Unlocking Creativity: Teaching Creative Thinking and Learning

The seminar will build on the work done by Tapestry in promoting creativity in learning. It will explore the concept of creativity, will suggest ways in which it can be 'taught' and will suggest that Curriculum for Excellence has now given permission for teachers to look for creative solutions to problems of underachievement.

Brian has worked at various levels in education, from class teacher to headteacher, from chief adviser to academic.  He was co-founder with Katrina Bowes of Tapestry, which has promoted creativity in learning since its inception. Tapestry has brought to Scotland a host of internationally renowned figures, from Howard Gardner and David Perkins to Reuven Feuserstein; from Nigel Osborne to Carla Hannaford and Tony Buzan.  What links all of these educational thinkers is the issue of creativity and its relationship with intelligence, learning and underachievement.

Nearer to home, Carole McGuinness and Robert Fisher have made the case for thinking skills as a platform from which to develop creativity in learners across the curriculum.

In this seminar, Brian, who was a member of the Ministerial Review Group which produced A Curriculum for Excellence will explore what it is that teachers can take from the current thinking on creativity and make use of in their classrooms.  He will address the controversy around certain ideas and approaches which have come in for criticism in recent months (learning styles, brain gym, neuro-linguistic programming, mind mapping, left- and right-brain learning, etc.) and suggest ways in which teachers can make sense of the many programmes and strategies which are out there.

Finally, he will look at the issue of assessment of creativity.

Brian has worked in the Faculty of Education at the University of Strathclyde for twelve years after a career in secondary education saw him hold two posts of headteacher as well as education officer and chief adviser.

He was a member of the Ministerial Review Group on the curriculum 3-18 which produced the report “A Curriculum for Excellence” in 2004.  Brian is a co-founder with Katrina Bowes of Tapestry, a ground-breaking new organisation set up to bring leading edge thinking about learning to Scotland.

Brian is in demand as a speaker at conferences, as a staff developer, as a tutor in management courses and as a consultant to local authorities and schools.

He writes frequently, and challengingly, for the educational press in Scotland and has published widely in educational journals and books.  He is the author of two books published by Hodder Gibson in April 2005 on Primary-Secondary Transition and Improving Professional Practice as part of a Continuing Professional Development series (of which he is also series editor).

He is passionate about education but tries not to take it too seriously.  His son, Chris, who has just left comprehensive school and is the second year of his University career, is a source of many anecdotes and his wife, Margo, a working Depute Head teacher in a local secondary school, keeps his feet on the ground.