About

What is Confident Creators?

Confident Creators is a primary school programme of lesson plans, video tutorials, arts activity toolkits and evaluation tools for teachers to use with their children, to support growth mindset approaches to learning in the classroom and embed the arts into the curriculum. The programme has been developed by the Brixton Learning Collaborative and the Windmill Cluster of Schools in partnership with Pegasus Opera and visual artists Liz Atkin and Laura X Carle and funded by The Paul Hamlyn Foundation.

How it came about

The Confident Creators programme was devised in 2018. Schools recognised how the arts were often a ‘way in’ to a subject for learners and also wanted to develop children’s resilience, collaboration and problem solving – skills that are integral to arts practice. They recognised that teachers often felt they needed to be ‘good at’ an art form to be able to teach it, which meant they sometimes didn’t consider using the arts as a learning tool.

20 teachers across 10 schools took part in the programme over 2 years. They trained with arts practitioners in Music, Drama and Art developing their skills to incorporate the arts into their classroom. The Senior Leadership teams from each participating school met frequently to share the impact of the work and to embed it into their school curriculum.

The Process

Central to the Confident Creators approach is encouraging lessons to be process rather than outcome driven, giving children the skills they need to experiment, collaborate, refine and articulate their ideas using the arts.

Teachers and Arts Practitioners worked together in the classroom with children, delivering lessons using the Confident Creators approach. Teachers took on the role of facilitator in the classroom, bringing out the creativity of the children. Planning, testing and reflecting were key to the whole process. Schools allowed time for teachers to plan with artists prior to lessons and to reflect on them together afterwards; in turn the lessons themselves encouraged the children to plan, test and reflect on their work.

The Impact

In order identify children’s creative learning as part of the programme, the team used an Observing Learning tool that was developed by Hill Mead Primary School, CLPE and London CLC, which focuses attention of areas researched showing children’s creative journey. The teachers and practitioners used these prompts to plan and reflect on lessons. The programme was externally evaluated by CUREE.