Michael Rosen, poet, writer and long time advocate for the arts in education, recently posted a wonderful piece on the Guardian website about how we teach the arts being just as important as the fact that we do teach it. Many of you out there that work in the arts and teach, already know how important that is, but I thought his ten key points to how that should be approached and why are so important that they’re well worth sharing again.

Michael Rosen is a children’s novelist and a former British Children’s Laureate Photograph: Graeme Robertson

Michael Rosen’s teaching of the arts checklist:

1) have a sense of ownership and control in the process;

2) have a sense of possibility, transformation and change – that the process is not closed with pre-planned outcomes;

3) feel safe in the process, and know that no matter what they do, they will not be exposed to ridicule, relentless testing, or the fear of being wrong;

4) feel the process can be individual, co-operative or both;

5) feel there is a flow between the arts, that they are not boxed off from each other;

6) feel they are working in an environment that welcomes their home cultures, backgrounds, heritages and languages;

7) feel that what they are making or doing matters – that the activity has status within the school and beyond;

8) be encouraged and enabled to find audiences for their work;

9) be exposed to the best practice and the best practitioners possible;

10) be encouraged to think of the arts as including or involving investigation, invention, discovery, play and co-operation and to think that these happen within the actual doing, but also in the talk, commentary and critical dialogue that goes on around the activity itself.

To read the article in full click here.