Creative Teaching and Learning

School of Creativity in Tower Hamlets

Making films about their school, area and themselves within ‘role’ for topics like the Second World War has given the children at Columbia Primary technical, interpretive and presentation skills, as well as a love of research.

Making films about their school, area and themselves within ‘role’ for topics like the Second World War has given the children at Columbia Primary technical, interpretive and presentation skills, as well as a love of research. Teaching Thinking and Creativity reports on a School of Creativity in Tower Hamlets.

“Creativity must be embedded into the working practices of a school if it is to have maximum impact on children’s learning experiences.” So says Mary Igoe, head teacher at Columbia Primary School in Tower Hamlets, one of the Creative Partnerships Schools of Creativity. She believes that working relationships with creative professionals are at their most effective when based on collaboration, pre-planning and a sharing of responsibility.

“This is how everyone involved can best use their skills, knowledge and their own creative potential for the benefit of the children,” Mary says. “What you want is for creative partners and teachers spending time together during INSET time so they can get used to each other’s working practices, share ideas and strategies about how to extend and enhance learning during the pre-planning stages and then work out how to deploy themselves and their time during lessons so they can have maximum benefit on the children’s learning experience.”

Columbia Primary has been involved with Creative Partnerships since the programme launched in 2002. Yet as Mary Igoe admits, in the initial stages it was more a case of developing creative opportunities alongside rather than within, the curriculum: “At the outset we needed to explore the value of cross-curricular creative working and so got involved in a project with a local arts group whereby each class made costumes and artefacts for a big celebratory march through Bethnal Green during the local carnival.”

“The project enthused the children, gave them a boost and introduced new ways of learning, but as it was essentially an add-on to their normal curriculum, the impact was limited,” she adds.

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