As a music teacher, opportunity for creativity seems to be naturally embedded into our curriculum. It is possible to have structure and order while also providing students with choices and the room to grow. On the other hand, too much creativity may be daunting for some students, which is why it is important to still have some guidelines in place. It is a fine balance to strike between creating parameters to work within, while being careful not to take away from the creative flow. With each group of students, this will look different and various strategies (encouragement, guidance, providing the right skills, etc.) will need to be applied.
While it can be challenging to find ways to assess creativity, I have found that formative assessment opportunities work well and students feel more encouraged to take creative risks when they are not being assessed for a formal grade. Formative assessment has an overall positive effect on creative learning and can “improve learner outcomes” (Lucas, 2016). When incorporating summative assessment, it is crucial to find ways to “diversify practices to enable students to demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways” (Bolden et al., 2019). At the beginning of the semester, I place a stronger focus on teacher feedback to support my classes. Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi (2020) state that “immediate feedback about the progress being made” is one of the conditions for entering flow state. Once students have grown to know their peers a bit better, I introduce peer feedback. Around mid-term season, I begin to incorporate self-reflection. By the end of term, all three of these are in place. These formative assessment strategies support social-developmental and socio-constructivist learning theories that “employ students’ metacognitive abilities” (Bolden et al., 2019). I have generally experienced positive results with these formative assessment strategies, with many students registering for the class again the following year because they feel motivated to continue growing as a musician and learner.
References Bolden, B., DeLuca, C., Kukkonen, T., Roy, S., & Wearing, J. (2019). Assessment of creativity in K‐12 education: A scoping review. Review of Education, 8(2), 343–376. https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3188
Lucas, B. (2016). A five-dimensional model of creativity and its assessment in schools. Applied Measurement in Education, 29(4), 278–290. https://doi.org/10.1080/08957347.2016.1209206
Nakamura, J., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2020). The Experience of Flow: Theory and Research. The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology, 3rd Edition, 279–296. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199396511.013.16
Kingston, March 2019
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