Developing creative thinking skills in adolescents through play-based pedagogic planning principles

Abstract

It is becoming clear that in the 21st century, a focus on skill development in education is necessary to complement the curriculum, particularly with regards to creative problem solving. The emerging Pedagogy of Play seems to provide a framework to facilitate this but is not easily applicable in the mainstream UK due to difficulties in empowering teachers to use it on an everyday basis. In response to this, a simple methodology was developed to encourage teachers to implement a Pedagogy of Play approach in the secondary UK classroom, and a control experimental Student Focused method was explored in a similar way. A classroom evaluation of the two methods was undertaken along with a control teaching as usual group. This was done in a classroom timeframe collecting pre-and-post measurements of creative thinking using the Widening, Connecting and Reorganising model of creativity, in addition to teacher generated attainment at the same time points. Results indicated that teachers showed clear appreciation of, and engagement with, the approach for both innovative methods. The use of Pedagogy of Play led to significant enhancements of creative thinking while the Student Focused method did not, although this group did show a significant improvement in subject attainment. This indicates it is possible to enhance creativity within the school curriculum and that Pedagogy of Play may be a way of doing this. Future research should focus on the exploration of a hybrid methodology to enhance both creative thinking and increase subject attainment.