Celebrating and Sharing Achievements

It is important to celebrate the achievements of everyone involved in your programme and to share what has been learned from the experience. Be sure to acknowledge the value of everyone’s contribution and thank people for their help.

Events
Special events, for example performances, may be an appropriate way of celebrating key moments in projects or of drawing your programme to a close. It is important that these events complement the overall programme, rather than acting as a time-consuming distraction. Putting together a final show or performance may take people’s attention away from the learning that is happening within projects. In other cases, however, it may be during the challenge of working towards an event that the greatest learning takes place. Careful judgements need to be made.

Publications
It may be appropriate to produce a publication that celebrates your Creative Learning programme. During the course of your programme, you will inevitably have amassed a selection of images, quotable statements, stories and other pieces of work. Bringing these together into a publication that shares your experience with a wider audience will create a resource that others might learn from. It is important that in producing such a publication you pay sufficient attention to describing the evidenced impacts that have arisen from your programme. While a narrative of the creative learning journey may be meaningful to you, a wider audience will want to learn about the deeper impacts that have arisen in the course of your work.

Dissemination across the school
In smaller schools, creative learning projects usually grab the attention of the whole school community and communication across the staff team is relatively straightforward. In larger schools, you will need to plan ways to ensure that the learning derived from the programme is shared with the staff team. Whole school inset days are a good way of sharing learning, and Creative Agents and practitioners will be happy to participate in such events, facilitating activity alongside teachers. Staff meetings are also helpful. In advance of inset days or staff meetings, you should plan for building on colleagues’ interest and enthusiasm for extending this work themselves.

Networks
Creative Partnerships schools are encouraged to participate in networked learning, and there are a variety of arrangements to facilitate this. Creative Partnerships Coordinators attend regular learning network meetings in their area and share experiences with others in a similar position. Your school will also be involved in other established networked learning groups. These are important forums for sharing your experience of developing creative learning with schools that may want to develop more creative learning environments.

Visitors
Creative Partnerships schools are often asked to welcome visitors who want to know more about creative learning. While at times visitors can be an inconvenience, it is important that interested colleagues gain access to the excellent practice being developed in your school. Your school will become accustomed to managing levels of interest and it is important that you balance receiving guests with visiting other schools yourself to learn from others.