A Game of Reflective Practice

Over two academic years, Grimm & Co partnered with Astrea Academy Trust to deliver a creative peer mentoring programme across eight primary schools in South Yorkshire. Our project was called Chapter & Verse and together we shared teacher and artist expertise, built creative courage, and developed a toolkit to enable more creative exploration to take place in Literacy. An integral part of this programme was our commitment to regular, structured reflective discussion and planning between teachers and artists as part of our wider approach to evaluation. We wanted to make this both creative and fun to match the ethos of the creative work taking place with children but we also knew we had to make this manageable and useful for teachers. And so, I introduced the Snap Evaluation Game.

It was important that the game operated at pace and didn’t take too much of the teachers’ time. It was also important that after a day of creative exploration, we didn’t revert to an uninspiring model of extracting information from teachers and artists, the creativity needed to continue on. We took inspiration from both the traditional game of Snap and the notion of archetypes that are commonly used in Tarot.

Snap established a fun element that was slightly competitive and allowed the teacher and artist to gain some distance from the intense day they had just experienced. Each card represented a theme we were exploring within our wider evaluation for example ​‘children’s collaboration skills’ and ​‘teacher creativity’. We were keen for the cards themselves to look professional and beautiful, so they were produced according to the texts that the children were studying. A Grimm & Co volunteer artist, Phillip Lee, designed and created the cards.

• A player ​‘snaps’ when two cards of the same suit are played.
• The winner of the pile of cards does not add the cards to the rest of their hand, but instead leaves them in a pile, face-up, in their playing area. The top card (or the ​‘snapped’ card) becomes one of the themes that the player will reflect on.
• For example, in Image 1, Miss D had drawn the themes:
  - Pupil progress: socio-cultural
  - Collaboration
• On each of these themes, the player then places their ​‘archetype cards’. The archetype cards invite the teacher and artist to reflect on the emotions and feelings the theme brought out in them.
• In the example in the photograph below, Miss D reflected on the following:
  - Pupil Progress: socio-cultural = Courageous and Fun
  - Collaboration = Inspired and Creative
• Once complete, the teacher and artist audio-record themselves discussing the cards and chosen archetypes.

We found the game focused the teacher and artists’ professional dialogue, honing the teacher and artists’ reflections into our key areas of enquiry. This relaxed and playful structure resulted in extremely useful data, which was later analysed to understand and evidence the changes the project made to teachers’ practice and the children’s engagement in learning. 

As well as being vital as a means of evaluating the overall project, the process was extremely valuable in real time too, because immediately after the evaluation the teacher and artist started to plan the next week of delivery. This meant that they could implement the changes there and then as they were fresh in their minds. 

The approach therefore supported our formative as well as summative evaluation plans. Another benefit of using this approach was that it supported the teacher and artist to develop an honest and trustworthy professional relationship, resulting in a resilient collaboration. Importantly we kept the ​‘ask’ manageable and useful, this 15-minute reflective activity provided a regular safe space to talk openly about the project but also about wellbeing and work pressures.