured that teachers felt confident to take some risks with their teaching approaches knowing they had the support of their school leaders.
As well as working alongside their teachers during teacher research group days, school leaders also had the opportunity to work together to explore strategies for embedding and spreading creative practices and learning from the project throughout their schools. Ensuring a lasting legacy beyond the life of the project was a priority for the work of this group.