Education Scotland draws a clear distinction between creativity skills, creative process, creative learning and creative teaching, which is an indicator of how highly creativity is valued by the Scottish government. These definitions, along with a wealth of other information related to creativity in the Scottish education system, can be found in the document below: Creativity Across Learning 3- 18. Just click on the image to access the document.

According to Ruth Wishart, Chair of the Creative Learning Plan Strategic Group, "The ambitious aim is to allow our young people to be the best they can be in a new curricular environment where innovation is cherished, change is embraced and we celebrate the fact that every child is a creative child" ~ (Creative Scotland p. 7).

Creative Learners will be:

• Motivated and have ambition for change for the better, including their own capabilities
  
• Confident in the validity of their own viewpoint
  
• Able to apply a creative process to other situations
• Able to lead and work well with others

Education Scotland has published many other tools and resources to help all individuals support the development of creativity in schools and society. For example, they have created an "Everything is Creative" infographic maker as an online digital tool for creating high quality creativity and improvement infographics, memes and posters, as well as published infographics to explain why creativity is integral to Curriculum for Excellence and improves outcomes for all learners. Here are two examples:

Education Scotland created a Creativity Portal, which houses creative online teaching tools, CPD resources, inspiration and examples of best teaching practices. Education Scotland also produced ​The Creativity Toybox, which contains 27 short videos and related activities that can be used to develop creative thinking skills in the classroom or community setting. Here is the introductory video:

Even though there are no CfE Benchmarks for creativity skills, Education Scotland references the City of Edinburgh’s 3-18 Creativity Skills Progression Framework to help inform educatorsʼ understanding and context of creativity skills as students progress through the grades. You can download this 2-page document on this link where Education Scotland provides a host of resources to support educators in their planning for and evaluating creativity. Hereʼs the first page to give you an understanding of the commitment city councils have made to developing creativity and recognizing it as an important skill to address the challenges of globalization where Scotlandʼs economy must be based on creativity and constant innovation to be able to compete internationally.

The last resource, Education Creativity and Learning: what is the connection?, is a research document and thought piece by Paul Collard, Chief Executive of Creativity, Culture. Collard highlights distinctions between characteristic features of  the "high functioning classroom" vs. the "low functioning classroom" and explains how schools involved in the Creative Partnerships program in England "showed that a student educated in a context in which they are an essential learning resource, and where mobility, emotion, team working and risk are central to the learning experience, is a student who is ‘high functioning’" (p. 4). Collard also stated that being a high-functioning child leads to resilience, confidence, sense of competency, autonomy and relatedness - all which underpin successful learning. I plan to keep this diagram by my school desk back in Juneau to ensure that I embed these characteristics in my lesson planning.

Diagram: Characteristic features of a the so-called ʼhigh-functioning classroomʼ (Collard, 2016, p. 5)