Main Curriculum Focus:
HASS – Geography, Economics
Cross-curricular links:
Digital Technology, Media Arts, Science understanding, Persuasive language
CONTEXT
Campbell Primary School is based in Canning Vale, South Perth. It is an established and academically successful school, with strong leadership. The development of Creative and Critical Thinking is a priority in the school’s business plan and this is the school’s second year in the Creative Schools program. Last year, two Year 6 classes participated, and this year, two Year 5 groups are taking part. Since working as a Creative Practitioner with Campbell last year, I have also joined the school board and have an ongoing relationship with the school.
Teacher Sarika Suri is an experienced classroom practitioner and the Year Group leader. The students are terrific, enthusiastic learners and are easily lit up by new challenges. There are students with significant literacy challenges, though their comprehension of concepts is sound.
WHAT WE DID
Project Overview:
The project evolved somewhat from the original idea of an Emergency Summit, and ended up with two parts. The first part involved the students researching the causes of bush fire or floods in Australia and then communicating in a stop motion animation. The second part involved exploring the impacts of bush fire and floods on the community and the environment. For this, the students filmed news-style interviews with different individuals or experts to capture what they had learned.
For Term 4, we moved on to exploring the difference between our Wants and our Needs. We began taking a wide view and then focussed on Smartphones and how marketing can stimulate our Wants and Needs.
How did we make the curriculum come alive?
We used a variety of approaches inspired by student interests to explore the topics. From the beginning, we attempted to engage all the students’ senses in the learning - looking at physical artefacts (boxes of wreckage from fire and flood), news images as well as video and written texts. We ended up using two forms of film-making - stop-motion animation and a news report/ interview. In Term 4, we decided to ask the students to work towards a different product – an EXPO rather than a filmed commercial.
The student’s first Term 3 project was to plan and make a stop motion animation, which communicated one or more causes of bushfire or flood. This was engaging and a significant challenge - to research and then transfer written information into a visual, moving medium. The success criteria of both informing and entertaining, were kept in focus.
The second project was to plan and film an interview with someone who had been impacted by fire/flood - or an expert in climate change/conservation. The students again were very engaged and energised by this challenge - they made and brought in key props to bring their reports to life. There were some thoughtful interviews, and one group in particular shone for their rich informative interviews with a principal and students from a school affected by flood. Other groups struggled more with tone, getting carried away with comic touches and undermining the serious content of their reports. This was an important learning moment for the students, which hopefully, can shape future work. However, it would have been helpful to spend more time asking students to define the success criteria for this second task to avoid this.
Focusing on Smartphones in Term 4 excited the students – they could draw on their knowledge and enthusiasm to deepen their thinking about the topic. We tweaked the project as we progressed: they came up with original phone designs and then presented them at an EXPO to convince potential customers that theirs was the phone which would fulfill their needs.
How did we make the Creative Habits of Mind come alive?
These students already had some familiarity with the Creative Habits, as Campbell has encouraged all teachers to refer to these in their teaching and learning - they have a Creative Habits board in every classroom.
As a result of this, the students were quick from the start to identify their use of different habits. Every week the warm-ups (which they loved) shone a spotlight on how well they could activate various habits and they could comment on this, and suggest strategies for improvement.
With each task, we always discussed the habits we were using and how they could enable success. As we went along, I shone a spotlight on examples: a group that persisted in re-shooting their animation to overcome software glitches; Individuals who asked great questions; students who used their imagination to make recycled materials represent fire or water; A group, which worked through early conflicts to collaborate successfully, or conversely a group, which did not use all its members effectively.
At the end of each session we carried out a sticker reflection - Sarika created session-by-session grids for each of the habits and students could choose one coloured sticker and stick it on the relevant grid. This will allow us to analyse data about the most used habits and potentially shape our subsequent focus on other habits.
Knowing the students love making Keynote presentations, Sarika also set up a template for a Keynote reflection, which they completed at the end of each week. Students had ownership and were able to customise their Keynotes as well as recording their learning and setting a goal for the following week. This was a great reflective habit, but the next challenge is to build on this by encouraging students to be more specific in their observations and their goal setting.
The Creative Habits were woven into a lot of our talk and informal reflections and also our activities – one warm up asked students to come up with a dance move which represented a Creative Habit and teach the rest of the class.
How did we activate student voice and learner agency?
We started the project with a co-planning exercise - creating a quadrant covering MUST KNOW / WANT TO KNOW / MUST DO / WANT TO DO. This captured students’ natural curiosity and gave us information about their interests outside of the classroom to direct our project. This was a powerful exercise - the openness can feel like a risk, as if the teacher and practitioner have less control over the direction of the project. However, it showed us the students had a strong desire to find out about the causes of bushfire and flood. To start by exploring this, reduced the time we spent examining the impacts, but gave students’ the opportunity to answer their initial questions, which were fundamental to the topic area.
In the animation and the news interview tasks, the students had creative freedom and they enjoyed shaping their own product. The vast majority of students were obviously very invested in what they were doing. It was brilliant to see how differently they approached the animation, for instance, using a wide array of techniques to communicate. They were very imaginative in their use of Remida recycled materials.
There was growth in the way students were able to respond to each others’ work. They showed that they have the capacity to be very specific and thoughtful in their praise and constructive criticism, given prompts.
We adapted each project to use the intrinsic motivations of the students. For example, in Term 4, the students showed a lot of enthusiasm for physically making models of their phone designs. We wanted to make sure that they focussed on their idea development and on persuasive language principally. But Sarika was also able to give them time to develop the visual side of the product and the marketing so they could follow that urge too.
WHAT WAS THE IMPACT?
Students:
“There’s more thinking in Creative Schools, you think what and how you will create.” (Student)
"The students certainly have enjoyed the different style of learning - all joined together and exciting. The tasks have challenged them to dig deep - to persist, use their imaginations and be disciplined to complete them and fulfil the success criteria. The more they reflect on the five habits, they more they can apply this learning across their other lessons and see how they can progress.” (Teacher)
“These students are full of ideas and have been very engaged with their projects - even keen to work on them outside of class time. This makes working with them very exciting! Starting with co-planning was really successful. It helped me feel like I had an understanding of their curiosities, as well as explicitly valuing their interests. My challenge here has been balancing the content learning with the creative tasks. Sometimes it has been clear that they need more of a secure knowledge foundation to tackle the challenges in a meaningful way. On reflection, I would add more stages to some of the tasks for scaffolding and checking the learning. Sarika has been great to work with, shaping the project and supporting the tasks outside of the session time too. Her knowledge of her students as individuals and her apt suggestions have been so valuable to the project this term.” (Creative Practitioner)
School:
The school is on a journey and is very supportive of Creative Learning. There is still a lot of structure and explicit instruction involved in teaching, but an openness to other ideas and harnessing the power of the Creative Habits of Learning. The principal has indicated she is keen to plan more PL for the early part of 2023 and there are plans to use the habits language more consistently and systematically during lessons.
Parents:
During Term 3, there was an open evening and parents were able to see the students’ work so far. Seeing the product without much commentary could have had limited value. In the future, we could think more about communicating with parents - perhaps a simple outline we can share with them so that they get an insight into the work we do.
“It is different to usual learning. The structure is different. They get more control over how things develop and where they go. They get to choose their own groups. They just get a starting point from us and then they run with the ideas. They have more freedom and more control. The benefits are they have more ownership over it, more control. They are able to work with people they want to, and we just have to remind them of the responsibility that comes with this freedom. They live up to this responsibility. The downside is some may need those reminders, and they can get side-tracked. Having tight timelines with everything and the tight syllabus that we have makes other lessons different. We never have time to go back and repeat things. But in Creative Schools, we get to come back to the Creative Habits every week.” (Teacher)
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