By Rachel West
I was recently asked a tricky question in a workshop I was running: ”Surely you can’t be really advocating creativity? You work at an exam board!”
Creativity and high stakes examinations are not topics that we usually think about as being related. Professor Melvin Tumin, a Princeton sociologist sums it up by saying, ”Nothing is quite so hostile to the maximization of creativity as the competitive grading system which prevails in our schools”.
In my previous blog post I wondered whether we should take a wider view of creativity: could we include more creative activity in our lessons and still cover the syllabus in time for the exam?
Well, what if developing our learners’ creative thinking skills could in fact help them perform better in an exam? Read more