The Creative Election: due to our major project this term being all about politics, we gave them a preferential voting task that put the five habits of creative thinking as the candidates. This was an early test for their understanding of the five habits, indicating which habits we can focus on and help the students with. Additionally, it gave the students a taste of a mock election and preferential voting.

Snack Election - Names, Slogans, Poster. Students were put into groups then each group allocated a snack. They had to then come up with a name and slogan for a political figure or party with that snack as the leader, designing a slogan and name associated with the snack that might entice people to vote for their snack. This was a basic introductory exercise to marketing for politics, giving students a flexible opportunity to create and think about how political figures or parties might market themselves, similarly to snack companies or products.

We conducted a simple class discussion about the activities during the lesson, then counted up the votes from our Creative Election at the start of the class. This gave us some basic data/feedback about the students’ perspective on the creative habits, and which they understand, or don’t.

Our original plan for the term was to run the students through the snack election tasks, but we found they weren’t working well with the amount of creative freedom provided with the introduction to this task. We’re planning to give them more structure to their following activities and projects, to help reduce the scope of their creativity, motivating them to be more persistent in their tasks.

The students enjoy being creative, but structure will be necessary for getting good work out of them, rather than idle chatter. They also love class discussions, so we’ll continue to give them opportunities to chat but with purpose.

Since the Snack Election idea didn’t pan out so well, we’ll be trying them on something more ground-level and relatable. We will work on building an activity that uses real policies/commitments held by past political figures of Bullwinkel (the electorate of the school).

Keeping things simple for the next session with just paper for the students to write on, and developing a powerpoint to keep activities on track.

The creative election slips will be kept for reference later on. Possibly, to conduct additional creative elections, and see how results differ, and discuss amongst students why that might be.