You are hereHantsweb Homeks3 musicthe unitsunit 3good practice

KS3 Music

a professional development programme

Good practice

Characteristics of creativity

The 1999 report All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education (www.dfes.gov.uk/naccce) produced by the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education (NACCCE) identifies four essential characteristics to define creativity.

  • Creativity always involves imaginative thinking or behaviour.
  • This imaginative activity is purposeful.
  • These processes should generate something original.
  • The outcome must be of value in relation to the objective.

These four characteristics can identify whether pupils are truly working creatively in a lesson: are pupils set prescribed, closed tasks or are they offered opportunities to make choices, solve problems and develop their musical thinking?

Inventive strategies

Teachers can fire pupils’ imagination by developing a variety of teaching strategies that will make musical learning more interesting, exciting and effective. When doing this, it is important to give pupils insight into how the creative process works. The teacher (and pupils) can model this by taking on the role of performer, composer or listener, sharing thoughts and queries with the class, and inviting their contributions.

Setting a clear purpose for a range of challenges

To develop creativity teachers need to plan for and encourage enquiry and risk taking in pupils’ work. In order to accommodate this approach, teachers should plan activities that are open-ended and challenging. A range of challenges also needs to be set, which means that pupils will need to understand what the specific challenge is for any given activity. Teachers should therefore make explicit to pupils the sorts of musical challenges and thinking required in any given task.

Use Activity Resource 2 to explore and use a range of inventive strategies in your lessons.

After exploring this section, you may want to