6 ways to make time for creativity: #4 summer camps and weekend workshops
Flexible and fun, this approach can really boost your income!
You can’t do everything all at once, as we discussed in the last post. If you and your students are working towards exam and/or performance goals, it can be hard to fit in creativity into lessons.
That’s why many teachers prefer to teach creativity in “bonus” time.
Offering your students creative summer camps and group creativity workshops is an effective way to allow you to continue teaching “as normal” on a typical teaching day.
They offer significant flexibility: you can do them whenever you want, without having to commit to doing them regularly, and they can be a useful way of generating extra income.
If you have never taught groups before, Christopher Fisher’s Teaching Piano in Groups, published by Oxford University Press (pictured below) is a useful guide to getting started. He doesn’t cover many creative activities—improvisation is discussed briefly and there is a list of further resources— but it’s a good guide to many of the other aspects of running group lessons that you’ll need to consider.
If you need material, Andrea and Trevor Dow have a well-thought through book called The Curious Case of Muttzart and Ratmaninoff that will give you a useful framework. It’s designed for groups of kids aged 7-11, is full of amusing cartoons, and is pedagogically sound. It is available on a studio license, so it’s very cost effective.
I also recommend Carol Klose’s excellent book on teaching composition:
Klose doesn’t really discuss teaching in groups, but there are so many useful creative ideas in this book that it makes an excellent source of inspiration.
Pros and cons
I have mixed feelings about this approach.
The big downside is that it treats creativity as something “unusual” that doesn’t belong in “normal” lessons. That’s contrary to everything this site is about!
There are however several upsides:
It’s an opportunity to experiment with activities
It’s a flexibile way of bringing in some extra income, especially in the quieter summer months
It’s a nice short-term opportunity for teachers who aren’t currently integrating much creativity into their lessons to try it out
