PLAN

Understanding Context

• Find out what other teachers in your school are doing in relation to your topic
• Find out what other research has been done on your topic
• Refine your topic / research question

Introduction

This module is about developing your understanding of what other teachers and researchers have already found out about your creativity topic, and putting this alongside your own understanding of creativity as developed in the creativity module. It’s a core part of planning your research and is also an important part of the professional learning you are engaging in through the Action Research process.

It’s likely that other teachers are asking similar questions to you, and may be facing similar challenges in their practice. Spending time understanding the background to your topic helps you find out how other people might be approaching those questions and challenges. It also refines your understanding of creativity and allows you to relate what you’re doing to any relevant policy or practice initiatives in your school or more widely.

If you discover someone else has already done a study similar to yours, this can be very useful: it might answer a part of your question, or help you refine it or focus in detail on how the findings can be applied in your own setting.

The activities here will help you to quickly locate some relevant information and utilize it for your research. If you would like to publish your research in an academic journal or submit it as part of an academic qualification then you will need to conduct a more extensive literature review, and there are suggestions below for texts that will help you to do this.

AI can be utilised as a tool here to give you some basic background information to work from or to summarise documents to help you decide whether they are important for you to read. We recommend that you do not rely on AI to complete the task since it will not give you reliable information or a critical perspective on the sources it has utilised – a small amount of your own reading will be more valuable. If you utilise AI in any work you intend to publish, remember to cite it as you would any other source.

Activity 1: Understanding your school context

This activity is about exploring your own school policies and practices in relation to your topic, and locating others from / with whom you can learn.

• Using the definition of creative skills or pedagogies you developed in the Understanding Creativity Module, consider how teaching for creativity / your creativity research topic is currently being addressed in your school. Explore more deeply any existing initiatives in your school.

For example, if your research topic is about assessing creativity, have a look at any policies or initiatives that are to do with either creativity or assessment and consider how they are currently applied.

• Make a note in your Research Diary of key points relevant to your research.
• If it is not yet being addressed formally, then explore whether there is anyone else in your school whose practice you can learn from. Find a forum in which you can share practice.

This can be as informal as chatting with a more experienced colleague, or more formal approaches could include putting it onto the agenda for a short discussion in a staff meeting, or conducting a lesson observation in which you identify points in a colleague’s practice that you can learn from for your research.

Reflect: how can this apply to my research? Discuss your reflections with your Dialogue Partner and add any learning points to your Research Diary.

For example, if your research is about creative dialogue, then maybe you will find a link between this and your school’s work on oracy – note this down with any specifics that will help you to refine your question or plan your creative action; likewise, you could make a note of a teaching strategy you observed that you would like to try out with your class during your research.

Activity 2: Understanding the literature

This activity is about learning from other research that has been conducted on the topic you are researching.

• Search for literature that addresses the topic that you have decided to investigate. This can take a long time, so be very focused in your searching, skimming through your results to look for 2-3 key texts that are closely relevant to your research topic. Types of literature you might want to consider include: practitioner journals, websites of subject associations, research-focused blogs, policy documents, education news reports (these help you to understand current debates and issues).

Some starting points are:

• Return to the Understanding Creativity module to review the definitions of creative skills and creative pedagogies developed through Penryn Creativity Collaborative.
• Read the literature review (pp 14-21) in the Penryn Creativity Collaborative report, Year One.
• Creativity Exchange: Articles, blogs and research reports on schools-based practices in teaching for creativity from the UK-wide Creativity Collaboratives programme.
• Explore the Action Research reports written by the Penryn Creativity Collaborative teachers
• Impact: Journal of the Chartered College of Teaching: connecting research findings and classroom practice.
• BERA blog: Blog posts from the British Educational Research Association providing research informed content on educational issues. Refine your search using the drop-down menu on the left, selecting ‘SIGS’ and then ‘Creativities in Education’ to find relevant articles.
• Times Educational Supplement

Don’t have much time? A wealth of recent research and projects in schools are reported on the Creativity Exchange ‘Ideas Hub’. Select one reading from here relevant to your research, and move to the next step.

• Read the literature critically, looking for key points that will inform your research. Use our Research Journal Reading Template with guide questions to help you read critically and efficiently. By reading critically we mean that you should question the viewpoints presented, consider whether there are alternatives, question the clarity, logic and credibility of the writing, visuals etc.

Take care with the sources that you select, particularly online. Research literature is usually ‘peer reviewed’ and published in journals, which means that the methods and interpretation have been checked for research rigour by another researcher who is not the author. Blogs, newspaper articles and other online sources often support one particular point of view. So read any information you find with this is mind and check other sources so you are aware of multiple perspectives.

Reflect: how can this apply to my research? Discuss with your Dialogue Partner and add any key learning points from your reading template to your Research Diary.

• Your reflections may mean you want to refine your research question: if so, do that now.
• You will also want to come back to your literature when you are interpreting your findings, so save the notes you have made in your Research Journal Folder.

Further reading

Centre for Collaborative Action Research (2024). Action Research Tutorials: The Inquiry Context: Local history and past research.

Koshy, V. (2010). Action research for improving educational practice: a step-by-step guide (2nd Edition). SAGE. (Chapter 3, Reviewing the literature).

McNiff, J. (2017). Action Research: All you need to know. SAGE. (Chapter 8: The responsibilities of practitioner-researchers: Engaging with literatures).

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FAQs

What should I do if I discover that the study I want to do has been done before?

Don’t panic! There are several options for you:

• You may want to repeat the study exactly as it has been done elsewhere, so you can find out what happens when you try it in your own setting. Are the results similar or different? What can you learn from this about the topic you are studying, or about your own practice or context?
• Reading someone else’s results may give you the information you wanted to find, in which case you could consider a ‘what next’ question. For example, if you were thinking about how teaching for creativity could be integrated with exam criteria, you might read the action research report, What do we learn about assessment from Penryn Creativity Collaborative. Here, teacher Holly Manclark explored this question in relation to GCSE English. A what next question could be: what would this look like in another subject area, or at another educational stage?

How much literature should I read?

This is a bit of a ‘how long is a piece of string’ question. In the context of your classroom study, you’re likely to have limited time, so we recommend engaging critically with 1-3 pieces of literature using the template we have provided, rather than trying to find everything that has been written on the topic. Be aware that there is always scope for more learning in relation to your topic, and be cautious with any conclusions that you come to, remembering that other research (using different methods, making different assumptions, or in other contexts – see data collection module) may have come to different conclusions.