Below are just a few of our initiatives to develop our students’ creative capacities:
Striving for Success
Our Strive Programme provides opportunities for students to go beyond the classroom and pursue their curiosity about the things that fascinate them. With the support of their subject teachers students have free reign to explore whatever interests them. The tasks are designed to be done at their own pace and in their own time. At the end of the year we have Strive Celebration where students can showcase their work.
So if you’ve always wanted to design a costume for a musical or make a film about the environment, the Strive Programme provides a platform to satisfy that curiosity. At Portland Place, we believe that when students are curious they see things differently making connections and experiencing moments of insight and meaning — all of which provide the foundation for rich and satisfying life experiences.
Tech Enabled Learning
Technology today opens up many exciting opportunities to enhance education. Most of us carry a device in our pockets that allows us to access the sum total of human knowledge – albeit in a raw, uncurated way. Tablet devices and a fast web connection greatly enhance the learning activities for students. At Portland Place School we are looking at how to bring this technology into our work, for students and teachers, as a tool alongside a ruler and pen and whiteboard.
Growth Mindset
Growth mindset is a learning theory which revolves around the belief that you can improve intelligence, ability and performance. This means that by helping students to develop a growth mindset, we can help them to learn more effectively and efficiently
At Portland Place School we teach our students the power of the statement “I don’t know this… YET”; and how to use positive self-talk to get unstuck. We teach students to be in a growth mindset – be flexible, try alternative options, and most importantly, never give up.
Creativity
“Good artists copy; great artists steal.” Credited variously to Stravinsky, Faulkner, Picasso and Steve Jobs (to name but a few) this expresses the idea that creativity builds on the work of others – not the replication but the synthesis of ideas from disparate sources to produce something new and meaningful. This applies to scientists and mathematicians as much as it does to musicians, authors, composers and software designers. It demands a good knowledge of what has gone before plus the confidence to pull things together and make a statement. As automation increasingly takes care of the routine, of anything that can be done by the application of an algorithm or process, creativity will be the human hallmark in every field.