Fostering Creativity through Curricular Innovation
The Global Institute of Creative Thinking is an initiative first proposed by Professor Xiping Tao, one of the most famous educators in China. In his last overseas visit in January 2019, he travelled to the U.K., where he visited the local educational communities and spoke at the first Creativity Education Summit. The event was co-held by the Bryanston School, one of the UK’s leading independent boarding schools for boys and girls aged 13-18 in Dorset in South West England.
First Summit at a Glance
The theme of the first international conference was “Fostering Creativity through Curricular Innovation”. It sought to explore the good practices and challenges teachers and schools encountered in traditional classrooms and explicitly asked the following questions:
What is a Creative Curriculum?
What do we mean by a Creative Curriculum?
How can we develop the creativity of students?
What has UK independent schools done right?
The conference proposed the need to identify the contextual reality to nurture student creativity and how to support teachers to achieve it on campus.
Aims
- To learn from the UK experience in fostering creativity of young people.
- To explore the concept of a creative curriculum and measures to review and improve curriculum design
- To create a dialogue mechanism among educators from UK, China and beyond.
Impact
After the summit, in the same year, the Global Institute of Creative Thinking, London, along with its first key project Creative Lab, was launched.
The conversation offered Chinese educators, and policy-makers first-hand information on creativity education in the U.K. and beyond. The efforts later secured a fully-funded project from the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission to explore the role and value of creativity and leadership in education – the Creative Lab.
A summer training course in Shanghai and a mid-term training course in the UK were co-organized by Shanghai and UK schools, including Bryanston, to discuss a wide range of topics, from the concept of creativity, the role of students, and building teachers capacity.
Conference Program
Key Speeches
Here are a collection of speech extracts of our key speakers.
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