Reflective Account of Creativity Project - 2010/2011

Reflective account of Creativity project 2010/2011:

Raising Attainment in Literacy

This critical reflection aims to analyse and justify the decisions made for raising attainment in literacy and the methods chosen to do this. Our project aimed to raise attainment literacy with a group of eight Year 9 pupils who were achieving levels less than would be expected for pupils of their age. As a group, we were asked to use our knowledge and understanding of primary education to motivate and engage this group of students. This reflection will consider five major themes that are embedded throughout the project. These themes are:

• Creativity
• Effective teaching of Literacy and Oracy
• Use of e-technologies
• Collaborative working
• Sustainability and Continuing Professional Development

Creativity

Adopting a creative approach to the planning and teaching of our intervention was felt necessary by the group in order to motivate children to engage in literacy. Creativity in schools has been said to be in decline (Robinson, 2007) therefore it was important to adopt a variety of strategies to ensure effective teaching and learning took place. Child led learning was embedded throughout all stages of the plan, teach, assess cycle (Vygotsky, 1978; Piaget and Inhelder, 2000; Kolb, 1984; Dewey, 2011) in order to focus on the needs, interests and abilities of all the pupils. 

 

Trips and visitors were used as part of our intervention to provide learning opportunities to stimulate and extend children’s learning, which Ofsted (2008) have also found to raise pupils’ attainment and achievement. The group felt that using trips and visitors in this way would generate excitement about the project and allow the children to have some autonomy in their learning (Reeve, 2009). These opportunities punctuated the learning journey with exciting and inspirational experiences set within the context of the learning, which it was hoped it would provide learners with the confidence to succeed (DfE, 2010). 

 

An additional aspect to our strive for a creative approach was our consideration of the learning environment (Nagan, 1994). It was felt necessary by the group to adopt a relaxed and informal way of working in order to remove some of the barriers to learning that these children may have had. This allowed the learning to be a truly social activity where the children were active participants rather than recipients to knowledge (Vygotsky,1978; Piaget and Inhelder, 2000).

Effective Teaching of Literacy and Oracy

Within the group we had a wealth of knowledge to access to ensure that our intervention provided real life links to pertinent theory. We tried to incorporate the following approaches into our plan, teach, assess cycle:

• Talk for Writing (DfE, 2010a);
• Purpose (DfE, 2010b; Palmer, 2006)
• Audience (DfE, 2010b; Palmer, 2006);
• Oracy (Fox et al., 2010; Nicholson, 2006; DfE, 2008)
• Immersion (Wallace and Brown, 2008);
• Process (Hodson and Jones, 2001);
• Genre (Badger and White, 2000).

The inter-relationship between the four modes (Dlitt, 2009; Barrs and Cork, 2001) of literacy was crucial to our approach. We wanted to ensure that the children saw the link between reading and writing, and speaking and listening. We felt it was important to base our practice on pertinent theory and therefore chose to adopt a way of working that scaffolded the learners on their journey to confidence in literacy, working from dependence on the teacher to independence (Bearne, 2002; UKLA, 2004). Capturing ideas and oral rehearsal was central to our work, as promoted by the Talk for Writing model (DCSF, 2009).

Formative assessment was used throughout the teaching sequence to inform the next steps in the children's learning (Black and Wiliam, 1998). We used extensive self assessment to ensure that all teaching was purposeful and pitched at the correct level; this ensured excellent progression was achieved (Pressley et al, 1998). Effective questioning (Clarke, 2005; How do they walk on hot sand?, no date) and talk partners (Rowe, 1974; Clarke, 2005) were strategies used to incorporate assessment for learning. We also tried to provide additional challenge by varying the approach to talk partners through differentiating the groupings (Clarke, 2005).

Use of e-technologies

The school was keen to develop their use of e-technologies in the curriculum; as such we incorporated multi-modal learning into our approach. Correspondingly, we as teachers used a blog to record our plans, thoughts and reflections. It was hoped that this would provide a model of good practice to the children (Miskin, 2010), in addition to being an innovative way of reflecting upon our own practice (National Literacy Trust, 2009; Cooper, Doonan and Fawcett, 2011). 

 

It was important to us that the children were not presented with reams of written texts, as this may have been daunting for children who were disengaged with literacy. This was achieved through the digital recording of thoughts and reflections using notebooks, dicta phones and cam-corders. The children explored software and hardware such as E-jay and podium to create their own radio programme. 

 

The final podcasts were uploaded to the school's Virtual Learning Environment which allows for access and feedback from the wider community.

Collaborative working

Collaboration in terms of our project took many forms; these will be discussed under the subheadings of working together, working with external agencies and individual experience.

• Working together to plan and teach an intervention on this scale brought with it challenges as well as celebrations. Being able to select our own working group ensured that we felt confident in our “professional learning community” (Vanderlinde and van Braak, 2010, p.1). We kept in regular contact by using our blog (http://raisingattainmentinliteracy.blogspot.com/) to ensure that we were really working collaboratively rather than merely alongside each other. 
   
• External agencies were by definition an integral part of our project. Working closely with the school to deliver the intervention brought new relationships to manage. We liaised with agencies to plan trips and to promote our project in the local press. These sometimes proved problematic due to different schedules and priorities and we had to develop existing skills to manage these situations, such as communication and negotiation. The skills that we developed are both useful and transferable; we hope to utilise these in future employment (Pant and Baroudi, 2008). 
   
• Our individual experiences and achievements enabled us to bring knowledge and understanding that was useful to our specific project. Two of our group are English Subject Specialists which meant that they could bring a greater depth of knowledge and approaches to current practice, allowing for highly effective planning and teaching (Fox, et al 2002). Furthermore, two of our group have completed additional training with the Teacher Development Agency on teaching children with Special Educational Needs; the skills learned here were especially useful when creating and teaching lessons for disengaged pupils as one of our group had experience working with excluded boys at a Special School in Sussex. One of our group is male which helped provide a positive male role model for the children in our group (Carrington and McPhee, 2008; Millard, 2005). Similarly, our collective experience teaching at primary schools around the county has achieved us with strategies that are useful for motivating children in ways that may differ from modern secondary school teaching.

Sustainability and Continuing Professional Development

Our original intentions for the project took into consideration the need for sustainability. Subsequently, we decided to use a blog to reflect upon our project; this has given us flexibility and means that our work can be constantly updated and adapted to suit the needs of the user. Additionally, the nature of blogging means that our work is open to peer review and feedback, providing us with our own level of formative assessment. 

 

Our brief for the project was to raise attainment in literacy. However it was initially hoped that our intervention may lead to the creation of a school radio station which would be led by the students. Presently, the school is unsure of the future of the station, however they are very enthusiastic about the benefits that producing the programmes have had on the children. They hope to build on the successes of the project when time allows. 

 

Due to the success of our project, we were invited by the university to contribute at the ESCalate Student Conference at Liverpool Hope University in April 2011. We applied to present a poster to both academics and fellow students and were successful in our application. The process of creating our contribution allowed for critical reflection on our project and the module as a whole. We were able to analyse the profound impact that being part of this module has had on us. Particularly in terms of the impact that creativity has in teacher education and our own continuing professional development. Moreover, our involvement in this module has led us to a desire to continue to incorporate a creative approach in our own classrooms in September. 

 

Conclusion

To summarise, our project has surpassed the expectations that all involved in the intervention had at the beginning. We have achieved sustainability and had a impact on practice at both a personal and a wider level through our publication at the conference. We have critically reflected upon and analysed our learning that has taken place during the module. Our end product remains professional, useful, accessible and user friendly to ourselves, the school and the wider community. 

 

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© Sophia Koiston, Oliver Hughes and Helen Goodall 2010