Our Resources

At GIoCT, we know that creative thinking is something that is done not only as an individual, but as a team.
Therefore, we have made available our resources free to use, in the hope that our reports, videos, and documents
enable more people, students, and teachers to experience the benefits of creative teaching and learning.

Reports and Guides

GIoCT develops case studies of promising practices for schools across the world and produces toolkits and guidance that support the production of creativity project plans to empower better teaching.

Summit Report - Creativity in Education Summit 2022

The 2022 Creativity in Education Summit took place on the 17th and 18th October, 2022. The theme of this year’s event was Creative Thinking in Schools: from global policy to local action, from individual subjects to interdisciplinary learning. The report offers a quick recap on the many innovative approaches shared by representatives from UK, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, China and the US.

Creative thinking in schools across the world: A snapshot of progress in 2022

Professor Bill Lucas presented the annual report of the GIoCT, Creative thinking in schools across the world: A snapshot of progress in 2022, at CES 2022. He offered a global overview of progress exploring the inclusion of creative thinking in international, national and state curricula, sharing recent research into curriculum design and pedagogy, reviewing progress in assessing creative thinking, and considering the opportunities ahead for creating new approaches to professional development for school leaders and teachers.

A Field Guide to Creative Curriculum Design and Implementation

The guide offers teachers some key principles in how to design and develop a creative project in K-12 schools in general. There are six key sections: Vision and Objectives, Curriculum and Course Design, Pedagogy, Assessment in the Curriculum, Implementation, and Project Evaluation, each of them ending with a Checklist for schools – to support clear processes and structures for putting theory into practice and to support the production of clear and visionary curriculum plans. This guide is supported and underpinned by the previous work of PISA, Prof. Bill Lucas, the Education Foundation, the Welsh Government and the experiences of a number of UK Schools in the Odyssey Teaching School Hub.

<span data-buffer="">Sessions<span data-metadata="">

Why creativity and creative teaching and learning matter today and for tomorrow’s world

| Keynote Speech

The Director for Education and Skills and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the Secretary-General at OECD AndreasSchleicher opened the Fourth Creativity in Education Summit with a real story of societal transformation, growth, and what it means for 21st-century learners in his speech ‘Why creativity and creative teaching and learning matter’.

Keynote Speaker : Andreas Schleicher

Director for Education and Skills and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the Secretary-General at OECD.

An overview of creative thinking in schools across the world

| Keynote Speech

Professor Bill Lucas presented the annual report of Global Institute of Creative Thinking, Creative thinking in schools across the world: A snapshot of progress in 2022, at the event. He offered a global overview of progress exploring the inclusion of creative thinking in international, national and state curricula, sharing recent research into curriculum design and pedagogy, reviewing progress in assessing creative thinking, and considering the opportunities ahead for creating new approaches to professional development for school leaders and teachers.

Workshop Speaker : Bill Lucas

Chair of GIoCT Advisory Board and Co-Chair PISA Creative Thinking Test 2022 Strategic Advisory Group.

October 17, 2022

Nurturing creativity through education

| Keynote Speech

Gwang-Chol Chang, Chief of the Section of Education Policy at UNESCO Headquarters began by highlighting that the world today faces highly complex global tensions and crises and raised the key question – How can education help cultivate the creative thinking and solutions to respond to multiple crises? ‘Current education systems are no longer fit for purpose. We need to rethink the purpose and content of education for the 21st century,’ said Chang.

Workshop Speaker : Gwang-Choi Chang

Chief of Section of Education Policy UNESCO Headquarters

October 17, 2022

Making progress in embedding creative teaching practices in school

| Panel One

This panel began by Rachel Sylvester introducing the final report by The Times Education Commission that includes a 12-point plan and 45 recommendations to transform education and assessment in the UK. Together, the panellists discussed how they think creativity can be embedded and why that is important.

Michael Anderson drew attention to the key issue of the “pedagogy policy gap” because the education system has not worked out how to practically support educators in promoting creativity in students. To bridge the gap, he mentioned three things to do: a sustained professional learning approach, creative leadership and creative networks.

Pam Burnard offered three provocations to the audience that she hoped could be disruptive: 1) Future-making, 2) trans-disciplinarity and 3) multiple creativities. She argued that if creativity is a principle practice, it involves modalities. “The capacity to write rebelliously, in varying registers and voices, tempos and volumes is boundaryless.”

Laura McBain from Stanford University described creativity as the capacity to see and uncover challenges in the world and find radical ways to solve them. She emphasised that educators have a responsibility to really reckon with our understanding and relationship with creativity. ‘So much of design challenges that we are facing is not just seeing the problems today, but looking out into the future, and assessing and uncovering the problems that are yet to uncover. So we think about “creative acts” that we can all take.’

Kenneth Nally representing Creative Ireland, Department of Education and Ireland Inspectorate, pointed out that Ireland has a national focus on creativity, which has been part of the rebranding of Ireland called Creative Ireland. The most significant strand within the programme is the Creative Youth, where educators look at the creative work they can carry out with young people. This is further supported by efforts to promote teacher education and creative partnerships outside the classroom.

Moderator : Rachel Sylvester

Chair of The Times Education Commission and political columnist at The Times

October 17, 2022

Assessing students’ and teachers’ creativity formatively and summatively: promising methods and tools

| Panel Two

This panel, moderated by Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin, Deputy Head of OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation, focused on how educators may use standardised summative and formative assessment and how they can make things happen in schools.

Elodie Persem from DEPP introduced the work by the Accessibility, Innovation and Research Unit. Through their research, they have discovered that creativity is never defined in the curriculum in France, while there are mainly two descriptions, the ability to use imagination to produce artistic creation and the ability to find new solutions, or ‘innovation’. The unit also further designed assessment tasks for creativity and aims to collect data in the upcoming months.

Mario Piacentini working on the PISA creative thinking test, shared the definition of creativity: “the competence to engage productively in the generation, evaluation and improvement of ideas that can result in original and effective solutions, advances in knowledge, and impactful expressions of imagination.” A brief look into how the test measures creative thinking, which is further divided into four domains. Mario also introduced the open assessment application called “PILA” which utilised the same framework of PISA but was set up in different scenarios, all free and fun.

Todd Lubart, a leading figure in psychology and creativity, shared knowledge on creativity measurement tools: 1) creative accomplishment and 2) creative potential, where creativity is examined through a test, a request for performance or through measures of ingredients, such as risk-taking and mental flexibility. The professor also shared the work of EPoC, a new battery to evaluate creative potential and what support can be given to teachers in order to structure their mini-tests on creative thinking.

Richard Jones, head of Bryanston School, drew people’s attention to the danger of being too obsessed with assessing creative thinking, as it may create a system of “pass or fail”. From a headmaster’s perspective, creating an environment that fosters creativity is most important, and he loves the idea of creating a digital learner profile, which gives pupils ownership of their learning journey and the pupils have to evidence themselves in independent learning and problem-solving, etc.

Let the children play

| WorkShop

This workshop drew upon the experience gained at Bryanston School in the UK, an institution renowned for its success in creative, unbounded thinking. This workshop looked at the importance of allowing pupils to organise and take responsibility for their own actions. Edrys introduced the customised use of the Dalton Plan, an educational model, at the school and shared the example of a feature-length film made by some of the Sixth Form students at Bryanston in the summer term last year, both during and after their A level exams.

Workshop Speaker : Edrys Barkham

International Admissions Consultant, Bryanston School

October 18, 2022

Inculcating Creativity into the Learning Ecosystem

| WorkShop

‘How might creativity be a part of every aspect of schooling? From daily practices to flex our creative juices to approaching system-level challenges, how might we inculcate creativity and curiosity into the learning ecosystem so that everyone can practice their creative talents and use this creativity to address the challenges facing schools today? Using exercises from the Stanford d.school and examples from US-based schools, we will explore how we might embed creativity into our daily structures and systems within schools.’

Workshop Speaker : Laura McBain

Co-Interim Managing Director at Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford and Co-Director of K12 Lab

October 18, 2022

Establishing and Teaching Creativity: some practice from Australia and New Zealand

| WorkShop

The Creative Schools Index (CSI) has been trialled in New Zealand and Australian schools to measure Creative environments in primary and secondary schools. CSI is a collaboration between the University of Sydney and the University of Auckland and employs a multidisciplinary mixed-methods approach and features experts in education, creativity and educational psychology. This research aims to guide stakeholders in education in benchmarking, curriculum design, and reform.

Workshop Speaker : Michael Anderson

Professor of Creativity and Arts Education in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at The University of Sydney

October 18, 2022

Supporting school-level approaches to fostering creativity

| Workshop

Cassie presented findings from the international project, Fostering and Assessing Creativity and Critical Thinking, highlighting the bank of pedagogical resources developed by international teachers and experts, contained in a new app https://oecdcericct.com (beta version). She offered an overview of the work at CERI in the background that led to the digital app and the publications, including the action research over 2 school years in 11 countries with 800 teachers and 20,000 students in 320 primary and secondary schools.

Workshop Speaker : Cassie Hague

Analyst at the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) at OECD

October 18, 2022

Related content

The PISA 2022 Creative Thinking Test – The PISA 2022 Creative Thinking assessment measures students’ capacity to engage productively in the generation, evaluation and improvement of ideas that can result in original and effective solutions, advances in knowledge, and impactful expressions of imagination.

Co-organisers

Summit Report - Creativity in Education Summit 2022

The Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) performs research-driven work to achieve lifelong learning for all. It goes beyond formal education systems and reflects on the future of teaching and learning. CERI aims to set a forward-looking and innovative agenda for a changing education landscape.

Global Institute of Creative Thinking

The Global Institute of Creative Thinking (GIoCT) is a movement to promote teaching creative thinking in schools. A UK-based institute, GIoCT focuses on encouraging creativity education through curriculum innovation, reform, professional learning and collaboration. It brings together academics, policy makers, educators and learners, at a national and international level.

Latest Blogs

Sign up for GIoCT's monthly newsletter

Join the Movement

Always stay updated with the latest developments and events on creative thinking with our monthly Creativity Snapshots!

Join Our Mailing List!