The risks and unintended consequences of creative teaching
The below is a transcript of a talk given at NedTalks 'Creativity in Education' event, Winchester House School, June 2019.
About 30 years ago, someone had a very good idea. It was designed to provide reliable access to clean water in rural South African villages. The invention was called a playpump; a roundabout which, when turned, drew water to the surface and stored it in a tank. Children played and had fun; precious water arrived - a quintessential win-win. Word spread, benefactors were attracted, it achieved an award from the World Bank, and after years of investment, by 2007, over 1000 had been installed.
There was a hitch. More than a hitch actually. The problem was that in practice, they didn’t work very well. There were various reasons for this: children didn’t reliably play for the amount of time necessary to pump sufficient water - sometimes they’d come and just sit and chat, but not spin. Interestingly though, when evaluators arrived with cameras and clipboards to see how the project was going, kids tended to jump on and demonstrate their playpump with pride.
Once the cameras were gone, however, it was left to adults - usually elderly women - whose only option was to get water by pushing the thing around by hand. This was as degrading and uncomfortable as it was unproductive: playpumps are about a third as efficient as a standard hand pump. When eventually the problems became indisputable, the idea was dropped, having wasted a great deal of money, time, attention and good will for little long-term gain.
My contention this evening is that education is brimming with playpump equivalents. Initiatives, approaches or resources which are presented as full of potential, that seem so obviously beneficial and exciting, that they attract attention and investment and so find their way via CPD and policy, into our classrooms.
However, as with playpumps, this promised potential is not realised; pragmatic reality and unforeseen consequences get in the way. It’s important to note that most approaches do bring some value in some places - playpumps did after all pump some water - but more that the time and resource spent on training for initiatives which didn’t ultimately sustain was wasteful.
Examples from my own career - things that I have either trained or been trained on, which had surface level attraction but which didn’t sustain - make a long list. It includes learning styles, SEAL, L2L, APP, Literacy across the Curriculum, Numeracy across the Curriculum, interactive whiteboards, PLTS, Building Learning Power, VLEs, P4C, Thinking Hats, Multiple Intelligences, the Deeps, and most training in relation to AFL. This is very problematic. Teachers are extremely time-poor, and teaching is extremely difficult. All of this time could have been much more profitably used, to much greater benefit - this is important, and we should learn from it.My proposition is that encouraging teachers to teach creatively is a potential playpump. It shares certain play-pump-ish features - popular support, a highly-marketable surface veneer, a sort of truthiness, a stating-the-obviousness - ‘of course we want creative teaching - why wouldn’t we?’.So why adopt this unpopular, misery-guts position?
Well, for one thing, we have tried it before, not long ago, and it didn’t do much good. Of course I can only offer a single point of view on this - other, better perspectives are available - and I’m looking through a particular set of lenses. I’m secondary English trained, and attempt no comment on how this plays out at primary. I have personal preferences towards clarity and organisation - I’m limited by my own experience, and offer no certainty. However: here’s my take on it.
I trained in 1999 - an interesting point in edu-history. Labour were in power, Things Can Only Get Better was still faintly echoing in the corridors, and the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education, led by Ken Robinson, released the ‘All Our Futures’ report. This was to have a significant influence through the next decade. It’s well-worth reading - very detailed, much to debate. It kicked off a concerted and relatively well-funded attempt to promote creativity in schools - much training, resourcing, money and time was spent in and by schools trying to implement the recommendations. What went wrong?
Firstly, there is an enormous problem of definition and interpretation when promoting creativity. All Our Futures recognises this, and defines creativity as “Imaginative activity fashioned so as to produce outcomes that are both original and of value.”. I think this a pretty good definition. It’s also achievable in schools - we do this and could do it better - particularly through subjects where producing such outcomes fits most naturally. I think we would all support sustained, deep investment in CPD and resourcing for Art, Drama, Music and dance, creative writing elements of English etc - clearly this would make a difference.
However - and this I think is key - it seems to me that this laudable drive to improve arts provision in schools was accompanied by a sort of mission creep. Many of us felt compelled not really to teach so that opportunities for students to ‘produce original works of value’ were maximised, but instead to model and promote a sort of generic creativity, a creative mindset; that described in the report as a ‘disposition to be creative’ and captured by the PLTS agenda as ‘Creative thinkers’. This unevidenced, speculative proposition created a lot of collateral damage I feel.
We can see the way that creative teaching was interpreted through the mass of training material that became widely available at the time - the ‘1001 ways to teach creatively’, the creative teaching toolkits that were all the rage. Teachers TV produced a film entitled The Secondary A-Z of Creativity, which began with lots of teachers answering the question as to what creative teaching meant. Answers included enjoyment, fun, thinking outside the box, quirkiness, stretching, being a rule breaker, enthusiasm, learning through play, new ideas, great way to learn what could be boring topics, being different, using ICT...
Does this matter? Isn’t this range of views evidence of a healthy innovative culture which values autonomy and plurality of opinion? I think there were two key problems with the lack of clarity and consensus.
One was that it led, in some places, to an ‘anything goes’ mentality, where risk-taking and experimentation were excessively encouraged. In practice, this meant that approaches were used for which the actual evidence of impact was very low or non-existent, so too many students didn’t learn. It led to ‘folk-teaching’, based on no stronger evidence than intuition, personal preference, ‘let’s try this’, ‘the kids’ll love it’, usually crudely importing features of creative arts lessons into other subject domains: maths through drama, business studies using rap etc.
From my own career, I recall many examples and suspect I’ve blocked out others to escape the trauma, but here’s a few - the Titanic Unit where we did a soundscape involving squawking seagulls, crashing cutlery and glugging noises. The unit on designing a theme park. The Macbeth soap opera or indeed Jeremy Kyle lesson. The endless faffing around on whatever new website had launched… all experimentally plucked from the pages of ‘150 bonkers ways to teach… well, nothing much’.
It was fun on occasion. Usually, it was frustrating, unsatisfying and depressingly low value. Looking back I feel genuine regret that so very little of actual value was taught, or learnt in those exhausting, fraught lessons. I’m sad to report that I ended up less with PLTS, more with PTSD. It was all play, and no pump. I’m sure others did it much better than I. But many didn’t.
The second problem was that it sapped coherence from our body of professional knowledge, and therefore mitigated against teachers’ ability to learn and improve. Because there was such a wide interpretation of what creative teaching meant, INSET became scatter-gun and piece-meal and too much was very low-impact. Observations resulted in fairly random feedback, excessively dependent on the personal whims and biases of the observer. And we collectively lacked a commonly-understood set of clear principles for what makes the most difference, so teachers’ ability to help and learn from colleagues, to move on in a coherent direction was diminished. In contrast, whatever you think about the ‘knowledge-rich’ agenda, for those of us who believe in it, the sense of emerging collective professional identity and expertise is exhilarating.
But this ‘00s lack of clarity and focus continued for years. In 2010, Ofsted produced a report entitled Learning: Creative Approaches that raise Standards, which presented an extremely positive view of what was happening in schools. It reported that creativity had a ‘variety of interpretations and applications’. They weren’t kidding - they included:
- Questioning and challenging
- Making connections and seeing relationships
- Envisaging what might be
About 30 years ago, someone had a very good idea. It was designed to provide reliable access to clean water in rural South African villages. The invention was called a playpump; a roundabout which, when turned, drew water to the surface and stored it in a tank. Children played and had fun; precious water arrived - a quintessential win-win. Word spread, benefactors were attracted, it achieved an award from the World Bank, and after years of investment, by 2007, over 1000 had been installed.
There was a hitch. More than a hitch actually. The problem was that in practice, they didn’t work very well. There were various reasons for this: children didn’t reliably play for the amount of time necessary to pump sufficient water - sometimes they’d come and just sit and chat, but not spin. Interestingly though, when evaluators arrived with cameras and clipboards to see how the project was going, kids tended to jump on and demonstrate their playpump with pride.
Once the cameras were gone, however, it was left to adults - usually elderly women - whose only option was to get water by pushing the thing around by hand. This was as degrading and uncomfortable as it was unproductive: playpumps are about a third as efficient as a standard hand pump. When eventually the problems became indisputable, the idea was dropped, having wasted a great deal of money, time, attention and good will for little long-term gain.
My contention this evening is that education is brimming with playpump equivalents. Initiatives, approaches or resources which are presented as full of potential, that seem so obviously beneficial and exciting, that they attract attention and investment and so find their way via CPD and policy, into our classrooms.
However, as with playpumps, this promised potential is not realised; pragmatic reality and unforeseen consequences get in the way. It’s important to note that most approaches do bring some value in some places - playpumps did after all pump some water - but more that the time and resource spent on training for initiatives which didn’t ultimately sustain was wasteful.
Examples from my own career - things that I have either trained or been trained on, which had surface level attraction but which didn’t sustain - make a long list. It includes learning styles, SEAL, L2L, APP, Literacy across the Curriculum, Numeracy across the Curriculum, interactive whiteboards, PLTS, Building Learning Power, VLEs, P4C, Thinking Hats, Multiple Intelligences, the Deeps, and most training in relation to AFL. This is very problematic. Teachers are extremely time-poor, and teaching is extremely difficult. All of this time could have been much more profitably used, to much greater benefit - this is important, and we should learn from it.My proposition is that encouraging teachers to teach creatively is a potential playpump. It shares certain play-pump-ish features - popular support, a highly-marketable surface veneer, a sort of truthiness, a stating-the-obviousness - ‘of course we want creative teaching - why wouldn’t we?’.So why adopt this unpopular, misery-guts position?
Well, for one thing, we have tried it before, not long ago, and it didn’t do much good. Of course I can only offer a single point of view on this - other, better perspectives are available - and I’m looking through a particular set of lenses. I’m secondary English trained, and attempt no comment on how this plays out at primary. I have personal preferences towards clarity and organisation - I’m limited by my own experience, and offer no certainty. However: here’s my take on it.
I trained in 1999 - an interesting point in edu-history. Labour were in power, Things Can Only Get Better was still faintly echoing in the corridors, and the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education, led by Ken Robinson, released the ‘All Our Futures’ report. This was to have a significant influence through the next decade. It’s well-worth reading - very detailed, much to debate. It kicked off a concerted and relatively well-funded attempt to promote creativity in schools - much training, resourcing, money and time was spent in and by schools trying to implement the recommendations. What went wrong?
Firstly, there is an enormous problem of definition and interpretation when promoting creativity. All Our Futures recognises this, and defines creativity as “Imaginative activity fashioned so as to produce outcomes that are both original and of value.”. I think this a pretty good definition. It’s also achievable in schools - we do this and could do it better - particularly through subjects where producing such outcomes fits most naturally. I think we would all support sustained, deep investment in CPD and resourcing for Art, Drama, Music and dance, creative writing elements of English etc - clearly this would make a difference.
However - and this I think is key - it seems to me that this laudable drive to improve arts provision in schools was accompanied by a sort of mission creep. Many of us felt compelled not really to teach so that opportunities for students to ‘produce original works of value’ were maximised, but instead to model and promote a sort of generic creativity, a creative mindset; that described in the report as a ‘disposition to be creative’ and captured by the PLTS agenda as ‘Creative thinkers’. This unevidenced, speculative proposition created a lot of collateral damage I feel.
We can see the way that creative teaching was interpreted through the mass of training material that became widely available at the time - the ‘1001 ways to teach creatively’, the creative teaching toolkits that were all the rage. Teachers TV produced a film entitled The Secondary A-Z of Creativity, which began with lots of teachers answering the question as to what creative teaching meant. Answers included enjoyment, fun, thinking outside the box, quirkiness, stretching, being a rule breaker, enthusiasm, learning through play, new ideas, great way to learn what could be boring topics, being different, using ICT...
Does this matter? Isn’t this range of views evidence of a healthy innovative culture which values autonomy and plurality of opinion? I think there were two key problems with the lack of clarity and consensus.
One was that it led, in some places, to an ‘anything goes’ mentality, where risk-taking and experimentation were excessively encouraged. In practice, this meant that approaches were used for which the actual evidence of impact was very low or non-existent, so too many students didn’t learn. It led to ‘folk-teaching’, based on no stronger evidence than intuition, personal preference, ‘let’s try this’, ‘the kids’ll love it’, usually crudely importing features of creative arts lessons into other subject domains: maths through drama, business studies using rap etc.
From my own career, I recall many examples and suspect I’ve blocked out others to escape the trauma, but here’s a few - the Titanic Unit where we did a soundscape involving squawking seagulls, crashing cutlery and glugging noises. The unit on designing a theme park. The Macbeth soap opera or indeed Jeremy Kyle lesson. The endless faffing around on whatever new website had launched… all experimentally plucked from the pages of ‘150 bonkers ways to teach… well, nothing much’.
It was fun on occasion. Usually, it was frustrating, unsatisfying and depressingly low value. Looking back I feel genuine regret that so very little of actual value was taught, or learnt in those exhausting, fraught lessons. I’m sad to report that I ended up less with PLTS, more with PTSD. It was all play, and no pump. I’m sure others did it much better than I. But many didn’t.
The second problem was that it sapped coherence from our body of professional knowledge, and therefore mitigated against teachers’ ability to learn and improve. Because there was such a wide interpretation of what creative teaching meant, INSET became scatter-gun and piece-meal and too much was very low-impact. Observations resulted in fairly random feedback, excessively dependent on the personal whims and biases of the observer. And we collectively lacked a commonly-understood set of clear principles for what makes the most difference, so teachers’ ability to help and learn from colleagues, to move on in a coherent direction was diminished. In contrast, whatever you think about the ‘knowledge-rich’ agenda, for those of us who believe in it, the sense of emerging collective professional identity and expertise is exhilarating.
But this ‘00s lack of clarity and focus continued for years. In 2010, Ofsted produced a report entitled Learning: Creative Approaches that raise Standards, which presented an extremely positive view of what was happening in schools. It reported that creativity had a ‘variety of interpretations and applications’. They weren’t kidding - they included:
- Questioning and challenging
- Making connections and seeing relationships
- Envisaging what might be
- Exploring ideas, keep options open
- Reflecting critically on ideas, actions and outcomes
This suggests to me that we made little progress in understanding what it means to teach creatively over the decade of investment. These interpretations are hopelessly, uselessly vague, and lead to no useful theory of action or coherent understanding of how to help each other improve.
The uncritical tone of the report also suggests an enormous institutional bias in Ofsted at that time towards ill-defined ‘creative approaches’.
We see this in the use of pupil testimony as a source of evidence: ‘we combine lessons a lot here, like literacy and drama. It helps us think a lot’, or ‘Projects include all sorts of subjects so you have to use your brain more’. Remember the South African kids excitedly jumping on the play pump when the evaluators arrive? It’s endearing that children try to put their school and teachers in a good light. But it’s surely naive to propose this as a reliable source of evidence in this way. ‘I worry that I’m not building a sufficiently strong store of domain-specific inflexible knowledge over time’ ... said no student voice panel member ever.What else? A further consequence of what was ‘acceptable in the noughties’ was that this nebulous ‘anything goes’ creative agenda distracted many of us from focusing on the things that matter more. It promoted emphasis on surface features of lessons, supported by an inspection regime that was understood to grade lessons highly on the basis of engagement, the elusive ‘buzz’, group work and independent learning, and pay scant attention to hidden elements of teaching which have a deeper long term influence.In that category, we could place curriculum and assessment design, selection and sequencing of knowledge, and clarity of explanation. Well-intentioned encouragement towards the creative left us flailing around on insecure foundations.
At times of course, knowledge itself was actively decried as it didn’t fit into this sexed-up brave new world of creative teaching. This tendency is best exemplified by the frightening assertion - commonplace at the time - that teaching of knowledge was redundant because ‘they can just google it’, an idea that fit nicely with the pro-technology elements of the creative agenda. But it’s profoundly, play-pumpishly wrong - what better way to keep kids ignorant, impede critical thinking and and maintain advantage gaps, than telling them they don’t need to know anything anymore, that they can outsource their minds to their phones.
I’d like to talk a bit more about the concept of risk-taking in teaching. It seemed to me at the time that taking risks as a teacher was seen as a ‘very good thing’, culturally encouraged as evidence of a groovy creative approach. Having for the last few years taught groups of the lowest attaining students at KS3 and 4, this is not an attitude I share.
For too many students, school and lessons can be a nightmare, because learning is hard and they feel the daily shame of struggle and failure. These students don’t need us to take risks. They have enough risk, and they are fragile. They are capable of understanding and applying difficult ideas, and gaining from the sense of accomplishment and growth in self-esteem that genuine learning brings. But it’s not easy. They need clarity. They need technically very strong, well-organised teaching over time, by which I mean careful selection, sequencing and explanation of the right knowledge in the right order, and meticulous attention to detail in modelling ways in which that knowledge can be used and applied.
Messy, experimental, risk-taking creative teaching too often provides the opposite. It leaves many students adrift on a tumultuous sea of confusion, social awkwardness and shame. It’s not good for them. It’s not OK to self-indulgently bang out hopeful, risky lessons that then go wrong, on the basis that ‘I’m modelling a creative mindset’, or ‘they need to learn to fail’. We should be sending kids to school to learn successfully, not to fail - what an odd thing to have to say.
A final unintended consequence is that attempts to promote creative teaching actually contributed to an unhealthy, oppositional, negative perception of what was seen to be ‘uncreative’ teaching.
This reveals itself fairly regularly in casually and ignorantly sneering attitudes and comments in the press, and I worry about the insidious impact that this has on our young people and our colleagues. Consider the phenomenon whereby minor artsy celebrities will casually but viciously denigrate schools and schooling for their allegedly anti-creative practice.I am something of a collector of the genre - here’s Imogen Stubbs lamenting the ‘awful treadmill’ of education - thanks Imogen - George Monbiot thinks we are ‘crushing people’s instinct to learn and destroying their future’. Meg Rosoff considers education policy as ‘an assault on childhood’, and that teaching has become ‘joyless’. Even Peter sodding Andre is having a go at us! My favourite is from Radiohead's Ed O’Brien, who claims that the way we educate is ‘criminal’, and goes on to make the memorable prediction that ”In 500 years, people will look back at the way we educated our children, keeping them in classrooms most of the day, having to sit still. It’s stuff of the Stone Age.’It’s not really, is it Ed? The Flintstones is a cartoon not a documentary. He then goes on to say it’s a hangover from the Industrial Revolution, suggesting a bit more attentiveness in timeline-focused history lessons at school would have been worth the effort.
But there’s a serious point here. In these examples we see the dark underbelly of the creative agenda, a leaking of binary, nuance-free contempt towards the traditional work of teachers, and of students. How does it feel to be 15 and told you are on an ‘awful treadmill’, a victim of ‘assault’? How does it feel to be a dedicated teacher who thought themselves to be teaching young people about geography or whatever, only to be told that they are joyless, that they are complicit in criminality? How supportive or otherwise of self-esteem and mental health is that likely to be?
So what to do? Am I suggesting that ‘creative teaching’ approaches should be banned? Absolutely not. I know that for some teachers, teaching creatively is a dearly-held and fundamental element of their practice and professional identity. And - assuming that they are aware of the risks of pitfalls, particularly for weaker students, can demonstrate that these risks are being well-mitigated, they can maintain the levels of energy required, and the students do learn actual content, I think they should crack on. They have my admiration for doing so.
But I also think we should acknowledge, celebrate and cherish the non-creative teacher. The hand-pump, not the playpump, of the staffroom. The teacher who comes to school every day, who may sit students in rows, who knows their subject well, who explains it with interest and conviction, who has a joke with the kids when it’s appropriate, who insists that they do the work, who gets through the curriculum so that students can speak better French, or understand the significance of historical events and how they are interpreted, who can draw, or paint, or make music, or write essays, or comprehend the slow shifting of the tectonic plates beneath us, can perceive religious perspectives, or solve simultaneous equations or any of the other valuable and interesting gifts of the curriculum, who do this whilst looking out for the youngsters and their wellbeing. We should say to these people that what they do is great. Crucially, we should tell them that they don’t have to be different, or a rule-breaker, or, god forbid, quirky, because what they do already is wonderful, it is admirable, and it is enough.
- Reflecting critically on ideas, actions and outcomes
This suggests to me that we made little progress in understanding what it means to teach creatively over the decade of investment. These interpretations are hopelessly, uselessly vague, and lead to no useful theory of action or coherent understanding of how to help each other improve.
The uncritical tone of the report also suggests an enormous institutional bias in Ofsted at that time towards ill-defined ‘creative approaches’.
We see this in the use of pupil testimony as a source of evidence: ‘we combine lessons a lot here, like literacy and drama. It helps us think a lot’, or ‘Projects include all sorts of subjects so you have to use your brain more’. Remember the South African kids excitedly jumping on the play pump when the evaluators arrive? It’s endearing that children try to put their school and teachers in a good light. But it’s surely naive to propose this as a reliable source of evidence in this way. ‘I worry that I’m not building a sufficiently strong store of domain-specific inflexible knowledge over time’ ... said no student voice panel member ever.What else? A further consequence of what was ‘acceptable in the noughties’ was that this nebulous ‘anything goes’ creative agenda distracted many of us from focusing on the things that matter more. It promoted emphasis on surface features of lessons, supported by an inspection regime that was understood to grade lessons highly on the basis of engagement, the elusive ‘buzz’, group work and independent learning, and pay scant attention to hidden elements of teaching which have a deeper long term influence.In that category, we could place curriculum and assessment design, selection and sequencing of knowledge, and clarity of explanation. Well-intentioned encouragement towards the creative left us flailing around on insecure foundations.
At times of course, knowledge itself was actively decried as it didn’t fit into this sexed-up brave new world of creative teaching. This tendency is best exemplified by the frightening assertion - commonplace at the time - that teaching of knowledge was redundant because ‘they can just google it’, an idea that fit nicely with the pro-technology elements of the creative agenda. But it’s profoundly, play-pumpishly wrong - what better way to keep kids ignorant, impede critical thinking and and maintain advantage gaps, than telling them they don’t need to know anything anymore, that they can outsource their minds to their phones.
I’d like to talk a bit more about the concept of risk-taking in teaching. It seemed to me at the time that taking risks as a teacher was seen as a ‘very good thing’, culturally encouraged as evidence of a groovy creative approach. Having for the last few years taught groups of the lowest attaining students at KS3 and 4, this is not an attitude I share.
For too many students, school and lessons can be a nightmare, because learning is hard and they feel the daily shame of struggle and failure. These students don’t need us to take risks. They have enough risk, and they are fragile. They are capable of understanding and applying difficult ideas, and gaining from the sense of accomplishment and growth in self-esteem that genuine learning brings. But it’s not easy. They need clarity. They need technically very strong, well-organised teaching over time, by which I mean careful selection, sequencing and explanation of the right knowledge in the right order, and meticulous attention to detail in modelling ways in which that knowledge can be used and applied.
Messy, experimental, risk-taking creative teaching too often provides the opposite. It leaves many students adrift on a tumultuous sea of confusion, social awkwardness and shame. It’s not good for them. It’s not OK to self-indulgently bang out hopeful, risky lessons that then go wrong, on the basis that ‘I’m modelling a creative mindset’, or ‘they need to learn to fail’. We should be sending kids to school to learn successfully, not to fail - what an odd thing to have to say.
A final unintended consequence is that attempts to promote creative teaching actually contributed to an unhealthy, oppositional, negative perception of what was seen to be ‘uncreative’ teaching.
This reveals itself fairly regularly in casually and ignorantly sneering attitudes and comments in the press, and I worry about the insidious impact that this has on our young people and our colleagues. Consider the phenomenon whereby minor artsy celebrities will casually but viciously denigrate schools and schooling for their allegedly anti-creative practice.I am something of a collector of the genre - here’s Imogen Stubbs lamenting the ‘awful treadmill’ of education - thanks Imogen - George Monbiot thinks we are ‘crushing people’s instinct to learn and destroying their future’. Meg Rosoff considers education policy as ‘an assault on childhood’, and that teaching has become ‘joyless’. Even Peter sodding Andre is having a go at us! My favourite is from Radiohead's Ed O’Brien, who claims that the way we educate is ‘criminal’, and goes on to make the memorable prediction that ”In 500 years, people will look back at the way we educated our children, keeping them in classrooms most of the day, having to sit still. It’s stuff of the Stone Age.’It’s not really, is it Ed? The Flintstones is a cartoon not a documentary. He then goes on to say it’s a hangover from the Industrial Revolution, suggesting a bit more attentiveness in timeline-focused history lessons at school would have been worth the effort.
But there’s a serious point here. In these examples we see the dark underbelly of the creative agenda, a leaking of binary, nuance-free contempt towards the traditional work of teachers, and of students. How does it feel to be 15 and told you are on an ‘awful treadmill’, a victim of ‘assault’? How does it feel to be a dedicated teacher who thought themselves to be teaching young people about geography or whatever, only to be told that they are joyless, that they are complicit in criminality? How supportive or otherwise of self-esteem and mental health is that likely to be?
So what to do? Am I suggesting that ‘creative teaching’ approaches should be banned? Absolutely not. I know that for some teachers, teaching creatively is a dearly-held and fundamental element of their practice and professional identity. And - assuming that they are aware of the risks of pitfalls, particularly for weaker students, can demonstrate that these risks are being well-mitigated, they can maintain the levels of energy required, and the students do learn actual content, I think they should crack on. They have my admiration for doing so.
But I also think we should acknowledge, celebrate and cherish the non-creative teacher. The hand-pump, not the playpump, of the staffroom. The teacher who comes to school every day, who may sit students in rows, who knows their subject well, who explains it with interest and conviction, who has a joke with the kids when it’s appropriate, who insists that they do the work, who gets through the curriculum so that students can speak better French, or understand the significance of historical events and how they are interpreted, who can draw, or paint, or make music, or write essays, or comprehend the slow shifting of the tectonic plates beneath us, can perceive religious perspectives, or solve simultaneous equations or any of the other valuable and interesting gifts of the curriculum, who do this whilst looking out for the youngsters and their wellbeing. We should say to these people that what they do is great. Crucially, we should tell them that they don’t have to be different, or a rule-breaker, or, god forbid, quirky, because what they do already is wonderful, it is admirable, and it is enough.
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