As part of our Festival of Creativity (2010) we commissioned Sarah Alexander and Guy Connelly to work with a group of Year 7 students using Dance Spinner to stimulate the creation of some site specific dance and music responses to the school building. The students explored the use of various digital devices to record, edit and share the products of their dance and music experiments. They took an experimental approach, reflecting on the relationships between dance, music and physical space. Their performances at the two festival events were really captivating.

We are using the excellent Wallwisher to gather a range of proposals and ideas relating to this year's Festival of Creativity at Thomas Tallis School. Our theme, Past, Present & Future, represents the social history of the school site, its origins in the early 1970s through to its current situation and imminent demise to make way for a brand new building in 2011. We want to explore what the building represents, how people feel about it, how it can be transformed into a venue for all manner of creative interventions and how it can still surprise us after all these years.

We will be working with a variety of practitioners to energise the physical spaces and provoke thoughts and reflections about the relationship between our environment and out ability to be creative.

Here is a slideshow of some of the images taken during the two evening 'Past, Present & Future' events in July 2010. Many of the ideas featured in the Wallwisher (above) were included in some form on both nights. Feedback from audience members was very positive and we were delighted by the number of parents, carers and friends of the school who attended. Our students responded brilliantly and we learned a great deal about how to manage a large scale event featuring a variety of art forms:

"Please pass on my thanks and admiration to all who created, participated in, and organised the fabulous carnival of 'Past, Present & Future'... we had a brilliant time ... once again your team brought colour, vibrancy and artists of all kinds to cheer on the end of term. Thanks !!"

This report was prepared for the March visit of our national School of Creativity Advisor, Julian Sefton-Green. It outlines progress made since the previous visit in October 2009.

The report is divided into three sections:

1. Developing Practice: Transforming Our School
2. Influencing Practice: Transforming Other Schools
3. Leading Practice: Transforming the Education System

The appendix includes avfirst draft of a proposed framework for assessing pupil progress in creative learning.

A copy of the report is available for download.

Part of the school's strategy for promoting creative learning has been to run termly whole school learning events related to a cross-curriculum dimension and theme. During the summer term of 2009 we organised a whole school event focused on the Olympics exploring the theme of Perspectives. The Spring Term theme is Connections and the focus has been on several dimensions: Enterprise, Global Awareness and Sustainability and Technology and Media. We decided to run two days of activities for teams of vertically grouped students across the whole school. Fifty two fair Trade country groups were established and tasked with generating a campaign to increase the amount of fair Trade in their country through a variety of analogue and digital creative products. Throughout the two days, the students experienced a variety of activities including a Wii Challenge and Fair Trade United Nations Assembly. The purpose of this meeting was to create a Fair Trade Manifesto for Thomas Tallis School. Students also created websites and blogs, digital animations and slideshows, Powerpoint presentations and a host of wonderfully inventive craft based products including whole costumes constructed from tissue paper and clay coffee beans.

The project blog has collected these campaigns together and demonstrates the variety and diversity of the learning experienced by the students.

We are fully committed to carrying out a detailed evaluation of these days in order to learn from them and help us plan even more successful learning opportunities in the future.

We are very excited about the potential of using online tools to create and maintain a variety of international links. One such collaboration is a blogging project with the Royal Dubai School in the United Arab Emirates.

Year 7 students in both schools have established a blog called Tallis Royal and are busy exchanging details of their lives and experiences in very different environments. Early discussions have focused on the weather, the school day and what people get up to in their spare time. We are hoping to extend the range and ambition of these communications in the coming weeks and months to include shared analysis of texts, online discussions using VoiceThread, film reviews and creative writing projects. The blog allows us to maintain asynchronous discussions between young people in very different contexts, promotes global awareness and the creative use of new technologies for online collaboration.

Aleatory text is dependent on the laws of chance. The Surrealists were perhaps the first to experiment with the creation of poetry and other forms of writing that exploited the chance association of words. More recently, this technique has been popularised by the writer William Burroughs. The resource below has been used recently in the English Faculty to encourage young writers to experiment with the creation of aleatory epic poems inspired by Beowulf. Key words from the Epic Poetry Generator are chosen at random with the roll of a die. The author is then responsible for stitching these words together into the form of an epic. A visual element is provided through the use of another Surrealist invention, the Exquisite Corpse game (what we often call Consequences).

The school has a long tradition of supporting the local community. School of Creativity status provides us with further resources to help support the development of creative learning for our stakeholders. In recent years, we have been active supporters of the annual midwinter Tree Dressing celebrations on the local housing estate. The estate is currently being demolished to make way for new homes so this year's event was even more poignant. We decided to make a website featuring the various activities that took place in the lead up to and during the celebrations. These included artists working with local primary school children to make lanterns for the evening parade and decorations for the trees in Telemann Square, songs being written and recorded by members of local community organisations, a performance by the Tallis Steel Pans band, fireworks and food cooked and served by local residents in the Community Hall. The event would not have been possible without the collaboration of a wide variety of partners. Check out the site to find out more.

One of the units on the BTEC Media course requires students to produce ePortfolio websites in order to learn about web authoring. We chose to use Weebly, an excellent online web authoring application (the same one we've used to create this site) so that students could work on their designs in and outside school.

Here are a couple of links to ePortfolios created by the students in Year 11:

Seb's ePortfolio
Raihan's ePortfolio
Richard's ePortfolio

We have also been experimenting with a variety of tools to help with the evaluation process. We have created podcasts using Audioboo, virtual tours using a variety of screencasting tools like Screenr and even animated interviews, like the one to the left, using sites like Xtranormal. Not only is this a lot of fun to do, it also engages the student in some sophisticated higher order thinking skills - evaluation, synthesis and creativity.

Students studying A level Sociology have been experimenting with online animation tools in order to synthesis their learning. They have used both Go!Animate, Pixton and Voki to re-present their learning about key sociological concepts. Not only are these documents engaging to create, there is growing evidence to suggest that the meta-cognitive learning involved in the process of creating them is of great educational benefit. Finally, the animations and comics are proving to be a really useful resource for revision. We intend to further explore the value of using these tools in an ongoing research project this term (Autumn 2009).

Check out the example opposite of an animation designed to capture a variety of sociological models relating to the Media.

At the beginning of the summer holidays Tallis commissioned film company Eelyn Lee Productions to run a 4-day media project for girls aged 14-19. Held at the Greenwich Youth for Christ drop-in centre on Telemann Square, the girls worked alongside a team of creative practitioners developing skills in photography and filmmaking.

For four consecutive days the group worked as a creative team – generating ideas; discussing the work of contemporary artists; sharing skills and producing work. They shared lunch every day, cooked by Ferrier resident Rosa Goncalves from the Guarida Community Café. The girls were quick to form considered opinions about some of the photographic images we looked at. This meant that when we began to illustrate some fables, sayings and parables the group came up with some sophisticated and unique ideas.

As part of shine week, on Friday 10 July, a group of 20 able and keen students of Italian got together with Mrs Totten and Ms Astill to think about  how language has changed over time.
 
We started off by thinking about English, in particular about Elizabethan English, and all of those expressions that are no longer used but that have changed into more modern versions. We watched a clip from Romeo and Juliet and looked at old handwriting too before thinking about what content we could have used to write our own message to somebody, in both ancient and modern style, in English and Italian.
 
The students came up with lots of different ideas, from love messages to hatred ones, from picking fights and duels to arranging to meet someone and they then started to write their own letters, with the aid of a list of words and expressions that were common in Elizabethan times. They had all the freedom they wanted and could write about absolutely anything, as well as pretend to be anybody they wanted, so some decided to be kings or queens, others to be lovers, suicidal people or even assassins! After drafting their work the students had a go at using quills and ink to write on parchments and produced beautiful pieces of work with fantastic calligraphy, adding a wax seal to make them even more realistic. After that it was time to come back to year 2009 and they all had a go at transferring their original long and elaborate messages into very short sms, using their mobile phones.
 
All of the students were very positive in their comments about this experience and they seemed to have enjoyed the creativity involved in both taking on a new identity and thinking about a message, conveying it in two such different ways; they also enjoyed the creative side of the project in which they had to use old material to produce some aesthetically appealing pieces of writing.

This film tells the story of a week long residency by Tangled Feet Theatre Company at Tallis. The work was commissioned by young people on the Creative Tallis Action Research Group following a long period of research and reflection about creative learning. The group felt that it would be interesting to begin to think about our move to a new school (scheduled for September 2011) and reflect on the emotional and psychological issues around moving home. Tangled Feet are co-directed by an ex Tallis student, Kat Joyce, and had created a play entitled "Home" which has been touring the country in a range of alternative venues. We wanted to see if a theatre company comprised of Tallis students and the Tangled Feet actors and technicians could work collaboratively for a week to create a series of interventions in the building designed to provoke thoughts and ideas about physical and emotional spaces.

We decided to make a mini website about the residency using the excellent Wix.

We are very proud of the students from Years 7 to 13 who took part in the project and especially those members of the ARG who helped to commission and co-ordinate the entire process. They displayed a real maturity and sense of ownership of the learning journey that will hopefully have provided them with a memorable experience and range of transferable skills.

The Year 10 Media BTEC class have been responding to a photography brief entitled "Portrait of Tallis". Their task has been to capture the essence of the school, its ethos and atmosphere, through a series of photographs. We decided to use the excellent Vuvox application to create slideshows of our work. The more adventurous amongst also created musical accompaniment using Garageband. This example is by one of our deaf students, Richard Achiampong. Richard is an excellent example of a student who is often, to use Sir Ken Robinson's expression, in "his element" when working with digital media. Richard has not always found school easy but he has made fantastic progress on the media course and we are very proud of him. We hope you like his "Portrait of Tallis".

"Creativity in different media is a striking illustration of the diversity of intelligence and ways of thinking."                    
                  Sir Ken Robinson The Element

Click the play button (left) to hear one of the sound collages created by students at the school with the support of artists Nick Cattermole. Noises were sampled from the school environment and fed into a sequencing programme. They were then arranged by the students into a composition. Awareness of rhythm and timing, plus an ability to manipulate sophisticated ICT hardware and software make this activity a fantastic opportunity for exercising creative thinkng skills.

What the community said...

"It was nice to see all generations of Horn Park coming together to make the film, it had the feel good factor"

"Very enjoyable. Good to see contributions from everybody in the community"

"I feel Proud to be part of Horn Park"

"Really nice to see a film about the school and area put together so professionally"
                                                                                "Wonderful music and a fantastic DVD"

The Science Club at Tallis, run by Andrew Davids and Andrew Wardell, has its very own YouTube channel so that it can share its experiments with a wide audience. They have been busy experimenting with recording various phenomena using a high speed camera that produces fantastic slow motion footage. This is how they introduce themselves and their experiments on the site:

Evidence, Evaluations, Proof, and things of wonder may all be found here. We will stop at nothing to rigorously test theories through experimentation and evidence. This process sometimes involves destruction, explosion, damage to personal property, and occasionally teacher humiliation.

You'd better believe it!

Deaf Create is a new blog created to support the use of new media as a learning tool for deaf students across the borough of Greenwich. The project is led by Soren Hawes at Tallis and has the following objectives:

• To create a pathway from early years to post 16 education to enable students and staff to develop their use of new media to support learning
  

• To use new media to develop resources and teaching to make the curriculum more accessible for deaf students
  

• To share and develop expertise in new media between different support bases in the Deaf Advisory Service
  

• To allow access to technologies that develop student independence, communication skills and enhance student self-esteem
  

• To record and share learning and resources more effectively among students, parents, teachers and community groups

The project has its own YouTube channel and features a range of useful "How to" videos and examples of media products made by staff and students. This one about the application Comic Life has some fantastic sound effects!

We believe that students and members of staff should collaborate on creating a curriculum for the 21st century. In order to develop our ability to integrate creative learning strategies into this new curriculum, we set up an Action Research Group comprising student representatives from all years and a group of enthusiastic members of staff. We now meet weekly to discuss progress, share our thinking and publish policy recommendations for consideration by the school's Leadership Team. We recently presented a report about School of Creativity activities since September 2008, complete with a set of recommendations and a draft Manifesto for a Creative Tallis. Several student members of the group will be entered for the national Arts Award accreditation scheme based on their contributions this year. We are currently planning an innovative theatre arts residency in June by Tangled Feet, based on their production "Home". The group has a blog which we use to communicate between meetings and highlight aspects of creative learning, especially in the field of new technologies and Web 2.0 applications.

Working closely in collaboration Kerry Gibson (ART AST) and Sharon Gallagher (Maths) have devised a system for encouraging students to reflect on learning experiences using a combination of colour and abstract forms.  Evaluations are based on the emotions the students feel before, during and after they have completed an activity.  They use Kandinsky’s colour code (see below) and consider the quadrant diagram (see image below) to give them a sense of a time scale.  Recent experiments have included the introduction of 3D evaluations in clay and working with teachers to encourage them to evaluate their own learning. The system can be used with students of all ages and often reveals surprising and beautiful results.

This project forms part of a series of initiatives related to the Personalisation of Learning undertaken by a range of staff members under the umbrella of our Leading Edge status. More information about all these projects can be accessed on the school's main website.

In March 2009, the school hosted an unusual evening of entertainment involving live video projections, a three course meal, a performance from the Bollywood Brass Band and discussion about the role that creativity might play in the regeneration of the local area. The evening was the culmination of a collaboration with Netribution, the Technology Strategy Board and Eelyn Lee Productions. Members of the Creative Tallis Action Research Group assisted backstage and helped to make the evening a great success. It was fascinating to watch the Vusicians struggling with the mountains of equipment and problem-solving as they prepared for the performance. Students don't often get to witness professionals behind the scenes facing challenges and working together to solve them.

The most exciting aspect of the event was the way the team of artists, staff members, students and parents worked collaboratively to create an unusual and stimulating experience for our visitors.

The feedback from the evaluations completed on the night suggests that there is definitely an appetite for this form of entertainment, at least in our corner of South East London.

In October 2008 a group of Gifted & Talented Year 7 students were selected to take part in a Poetry and Film workshop with film maker Eelyn Lee. In an intense day of activity, the students worked in groups to create a poem about their sense of identity and local area, storyboard a film, shoot the footage and edit it using iMovie. The resulting film poems are of a very high standard and we are looking forward to a follow-up workshop with the same students this term (summer 2009) to help them make further progress in developing their film making talents. Here's an example of one of the films. Click here to see the others.

In April 2009 we organised an experiment for Year 7 students to enable them to make connections in their learning and think about Healthy Lifestyles. The students were off timetable for a day and elected to take part in a wide variety of activities from blogging to break dancing. Loaded Productions made a video documentary of the day (see opposite) capturing the thoughts of participants and creating an opportunity for us to reflect on what was achieved in order to improve provision in the future.

We believe that making connections between diverse bodies of knowledge and transferring skills across the curriculum are vital 21st century skills. We hope that further days like this will encourage our learners to try new things, take a few risks and understand the need for flexibility and resilience in their learning.

Inspired by the work of neuro-scientists in America, Professor Helen Storey devised an installation entitled "Eye & I" which was housed in a Year Base at Tallis during the first two weeks of July 2006. Drama and Business Studies students collaborated on running the project which involved them in working with professional actors, a theatre director, Helen Storey and their teachers, learning a variety of skills related to manipulating the muscles around the eyes and how they can be trained to convey authentic emotion. Visitors to the installation from in and outside school had an exciting and thought-provoking experience which we have captured on video and accompanying photographs. In addition, an evaluation report by Kat Joyce captures the reflections of the staff members, students and 300 visitors.

Inspired by Professor Helen Storey's generous gift of the original scale model for her Amygdala installation, we decided to encourage Year 7 students to reflect on a time in their lives when their amygdalas were working overtime - the transition from primary to secondary school. The amygdala is the part of your brain which controls your fight or flight reactions. Students submitted their thoughts about this challenging time in their lives and we published them as an online book using Issuu (see opposite). This was then shown to family and friends at the "Identity" inter-disciplinary arts event in January 2009.

The stories and pictures contained in the book testify to the complex set of emotions that accompany the transfer to secondary school. Thankfully, most of the contributors report that, despite feeling worried and nervous, their introduction to Thomas Tallis was very positive. We are hoping to build on the success of this project next year.

Tallis TV began life when staff and students from Ravensbourne College of Art & Design visited school to run a masterclass on TV production techniques. It is now a fully fledged online broadcasting unit. Students form the editorial committee, shoot all the footage, write the scripts, present links and edit the programmes. They get a bit of help with subtitling and uploading to the internet from staff in the Film & Media department. The schedule of fortnightly episodes, working under pressure and the need for intelligent collaboration means that the students benefit from a deep and engaging learning experience. You can now subscribe to Tallis TV via iTunes.

It seems a long time ago now, but our journey to becoming a School of Creativity started in earnest with this whole staff residential conference in March 2005. The aim of the event was to promote the value of creativity in learning and a whole range of workshops were organised covering a variety of approaches and techniques. Nick Williams, Head of the BRIT School (and ex-head of Tallis) was the keynote speaker and he spoke passionately about the need for teachers to model the creative learning process and be prepared to take risks. A journalistic team, led by Emma Warren, created a magazine about the conference in a single day and Loaded Productions made this film, documenting the activities. Consistent with the challenging nature of the event, the film makers were tasked with shooting and editing the film in only 24 hours so that it vould be shown to everyone in the plenary meeting. As you can see they did a brilliant job.