A metacognitive approach to developing creativity

Dr Jonathan Firth, University of Strathclyde, UK Dr Claire Badger, The Godolphin and Latymer School, UK Background Creativity is widely considered to be a vital skill in education. It sits at the pinnacle of the revised Bloom’s taxonomy of skills (Anderson et al., 2001) and has been recognised as important across all curriculum areas (van Broekhoven et al., 2020). It will impact students’ future in the workplace, as well as being embedded throughout the competences that all citizens need (European Commission, 2018). Well beyond their school days, our students will need to find creative solutions to problems. While the importance of creativity is relatively uncontested, the best way to teach it is controversial. There is a recognition in cognitive psychology that developing transferrable skills is often difficult (e.g. Barnett and Ceci, 2002; Sala et al., 2019). Transfer of creative thinking from one situation to another appears to depend on how it integrates with domain knowl