For the third year in our district, Rosalind Poon and I are facilitating a Core Competencies Project. This series takes place over the school year, with release time provided to grades 6-9 teachers. This year, we have narrowed our focus to closely examine the Creative Thinking Competency and ways we can provide opportunities for students to develop this competency across disciplines.

For our first session together, we asked teachers to engage in a “chalk talk” about what creativity is- a strategy to record your thoughts about something and make connections between others’ ideas and yours.

We watched a short video with Sir Ken Robinson discussing what creativity is and how we can assess it. Watch the video HERE.

We unpacked what Core Competencies are and then specifically looked at the Creative Thinking Competency.

The Creative Thinking Competency has three facets – novelty & value, generating ideas and developing ideas. Each teacher or school team of teachers was asked to choose one facet to play around with in their classrooms between our first and second sessions. Roz Poon documented our first session using Pages:

We are using the Spirals of Inquiry cycle to engage in professional learning together. Teachers each received a copy of a teacher resource book that is full of ideas for the “taking action” part of the cycle.

In order for teachers to connect to the Creative Thinking profiles and illustrations, we facilitated a series of mini-challenges from Destination Imagination and had teachers consider the facets of the Creative Thinking competency – novelty & value, generating ideas and developing ideas – and consider how they might describe their own competencies in these areas.

Information about BC’s Core Competencies can be found in this short video HERE.

The information about the Creative Thinking Competency can be found HERE.

We are meeting together in January and I look forward to seeing how the creative thinking competency is coming alive in Richmond classrooms!

~Janice