England Infuses Schools With the "Wow Factor"

Hello there. I am dedicating my blog to “Wow” moments in teaching. These moments are creative teaching lessons and experiences that excite the students and often the teachers as well.
My first blog refers to an article I read entitled, “We Want the Wow Factor” by Naomi Westland http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/may/26/creativity-schools. This article is about how certain schools in England are changing the curriculum to make a “creative curriculum”. This curriculum still teaches the students what they need to know, but takes a broad theme and uses that theme to aid in teaching classes for a half term or up to a full term. For instance, some of the themes used were castles, aliens, space, water, and minibeasts. These themes often present a lot of history or geography, but the schools also find ways to relate them to all subjects. The tough part of this new curriculum is making sure it still meets national curriculum objectives. This is tough being it is taking a risk and thinking more outside of the box. However, with this new curriculum in effect, behavioral problems have “evaporated” and it has made the teachers enthusiastic and the students willing to learn. Teachers are not sitting around lecturing to the students and are there more to help promote the creative learning process. Due to this, teacher morale is up.
Most activities are hands on and students often go on field trips to experience learning. For instance, the article explained how the children were learning about castles and were making a traditional Chinese Dish that people would eat in the castles in China. For learning about Medieval Castles the students get to dress up in the appropriate dress for the time period. These activities excite the children and they often go home telling their parents what they learned in school, which is instead of the parents having to drag it out of them.
Another idea that I found interesting is all students who go to a school that incorporates this type of learning has to learn an instrument. I myself being a band teacher, agree this is important and infuses culture and teaches the students about not only culture, but also incorporates history, geography, and math. I can see why the schools would want to make this a must for every student.
I personally found this to be a very interesting article and thought it gave a lot of great ideas of how to make your lessons exciting for you and your students. However, I do think that starting a “creative curriculum” would take a lot of time and planning. It would need to be exciting and activities would need to be planned out, but also it would be somewhat difficult to make sure it lined up with the national curriculum. It would be good though because people are always talking about cross curricular activities and I can easily see how this would be perfect for doing those types of activities. Those are my thoughts, what are yours?

Westland, N. (2009) We Want the Wow Factor. Retrieved on May 27, 2009, from http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/may/26/creativity-schools