I was in the UK last week for a brief visit and one essential activity is always to take a browse in the nearest bookshop. I had no particular goal in mind and good as Amazon and its ilk are at locating and sending you books which you have decided you want, they still remain rather bad for browsing and for making serendipitous discoveries.
Therefore I was very pleased last week to find a book entitled 'The Creative Teaching and Learning Kit' by Brin Best and Will Thomas. I like it for many reasons.
I like it because, although written with the UK school system in mind it is sufficiently general to be widely applicable beyond school and beyond UK borders. Often wide appeal means that the advice is too general to be of use but I would say that the book is chock full of ideas which can be used immediately in many settings.
I liked also the very first chapter on visions and values because I have been looking for inspiration about teacher values for several weeks now in connection with the VITAE project. The section manages to convey the theory while at the same time presenting some very clear and concrete actions to allow one to find out which value clusters you and other stakeholders most closely identify with.
I also like its multi-facetted approach employing visualisation techniques, aspects of multiple intelligences and NLP in a healthily sceptical manner. You don't have to buy into these theories to see the value of employing some of their techniques.
When I got the book home I discovered that there should have been a CD-Rom with it. I have since acquired the CD-ROM but am not convinced how much this adds to the overall value of the book since it only contains electronic versions of some of the forms in the book.
Not surprisingly the book is in the running for the 2008 Education Resources Award.
Finally there is a website to accompany the book at http://www.creativityforlearning.co.uk/ so that you can get a flavour of the approach.
Keywords: Brin Best, Creative teaching & learning Toolkit, Will Thomas
