Teacher Staffroom Episode 58: Concentrating on creativity

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Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Teacher Staffroom, where we catch you up on the latest evidence, insight, and action in education. I'm Dominique Russell.

You may have seen that, last month, new data from PISA 2022 on the creative thinking assessment were released, showing Australian students performed strongly. At Teacher, we’ve been looking at the topic of creative thinking and teaching creativity on the back of this, and in today’s episode, I’m going to get you up to speed on the insights we’ve gathered.

And don’t forget, like all episodes of Teacher Staffroom, I’ll be posing some questions throughout this podcast, so feel free to pause the audio as you go, gather some colleagues, and discuss together how these stories might be relevant to your school context. Let's jump in.

So, as I mentioned at the top of this episode, new data from PISA – that’s the Programme for International Student Assessment, an assessment of 15-year-olds around the world that’s run every 3 years by the OECD – show that students in Australia performed strongly in creative thinking.

Thinking creatively was defined by PISA 2022 as ‘the competence to engage in the generation, evaluation and improvement of original and diverse ideas’ and one of the aims of the assessment was to provide insights into ‘how well education systems are preparing students to think outside the box in different task contexts.’

This latest PISA 2022 cycle was the first time creative thinking was assessed and Teacher Editor Jo Earp shared the overall findings in an article the day after the results were released.

So, the data includes findings on students’ beliefs and attitudes, the school and classroom environment, and the report also has some recommendations for teacher professional development.

So, as for student performance in the assessment, overall Australia performed above the OECD average and more than 88% of students reached Level 3 proficiency which is deemed to be the baseline level of creative thinking proficiency. This means students are able to think of appropriate ideas for several tasks and also begin to suggest original ideas for familiar problems.

There was also a strong gender difference across the board, which I found really interesting. They found that girls outperformed boys in all participating countries.

Now, going back to students’ beliefs and attitudes, it was found that 8 out of 10 students feel it’s possible to be creative in nearly any subject, which I found really interesting to see, and also, 60-70% of students said their teachers value creativity.

Finally, the report mentioned that ‘teachers might benefit from pedagogical resources that exemplify what it means to teach, learn and make progress in creativity in primary and secondary education, and how to connect pedagogies encouraging creative thinking to different elements of the curriculum.’

So, to follow up on these PISA findings, we published an article from ACER’s Claire Scoular where she shared 6 considerations for practice on the topic of teaching creative thinking. In a nutshell they were: to use a framework to break skills down into manageable chunks; using structured brainstorming activities to generate ideas; teaching the aspects of creative thinking explicitly; setting students ill-defined problems to solve; collaboration and peer feedback; and focus on progress.

So, you can absolutely read the full article at our website to learn more about all 6 areas, but one area I found really interesting to read about were Claire’s suggestions for structured brainstorming activities. Here’s what she had to say:

While generating many ideas increases the likelihood that a creative one will be among them, if all ideas are similar to each other, a creative idea is less likely to emerge. Therefore, we can look together at the number and range of ideas during brainstorming tasks to give us an indication of the fluency and flexibility of student creative thinking. Teachers can pause and ask students to reflect: ‘Are we just coming up with the same idea in different words? How many ideas do we actually have? What sorts of categories could we create from these ideas? Let’s try to think of ideas beyond the categories we already have, to see if a really original idea will emerge.’

So, that brings me to a couple of questions for you to think about. Reflect on the last time you led a brainstorming activity in the classroom. Did you take the time to pause and ask students to reflect on their ideas? How did this enhance student learning?

We also explored creativity in a recent episode of our Global Education podcast series. Our Editor Jo Earp spoke with Sarah Childs, Lead Practitioner at Penryn College and Associate Professor Kerry Chappel from the University of Exeter, about the Creativity Collaboratives partnership in England that brings together teachers and academics to focus on how creativity is cultivated across the school curriculum. Here’s a snippet of what they had to say in the episode:

Our ambition really was to inspire teaching and learning for a future curriculum and almost develop our thinking and be ahead and future-proofed in lots of ways. We wanted to make sure that creativity was also fostered, not just in some subjects, but actually across the whole curriculum for our young people, and actually that they then could enter the world of work, able to apply that really passionately, using their knowledge and skills in whatever, you know, school experience they take with them into their future careers.

I really liked listening to this episode. If you want to catch the full conversation, just scroll down in your podcast feed to have a listen now.

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Now, to bring you back to PISA 2022 for a second, I wanted to share with you some more recent findings that I found really insightful and pretty fascinating. We published an article sharing the results of the financial literacy assessment in PISA 2022, and overall, the consensus was that while most 15-year-olds are already consumers of financial products and services, many lack some of the skills that are needed to make sound financial decisions themselves.

So, the financial literacy assessment was actually an optional component of PISA 2022, and Australia didn’t participate for this cycle, but 14 OECD countries and 6 partner countries did take part. The data show that 7 countries performed above the OECD average, but only an average of 8% of students were found to be proficient at Level 5, meaning they were top performers in financial literacy.

In terms of specific results, 77% of students on average said they felt confident about their ability to manage their money. However, at the same time, an average of 38% of all participating students said money matters are not relevant to them right now.

Students were also asked to self-report on their exposure to financial literacy in school. Here it was found that 67% reported learning about a wage, 64% about a budget, and 63% about a bank loan in the last 12 months, and they said they still know what these terms mean. Only 28% learnt about a return on investment at school and still know what this means, and 26% said the same about compound interest and dividends, and 19% said this about diversification.

On these findings, here’s what the OECD had to say:

These results show that there are wide variations among students in their financial literacy proficiency, and that students can learn about money matters in a variety of ways: from their parents, families and friends, at school, and from their experience with money and financial products.

So, considering the OECD’s conclusion that while most 15-year-olds are already consumers of financial products and services, many lack some of the skills that are needed to make sound financial decisions themselves; with a group of colleagues, discuss together any upcoming opportunities in the curriculum to expose students to finance-related tasks. How will these tasks support students’ financial literacy?

And finally, as we’ve said during this episode, creativity and creative thinking is something that can be fostered across the whole curriculum. If you’re a senior secondary mathematics teacher, how are you supporting students’ creativity in your classroom? One avenue might be through the International Mathematical Modeling Challenge. The international judging round for this annual challenge concluded recently, and Australian schools were among those recognised.

In case you’re unfamiliar, the International Mathematical Modeling Challenge (or IM2C) gives students an opportunity to work with their peers on a complex mathematics task that connects their mathematical learning with a real-world situation. Previous years’ students have worked on determining the most effective way to board and disembark planes, and to declare who the ‘GOAT’ of women’s tennis is.

We caught up with the team from Brisbane Boys College, who were one of the 2 Australian teams awarded Meritorious achievement this year after being tasked with the problem of determining household readiness for pet ownership. Here’s a snippet of what Head of Mathematics Jeremy Hunter, had to say about the value of participating in the challenge:

Students learn to collaborate, to problem solve, and to place themselves in situations that replicate real life, where the answers aren’t provided on the whiteboard or in the back of a textbook. These competitions act as an opportunity to broaden skills, challenge their skill base, and establish networks beyond the classroom.

So, that brings me to one final question for you to consider for this episode. Does your school provide opportunities for students to connect their learning to real-world contexts, through extracurricular learning opportunities and competitions? How will you incorporate this into learning next term?

That’s all for this episode. Thanks for listening. You’re now all caught up on the latest evidence, insight and action. I’ll leave all the links to the full articles and podcast episodes I mentioned today in the transcript of this podcast episode, which you can find under the podcast tab at our website.

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