Objectives and outcomes

This training unit is designed to help you explore what creativity is and how you can use it to make your music teaching more inventive. It will also guide you to help pupils use their imagination, be prepared to take risks and evaluate work in terms of its originality. It will therefore ensure that you are addressing essential aspects of the National Curriculum (2008), covering both its music-specific requirements (the new key concept of ‘Creativity’) and its generic ‘Personal, learning and thinking' skills (learning how to be ‘creative thinkers’, ‘independent enquirers’ and ‘team workers’).

The unit will focus in particular on:

• how to use a range of strategies to teach more creatively;
• how to provide pupils with more varied musical challenges;
• how to enable pupils to use a wider range of thinking skills.

As a way of identifying your current practice, use Activity Resource 1 to carry out a simple assessment of the extent to which you currently use creative teaching and learning in your lessons.

After exploring this introduction, you may want to

• develop your exploration of these key principles by reading more;
• continue with this unit by exploring good practice in creative teaching and learning.