Book Nook - Creative Thinking in Schools: A Leadership Playbook

Creative Thinking in Schools: A Leadership Playbook by Bill Lucas, Ellen Spencer, Louise Stoll, Di Fisher-Naylor, Sian James, Nia Richards and Katy Milne

Published by: Crown House Publishing, 12th October 2023

The book is a practical and interactive guide that draws together understanding about school leadership with a deep experience of cultivating creative thinking in all aspects of school life and promoting creative learning habits in the classroom.

In a world in which the things that are easy to teach and test have also become easy to digitise and automate, the capacity of individuals to imagine, create and build things of intrinsic worth is rising in importance. Schools today need to prepare pupils for a period of extraordinarily rapid economic and social change, for jobs that haven’t yet been created, to use technologies that haven’t yet been invented and to solve social problems that we can’t yet imagine. People need to be able to imagine new solutions, connect the dots between things that previously seemed unconnected, see new possibilities and turn them into new products or ways of living.

All this makes creative thinking vital. And it presents a particular challenge to school leaders who need to inspire their teachers both to ensure that their pupils achieve the best qualifications they can in whatever accountability regime they find themselves, and to prepare their pupils for uncertain, challenging times.

We know an ever-increasing amount about curriculum design, the selection of signature pedagogies and how best to evidence the progress of young people’s creative thinking skills, but for real change to happen, we need to focus on building the knowledge, confidence and capabilities of the teaching profession to deliver these changes at scale. Which is exactly what Bill Lucas, Ellen Spencer, Louise Stoll, Di Fisher-Naylor, Nia Richards, Sian James and Katy Milne do in a groundbreaking new resource, Creative Thinking in Schools: A Leadership Playbook. Authored by a team of acclaimed educators and leaders, the playbook offers a comprehensive guide to fostering creative thinking in schools, a crucial skillset necessary for success in today’s rapidly changing world.





The playbook offers a series of evidence-based activities that school leaders can use with their staff to consider what creativity is, how it can be taught and assessed, and what cultural and system changes need to be put in place to enable this to happen. This is not about discarding current approaches to pedagogy, curriculum and assessment. Rather, it’s about noticing and responding to the space for creativity across all areas of school life. It’s about the use of frameworks to review and further develop whole-school thinking.




Creative Thinking in Schools has been published to coincide with the global release of the first PISA test results on creative thinking, the Creativity Collaboratives under way in England and the growing importance of creative thinking in countries across the world. It offers a framework for improving creative thinking based on the widely used Five Creative Habits model developed by the Centre for Real-World Learning. The framework focuses on developing learners who are inquisitive, persistent, collaborative, disciplined and imaginative.

Underpinned by research and analysis of practice in hundreds of schools across the world, and more recently by an in-depth study of fifty schools in England, Creative Thinking in Schools provides a range of accessible resources, planning tools and practical examples. These support leaders to reflect on their core purposes, understand the changes needed to embed creative thinking, develop leaders across their staff, facilitate the development of their teachers, plan, teach and assess creative thinking, and work with external partners, all the while developing a vibrant professional learning community.

Complemented by a dedicated website which contains additional downloadable materials and case studies, the playbook brings together a community of leaders and teachers around the world to connect with each other and share their own experiences in order to develop, spread, extend and evaluate creative thinking within and across schools.

The authors’ aim is to support a professional learning community of leaders and teachers who see creative thinking as a core purpose of education and are interested in making it a priority in their school. They hope that the playbook will become a valuable resource to all teachers and school leaders, wherever they are, and that its approaches to school leadership will be widely transferable across the world.