Concluding Remarks and Recommendations.txt

Chapter 5: Concluding Remarks and Recommendations: "There's a wealth of talent that lies in all of us. All of us, including those who work in schools, must nurture creativity systematically and not kill it unwittingly." -- Sir Ken Robinson This research project aimed to discover and celebrate lead...

Chapter 5: Concluding Remarks and Recommendations: "There's a wealth of talent that lies in all of us. All of us, including those who work in schools, must nurture creativity systematically and not kill it unwittingly." -- Sir Ken Robinson This research project aimed to discover and celebrate leading innovations doing exceptional work on fostering creativity at a school level. The results show there is no shortage of a wide range of practices and solutions currently being implemented in many parts of the world that are considered by stakeholders in education as both both impactful and scalable. We are humbled by the amazing work of these innovators putting in a ton of passion and drive to make these so inspirational and life changing; from Slam Out Loud impacting almost 80000 children in 16 countries to Brazilian Creative Network impacting around 200000 students in Brazil. We also want to celebrate the whole school models of Agora, Liger Leadership Academy, and aeioTU Educational Experience, which are exemplary at integrating many modern practices and solutions into a larger functioning ecosystem of learning to effectively foster creativity. GUIDING PRINCIPLES To round off this report, we discovered 10 major principles to follow from recurring themes that emerged from the reviewed literature (Chapter 1), Collection of Voices (Chapter 2), findings from the innovations gathered (Chapter 3), and selected innovations for this Spotlight project (Chapter 4). These principles are paired with the selected innovations that exemplify each principle, which we hope will guide and inspire educators, leaders and decision makers to formulate strategies that enable innovative approaches for fostering creativity at a school level. They are as follows: 1. Cultural inclusiveness when defining creativity We all need to ask who gets to decide what creativity is and why. If an education system adopts a definition that does not consider a diversity of cultural perspectives, there is a danger that they may miss important differences about what it means to be creative: for example, the importance of collaboration in co-creation is often neglected. Moreover, some definitions could bias towards over-valuing particular dimensions over others (divergent thinking for example). Selected innovations that exemplify cultural inclusiveness of fostering creativity are: **-Slam Out Loud:** intentionally promotes the creative voice and confidence of disadvantaged children **-Scholas Occurrentes:** educates people to be open to one another by 'the culture of the encounter' **-Remake Learning Days Across America:** brings together a diverse array of educators, parents, families and caregivers with a festival in 15 US cities that celebrate learning opportunities in any community 2. Recognise the importance of *will* as being entered around a growth mindset, self efficacy, and a sense of agency. Saku Tuominen, Creative Director at HundrED states that "One of the biggest challenges is that we tend to undervalue and undermine the role of will. Fundamentally everything else is secondary. If there is no will, real motivation, and self efficacy, nothing meaningful happens creatively". For example, while the inclusion of creativity at a curriculum level shows a positive shift in mindset at the top-level, it does not mean a lot if concrete changes to include more *student voice* is implemented into schools. There are many ways to achieve this, but it could start with having fewer pre defined answers and outcomes in teacher planning so that students have the space to explore ideas and develop interests and passions. Selected innovations that exemplify the inclusion of student voice are: -Design for Change: empowers students to be change agents through local community projects -Scholas Occurrentes: promotes openness to one another with more than 400000 education centers -Kids Can! Innovation Camp: provides students with the opportunity to lead their own learning as they tackle real-world problems aligned with UN SDGs -Slam Out Loud: builds the confidence of children from disadvantaged backgrounds to express themselves in a wide variety of ways 3. Fostering creativity is everyone's business (not just the Arts teacher). For creativity to become more integrated into school systems, we need to think much broader than it assumed to be only taking place in the art room. This idea is easier said than done as we should give teachers the time and resources to develop professionally for adopting and adapting modern pedagogies in their area of expertise. However, one practical way to achieve increased participation is to make learning visible through student led exhibitions of learning from all areas in the school, which don't just occur on open day. Selected innovations that help *all* educators to foster creativity are: -Learning Creative Learning: free world class online course and ongoing global community to explore principles and strategies to engage people in creative learning experiences across a diversity of contexts and domains -The Teachers Guild: builds off the methods and mindsets from a design thinking toolkit for all educators -The Walking Curriculum: can be used in any context to develop students' sense of place and to enrich their understanding of curricula topics 4. Put less emphasis on promoting creativity for career readiness and more on the joy of learning. The push to include creativity in school education is often rationalised through the skills needed for the modern workforce. However, we think creativity education should be much more about increasing confidence and the joy of learning for its own sake. Selected innovations that exemplify a joy of learning through creativity are: -Segni Mossi: brings together movement and art in workshops for learners and teachers alike -BRAC Remote Play Labs: provides free play based learning centers for children 3-5 in low-resource settings -EL INGENIO. Center for Learning and Creativity Development: allows students to explore making original projects in music, literature, arts, science, technology and creative industries 5. Creative partnerships should provide rich learning experiences outside of schools. Creativity in schools is unlikely to reach its full potential if learning primarily occurs within its walls. Partnerships with various opportunities outside of school will be essential to provide a rich array of new learning experiences for children. Selected innovations that exemplify creative partnerships are: -MyMachine: creates connections between the 3-educational levels primary, secondary, and university aged students to create working prototypes of dream machines -Design for Change: asks students to be socially aware to work in their community -Reap Benefit: students drive change in their local community -The Educate! Model: partners with youth, schools, and governments so youth in Africa can drive development in their communities -Designathon: Teaching for creative change-making: works with children on every continent from diverse backgrounds 6. Social-emotional skills need to be included in the scope of how we define creativity. Many approaches to creativity primarily focus on individual skills like divergent thinking. How students co-operate through collaboration, however, is at-least as important for both holistic development and how they may apply creativity later in life. Selected innovations that exemplify the development of social-emotional skills are: -Out of Syllabus Project (Project FUEL): documents, designs, and celebrates the wisdom of teachers through a reflective process the students participate in -Scholas Occurrentes: brings people together from diverse backgrounds to be open to one another -Slam Out Loud: enables children from the most vulnerable communities to build social-emotional skills through self-expression 7. Thoughtfully bending and eventually dismantling established structural boundaries that enable less scripted teaching and learning in schools. Many educators, students and institutions have been teaching and learning with pre-defined answers and outcomes. However, fostering creativity is unlikely to thrive if students and teachers are primarily aiming for the achievement of pre-defined goals and outcomes. Selected innovations that exemplify less boundaries and scripted teaching and learning are: -Segni Mossi: a rule-bending method of creative education that brings together movement and art -Playground Ideas: designs playgrounds using local materials for daily play -Out of Syllabus Project (Project FUEL): breaks down the barriers for more understanding between teachers and students -Brazilian Creative Learning Network: implements playful, creative, and relevant hands-on educational practices 8. Creative environments need to allow for uncertainty, experimentation, risk taking and the breaking of conventions safely. Educators need practical solutions that enable environments that allow students to explore with these characteristics. Resnick (2017) offers some guidance here: activities being implemented in an environment need to allow for *wide-walls* - where a diversity of approaches and outcomes need to occur for teaching to be considered successful. Selected innovations that exemplify these characteristics are: -Arkki - Creative Education for Future Innovators: students learn design thinking, critical thinking and complex problem solving through architecture and design -Scratch: both a coding platform and online community that allows children of all ages to code, share, and remix their own stories, games, and animations -Reap Benefit: connects students to their local communities -BRAC Remote Play Labs: play-based learning centres for children ages 3-5 in low-resource settings -...and all of the selected innovations in diverse ways. 9. We need to think very carefully about the possible side-effects when assessing creativity. As Chapter 1 outlined, there are many open questions and issues around the assessment of creativity. Since the 1950s, many possibilities have been explored in research that we can learn from but we have yet to see how creativity assessment may be successful at scale and if it is at all useful. Selected innovations that help us to think about assessment differently are: -MyMachine: through collaboration at three different levels, students are giving feedback to each other through building a working prototype of a 'dream machine' -Remake Learning Days Across America: promotes the idea of exhibitions of learning to help parents, families and caregivers engage in innovative education -Out of Syllabus Project (Project FUEL): Students learn from teachers through their experience and monitor their consistency in living up to their life lessons 10. The training of teachers and leaders will be essential if creativity is be fostered effectively in schools. The development of learning plans that allow for a diversity of individualised responses from learners is inherently more demanding and resource hungry than traditional teaching methods of a pre-defined syllabus testing for comprehension, memorisation, and technical skills. Educators primarily need the time and resources to adopt and adapt modern pedagogies that foster creativity in their area and discipline. Selected innovations that exemplify the training of teachers of leaders in creativity are: -Learning Creative Learning: free online course and ongoing global community to explore principles and strategies to engage people in creative learning experiences -The Teachers Guild: catalyse creative leadership through a design thinking toolkit for educators to design for the needs of their students -Out of Syllabus Project (Project FUEL): gets teachers to reflect and share their powerful life experiences for everyone to learn from So what and "who cares"? We don't believe improving education happens through publishing "yet another report" and leaving it at that. This is only just the beginning! From the findings here, we will be proactively promoting positive change in creativity education through following ways: 1. CONNECT Having good connections makes all the difference to thriving innovations in education; we have HundrEDs of them! Because we know effective practices and solutions are especially slow to be adopted and adapted to multiple contexts in education, after the release of this report we will be proactively helping the selected innovators with this process from our vantage point as a global organisation on an ongoing basis. HundrED Connect is an invitation-only service committed to this purpose of helping our selected innovator community to increase their impact and reach with a powerful global network combined of: other selected innovators for HundrED projects, funders, and implementors of education innovations. 2. SHARE We want to keep the momentum of dialogue up across boarders between governments, leaders, and teachers to share learnings and inspiring successes through the HundrED community on fostering creativity resulting from releasing this project. We implore everyone to tune in to this dialogue and participate from anywhere around the globe: please visit https://hundred.org/en/community to find out more. Moreover, following this report, we will be publishing many articles about the selected innovators on their successes and learnings. Stay up to date with our media by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on social media: https://hundred.org/en/media. A final call to action: Now it is up to all of us to take inspiration from this report to our local community. Let's cooperate and collaborate together on turning the ideas presented here *into action* so that we can help every child develop the creative skills they need to flourish in life.