Top Tips for a Creative Classroom

Children’s author Piers Torday reveals the secrets to keeping creativity alive in the classroom.

Last week we welcomed a team of tremendous teachers through our secret door for an inspiring day of training. With talks from children’s authors, experienced facilitators, poets and more, everyone left with lots of new ways to bring writing to life in the classroom. 

Award winning children’s author Piers Torday led the first session and got the day off to a great start with some top tips on helping pupils to get stuck into creative writing. Lucky for you, dear blog-reader, we jotted some top tips down:

1. Take the pressure off – unlike diamonds, truly creative writing is never made under pressure. Creativity needs room to breathe. Whatever you can do to take the pressure off is worth a go, even changing the language around writing can be a real help!
   

   I don’t talk about writing, I talk about making things up.

2. All you need is love – providing plenty of admiration and affirmation for young writers’ achievements is essential. This is what helps them to commit to their ideas! Praising them for the courageous act of taking a risk and getting an idea onto the page has an ENORMOUS positive effect.

1. Choose choice – agency is key. Giving young writers’ the choice of what they want to write about is the best way to motivate them. It can be tempting to offer all sorts of guidelines to support them but if you can keep their agency at the heart of the planning, they’ll feel a real sense of ownership over what they create.
2. Creative community – young writers who support, coach and create together are a force to be reckoned with. And remember, community is fostered through play. Games can be a fantastic way to help young writers build up trust in each other and develop a friendly creative community.

That’s just the tip of the ice berg when it comes to fostering creativity in the classroom. If you want to read more about our schools programme and CPD days, head to our schools page.