Super. Thank you for putting all this together.

Teacher and pupil creativity. There's a big difference between teacher creativity and pupil creativity.

For instance if I say "write a story about an elephant" I am not being particularly imaginative or creative. However it is an open-ended assignment that gives the children plenty of chance to be creative. Most will produce a few pages of competent prose about zoos or African jungles, a few will try something a bit offbeat, like a white elephant story, and ypu might get a few really nice, even publishable pieces.

On the other hand a lot of effort can go into designing an activity that is not open-ended, An example would be a series of logic puzzles. These require skill and creativity to devise, but the answer is known by the person setting the puzzle. This doesn't mean that the activity is bad, but it is not, for the pupils, creative.

There are real problems with making resources available in a school environment. For instance in chemistry you could say "devise a method to measure the concentration of salt in a solution". The most accurate easy way of doing this is with a spectrometer. However will one be available? Are children advanced enpugh to understand the principles on which it works? Did they get this information by asking chemist fathers, and is that really what ypu are trying to teach? Another way is passing an electrical current through the solution and measuring conductivity. But do you really want batteries and wires and electrodes spread over the lab bench? It's fraught with problems. It's very tempting to say "measure salt concentration using (eg) scales, or thermometer and bunsen burner". But that makes the activity no longer creative, it's just looking for the right answer the teacher has devised.

Brilliant!. Thank you so much for this inspiring and thought provoking document.