Celebrating the Creativity that is Inherent to the Teaching Profession
An interview with Matthew Worwood and Cyndi Burnett, the creators and hosts of the FUELING CREATIVITY IN EDUCATION podcast.
The FUELING CREATIVITY IN EDUCATION podcast has been in full flow for almost 5 years now with the objective of “bridging the gap between the science of creativity and classroom practice, with a focus on both creative teaching and teaching creativity.” The creators, producers, and hosts of this podcast, Matthew Worwood and Cyndi Burnett sat down with Anna Abraham and Desiree Sharpe from the Torrance Center at UGA to discuss their motivations in starting this podcast, their journey so far, and their favorite insights from their over 200 interview with experts in the field of creativity and education.
Below is link to the full audio interview. We recommend listening to the interview while reading through it. Video excerpts are embedded within the interview transcript if you prefer a brief listen. Enjoy!
Anna Abraham
Welcome everyone! We were debating on whom to speak to next for this Substack, and we both thought it would be wonderful to cater directly to our community of educational professionals this time around. By we both, I mean, Dr. Desi Sharpe, who is the program coordinator of the Torrance Center and I’m the director of the Torrance Center. We’re all about creativity and we thought the fastest way to get up to speed with what is on the minds of people who are trying to cater to the educational professionals, is to ask the people who’ve been doing podcasting in this domain for a very, very long time now. So I want to introduce Cindy Burnett and Matthew Worwood who lead the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast. Has it always been called that?
Cyndi Burnett:
No.
Anna Abraham
Haha … maybe you can tell us about your journey. Tell us first a little bit about yourselves in terms of your background and what you currently do, and then the story of how you met and how it all started.
Cyndi Burnett
Sure, I’ll start off. I’m Cindy Burnett and I was an academic and taught deliberate creativity and creative problem solving for 20 years at the Center for Applied Imagination at SUNY Buffalo State University. I have my Master’s in creativity and then I have a Doctorate in Education from the University of Toronto and have written books about creativity. In 2019, I decided to go out on my own and start my own company called Creativity and Education, and that company was meant to bridge the gap between the research of creativity and the practice of creativity.
What I was finding was that there were so many amazing researchers in the field doing great stuff, there were so many great things happening in education, but I couldn’t see the connection between the two, and there were so many misconceptions in the education world that I wanted to help with.
So, I started Creativity and Education, where my mission is to integrate creative thinking into classrooms around the world.
Matthew Worwood
I think I’ve got a little bit of an untypical journey in academia. I kind of stumbled into it. I’ve always been involved in K through 12 education, with a sense of mission, but also a sense of flexibility. I’ve learned over the last 20 years that I’m someone who greatly values flexibility, partly because I like to bounce around and pursue different interests. I would say that my interest in creativity, even though I didn’t necessarily know about it, began when I was working for the Center for 21st Century Skills.
I just recently moved to the US and I found myself working on a digital media and design program at the Center for 21st Century Skills, a lot of project-based learning STEM focus. I’ve told this story a few times, but I found myself getting curious about originality.
Some of the challenges that I saw was when you’re providing ill-defined problems in the classroom, why is it that students and teachers were struggling to come up with new and different ideas?
I’m sure we’ve all experienced it talking to the K-12 education community. You put out a challenge and typically you’ll end up with seven or eight very similar ideas, and that was across schools. There was a specific incident where we ended up with ten films and seven or eight of them were on the same topic, which was recycling. They could have selected anything associated with the theme “green”, so I was really curious because I think we all make the connection that if you say, “all right, we’ve got this theme green, we’ve got to make a film about green” … we get the fact that recycling would come up quite early, but I was really curious, particularly at the time I was trying to promote something around climate change and different challenges that small communities might face around climate change, and we ended up with these seven out of ten films on recycling.
So, to cut a long story short, I conducted an intervention, identified what I thought originality, but I didn’t know there was this big field really of creativity, so that took me to Buffalo State University where I met Cindy. What was great about that particular program, and picking up what Cindy said about bridging the gap, is that I’ve always been involved in cutting edge innovative programs. We were trying to cultivate 21st century skills and so you suddenly had this vehicle, in essence, to try and apply strategies in the classroom to promote and cultivate creativity.
I think since that particular incident with the story that I described, and having that better understanding I got from Buffalo State and a master’s program, I then found myself, on that mission to cultivate more original ideas and be different and really embrace the ill-defined problems that we face as students in the classroom environment.
I always say that this is a gift; when you don’t have that example and you don’t have kind of a really specified direction on where to go, it is a gift when it comes to you trying to find ways of bringing in your interests, being creative in what you produce.
So, transitioning now to the end of the story, what I would say is I found myself at Johns Hopkins University doing my doctorate. I think that grounded me a little bit more in the research, particularly in traditional research around empirical evidence and looking at trying to make sure that we’re finding ways that we know work, strategies that work, not just in creativity, but just how to improve learning in general. I think during that time, I started to transition, dare I say, a little bit away from cultivating creativity in students in the classroom since I felt that I was able to do that in my practice at the University of Connecticut. We then got ourselves in a scenario where I’m like, I’m really passionate about cultivating creativity of teachers because I always find it fascinating how much we talk about how we want student creativity, and it’s important, but we look to these teachers, including ourselves, to try and cultivate creativity in our students, but we don’t know enough about the science of creativity, or necessarily effective strategies to cultivate creativity.
I still hold this belief that we focus on the educator and have faith in their skillset, that if we provide them with the knowledge and the information they need, they’re to go and make all the connections they need to cultivate student creativity in their classroom environment.
So, that really has been a big focus of my work over the last four to five years. I’ve done education consulting around that, often working specifically with schools, though at the University of Connecticut, I still continue to try and practice what I preach to my students.
I suppose I should transition and quickly talk about the podcast. During the pandemic, I’ve got my three kids. I’m watching these teachers navigate all the challenges of the pandemic. I just now finished my doctorate program and I’m seeing this and saying, “Wow, this is that example of teacher creativity firsthand.” I’m getting to see it from three different teachers behind a screen and watching it evolve over a sequence of months. I reached out to Cindy and said, “Hey, I want to do a documentary to kind of explore and celebrate the creativity of the teaching profession.” We had some back and forth about that, and eventually we landed on the podcast. It’s been a great journey ever since. It certainly started with cultivating and promoting the creativity of the teaching profession. But as we all know, it’s expanded into other areas as well, so that’s my story and connecting the original question to the podcast.
Desiree Sharpe
Cindy, I would love to hear a little bit about your perspective on developing the podcast and future ideas, and whether it has fulfilled some of your original mission about it.
Cyndi Burnett
That’s a great question. I would say that when Matt reached out to me – so Matt had actually been one of my graduate students and he took a class with me on creative teaching and learning – so when he reached out, at the time he was doing, you were doing a documentary, was that the class of 2030 when you did an interview with me at that time?
Matthew Worwood
So no, that was the first film, Creativity and Education: Exploring the Imbalance. But I was doing another documentary around digital culture, schooling in the digital culture, so this was meant to be the third film.
Cyndi Burnett
That’s right. Yeah, so he came to Buffalo State. It was 13 years ago we met and he was interviewing me and I thought he was really interesting. When he reached out, when I started Creativity and Education, that’s around when the pandemic was happening. He finished his doctorate and said, “I like what you’re doing. Let’s do something together.” So when we started the podcast, it was called Fueling Creativity, but as we started that first season, I said, “our goal is really education … the more specific we are, the better off I think we will be.” We want to reach educators and administrators and policymakers and researchers in this field. There’s lots of podcasts on the general field of creativity, so we didn’t want to do that, we really wanted to focus on education.
When you go through a doctoral program, as all of you know, you get a lot of in-depth insight because you’re immersed in the research. But I would say this journey, and it’s been almost five years that Matt and I have been doing this podcast, and we’ve done over 200 episodes, which is honestly mind-boggling to me … it’s a lot of work, so it’s always mildly comical when someone says to us, “I’m thinking about starting a podcast. What advice would you give?” I’m like, “Do you have an extra 10 hours a week? Because that’s how much time it’s going to take.” And that doesn’t even mean it will be successful.
We had a massive open online course that came out, myself and my colleague, John Cabra back in 2008 and we had over 70,000 people take that MOOC and I still have access to that distribution. That’s what helped us start getting an audience, because finding an audience for a podcast can be very challenging, so we had a really robust audience right from the get-go because of that MOOC.
It’s been an incredible journey in terms of learning so much about not only what’s happening in the scholarship of creativity and AI in particular, and we’ll get into that I’m sure later, but in terms of the whole field and education and how things are seen in education. I wrote a chapter in Ron Beghetto’s book, and this was maybe ten years ago, and it was like, “Do we need a revolutionary or an evolutionary approach to education?” And I wrote about how we need an ‘evolutionary’ approach because we need small incremental changes.
But ultimately, where we are now, I think we need a ‘revolutionary’ approach. It’s been interesting because that has come out as a result of our conversations on the podcast with both educators and people who are starting up.
We just did an interview with someone who’s running these micro-schools and how you can start them and what’s transforming. You’re seeing this grassroots change and then you’re looking ahead and trying to predict the future and you can see the great change that’s sort of happening, or that has the potential to happen. I think that’s been the most exciting journey. While looking at my doctorate and saying, “wow, this was a great five years of my life,” these last five years of my life has been the most fulfilling and most enlightening of my whole career. I mean, having Anna Abraham on our podcast and talking to her about neuroscience and learning so much about that in just a couple of hours.
Then the fact that Matt and I have become great friends over this and we use Marco Polo as a device to sort of debrief all of our episodes, and we have really lengthy conversations as it goes on. Then we try to bridge the gap for people to really understand what this means. So, I think it’s just been a tremendous professional journey.
Anna Abraham
Thanks for that, Cindy. I am really curious. The next question is going to be a little hard, I imagine, for you after doing 200 interviews. We want you and Matt to do something a little bit difficult, to give you a little bit of a challenge to try and distill through those interviews to pick some of your highlights. I know this is hard because I’m sure you have tons of episodes that are your favorite ones. It might be your favorite because it really spoke to you in a specific way, but we were interested in thinking about what you thought was really insightful, not just personally, but for just teachers in general, educators in general, and to tell us about your top three. For any person who was interviewed by these two, they love all of the interviewees, I’m sure, but it’s just about picking what you think has resonated with your audience the most, where you’ve got a lot of feedback, or thought, “this is really unusual in terms of what it’s really taught us to think about something that we’ve never really considered” – so, could you maybe pick your top three most insightful interviews for this particular context? And hopefully for each of you, the top three will be different.
Matthew Worwood
It is difficult, but we have been challenged to answer this question before. I think we both change our mind every time we’re asked. In season one, we interviewed Ron Beghetto and the focus was around ‘uncertainty’, which Ron has written a lot about. Obviously, Ron’s work is very closely connected to what Cindy and I promote on the podcast, but I think the thing that really stood out to me was talking a little bit about uncertainty.
We found ourselves talking about the struggle of learning. This idea of learning sometimes is painful, and it’s difficult, it can spark very powerful emotions.
I was at a time – I think I’d been at the University of Connecticut teaching around five to six years – I was still in that place, and I’m sure a lot of educators can connect to this, where you kind of want to be liked, that you perceive negative emotions through your students. When I say perceive them, you might not even be right, but we kind of work out what we think they’re thinking and feeling. For someone that would always try (for the reasons I outlined in the beginning story), to try and always have kind of very ill-defined problems and be very careful in how I use examples, my learning experiences do have a lot of uncertainty. That does provoke a lot of emotion from students, particularly those that are uncomfortable when they don’t know exactly what they have to do to get the letter ‘A’.
I’d slowly been in this process of providing more and more scaffolding and probably scaffolding that went beyond what we would say is good practice and actually providing a little bit more of that roadmap to assist them in solving some of those problems, primarily because I was feeling uncomfortable because I was feeling like a terrible instructor. I suddenly realized, I said, “You know what? I need to change how I view myself in that classroom environment and actually say, it’s okay if they’re uncomfortable, it’s okay if because of that discomfort, they have negative feelings towards me. My role in that classroom isn’t necessarily to be liked, it’s to assist them in getting forward and growing as people”. That certainly has been echoed on the show in other ways, but I always select Ron Beghetto’s episode because of that.
I’ll try and be quick on the other two. In terms of research, I really enjoyed Todd Lubart. I think he did a really good job at communicating his work on identifying creative potential per domain. I’m assuming a lot of our listeners are kind of familiar with ‘domain’. The challenge with creativity – I always struggle with these two words, being specific and being general – but that kind of piece, the idea of Todd Lubart talking about the work around measuring creative potential per domain, I found really fascinating.
I find it really exciting to be in a situation potentially in the future where you can measure creativity by domain in students, or rather creative potential. Let’s be clear, measure creative potential by domain, and be in a scenario where then perhaps there’s now opportunities to see where there’s creative potential and also interest. That was something I raised on the show with Todd Lubart, is that connection as well with interest. Because you might be really interested in something, but perhaps on that test you don’t do well for creative potential. So, what does that mean, right?
I think that when we talk about the talented and gifted programs, or just teaching creativity in general, or helping students reach and maximize their potential, there are so many challenges around career, learning preferences, and even the different modalities of expression in the classroom.
That was one of the reasons why I was really fascinated with Todd Lubart’s work. I think in that particular episode, he did a really, really good job of articulating that work, as well.
Then the final episode, I would say, would probably be our episode with Principal El. One of the things that Cindy and I absolutely love is when – it can be researchers, practitioners, or classroom teachers, but I’ve dialed down my passion from your first question, because it can get out of control – but what I would say is that when you’re interacting with really passionate people, you just feed off that passion. Those episodes are always incredible, where someone’s talking with incredible passion, particularly if they can control that energy.
Principal El did a really good job with that. The other piece in that episode is he brought up perseverance. He spoke about his story. He was talking about his journey teaching students in his school around chess and how they were navigating the emotion of being good at chess and then losing at chess and learning to persevere, which is so important. We spoke about it (before we hit record) about emotion in general, and being able to persevere despite that emotion. So there’s a close connection with what I just said with Ron Beghetto.
But then the other thing that emerged in that episode, which really resonated with me and I continue to think about, is in the US in general (and we see it in our education system because we know what’s happening in society is typically at the microlevel, we’re seeing it echoed in education) this desire to be number one. Everything’s set up to where you must be the best you can be and you keep going, you keep going, and it’s how we define that success. It’s not a case of being, this is now a little bit of opinion, but I think it’s not a case of just having a comfortable salary. Sometimes we can define success as having billions of dollars today! It’s never enough.
Likewise, it’s about that fame and fortune and we see it being played out on social media. Ten thousand followers isn’t enough. It’s 50,000 or 100,000. It’s something that I think Cindy and I do share because we have a loyal following and we care more about the engagement and making sure we’re reaching the right audience as opposed to how many followers we have. But it can be hard to think like that, and to bring it back to Principal Al’s episode, he’s talking and what became very clear toward the end is that Principal Al looked like he had opportunities to leave his school, but he recognized that he was a leader in that community. I can’t remember if Principal Al brought that up or it was something that came up in our debrief. For me, it made me really think about, let’s dial down the ambitions that we set where it’s all about us and reaching this kind of really high outcome that, to a certain extent, may be out of our reach. But it’s also a little bit self-centered. Make it a little bit more about how can you serve your community. It’s about being a leader in your community, contributing to the growth of your community. I think that is a much better way of teaching for a future society, where perhaps there’s a little bit more balance in measurement in how we define success.
From a creativity perspective, transformational creativity has come up a lot, this idea that it’s about you thinking about, yes, bettering yourself, but bettering people around you. I think it’s a lot easier to measure the success of bettering people around you if it’s people you know within your community. I think that these are the three episodes that have had a really big impact on me as a person in my practice.
Cyndi Burnett
So, my first one is Bryan Alexander, who I think came on the podcast in season one. We interviewed him back in July of 2021. Bryan Alexander is a futurist. For those of you who don’t know, a futurist is someone who doesn’t foresee the future in sort of a magical way, but looks at current trends and predicts what’s going to happen.
In July of 2021, we interviewed him and he talked about this relationship between artificial intelligence and education and creativity. This was really my first introduction into it because as we were researching him and planning for his episode, I started getting into things that were emerging in trends and articles. I was just amazed at what the potential was for artificial intelligence. He talked about how students of today will likely work in partnership with AI, solving problems alongside machines, just as they do with their peers. That was just so shocking to me at that time, so imagine, it was November of 2022 when ChatGPT first was launched, so a year and a bit later, and everyone starts talking, “Have you seen this?” and I’m like, “Yeah, I saw it like a year ago.”
I’ve been playing with it for the last year and trying things out and trying new programs out, and just every week or every month seeing a new way you could use a tool and trying to use it in different ways and thinking about the implications and being a part of the conversation. That was sort of the launch of our AI conversations.
We’ve had a number of, we have a whole list, a whole collection of episodes around AI and creativity in education now. I think we have nine episodes, Matt, that focus on that particular topic. Matt and I have done a Listen and Learn series, where you can listen to us talking about how we’ve been applying it in education.
It’s just been such an exciting time and seeing how things emerge and being able to talk about it on the podcast and showcasing how it’s emerged through our timeline of the podcast has been really incredible.
My second one was a teacher, and this is going to be a little bit surprising, the teacher Bea Leiderman. It’s not surprising because she was a wonderful guest, but what was surprising about her episode was she talked about her interest and she sort of fell upon this interest of taking macro photography. She was waiting for something to download and all of a sudden, she saw this blog post for someone who was doing macro photography. By adding a little lens to your camera, all of a sudden you could do interesting things and take pictures of water drips on your tabletop. She got into macro photography with bugs and started an Instagram page and then she started writing books. The whole concept of starting a creative practice of some sort and being a novice in something and talking to her students about it was so joyful for me.
In the same way that we loved Principal El because he was so inspiring, I was really inspired by Bea because here she is trying a new hobby that is creative. She’s talking about it with her students and then it’s transporting into writing children’s books with macro photography. It was just so interesting and so unusual.
I think for teachers that are listening out there, think about something new that you might take on. Maybe it’s learning how to play an instrument or doing a specific arts project or doing visual drawing, anything that you can try on your own, putting yourself in that place of being a novice and how challenging it can be just helps educators. It reminds them of that creative process of starting at the beginning of not really ‘knowing’, and then developing their creativity and their skills so that they can become more everyday creative, and then maybe even professional creativity.
Todd Lubart, we did a double espresso with Todd. I think what struck me was a little bit different than what struck you, Matt, because what really struck me was this idea of seeing creative potential and identifying it, but really what is that creative potential? So, if you have a child who has creative potential in music, but they don’t have access to music teachers, what does that actually look like?
On the flip side, this was a conversation we had for several weeks after; Matt, I don’t know if you remember, but if someone has creative potential, and we’re identifying that, so we take a measure and we say, “this child has creative potential, little Junie, she has creative potential in music.” Does that pigeonhole her into being interested in music and therefore we’re trying to find other things to get her involved with music? Is there a problem with that? Is there a challenge with that? Are we better off just following their interests?
I think back to our conversation with Sally Reis, who’s also out of UConn, and she talked a lot about those interests and really getting students exposed to different things. I think that challenge can be, you know you see that interest and they think that’s who they are. I mentioned before we started this call that my son is starting his senior year of high school. He’s always been this strong STEM kid. And just a few weeks ago, he said to us, “I am not just a STEM kid. I love music and I want to bring music into what I do in college.” I sort of saw that coming in some ways, but in other ways, I was so focused on who he was as a STEM, like gifted in STEM, that maybe I missed nurturing that creative potential in music because I was so focused on the STEM.
How do we expose students to all different sorts of things and allow them to emerge as the creative humans that they are born to be, not those that we might think that they should be, but those that they feel like they should be.
I think those are some of my highlights.
Desiree Sharpe
Thank you so much! So, Cindy, you are speaking to this idea, “do we do this or this”, and kind of dealing with the paradox of: “Do you hone these creative skills in this one area or, be well-rounded and explore, and how do you kind of have it all?” From your experience of the podcast, we actually would love to hear about what some of your kind of expected things that have happened, but also the unexpected, what has happened throughout the creation of this podcast and development of it that you were like, “Whoa, did not see that coming!”, as well as the emotional part.
Matt, if you want to start off, that would be excellent.
Matthew Worwood
Cindy and I actually, if I recall correctly, we used to always do this, but we started off by setting goals for ourselves. Then as we progressed at the beginning of each year, I think we set goals for the podcast. We do that at the beginning of every year. I think we’ve been doing that since we started. I look back to the goals I first set for myself and I found that I need time to articulate my thoughts and make my connections on paper. I can be very good at presenting because we’ve got a clear script, but one of the things that was a particular weakness of mine and still is, is just speaking off the cuff, right? Panels, conversations like this, it could be that I don’t do a lot of prep. I don’t have any talking points. I just go with the flow. But that was a goal I set for myself: ‘How do I engage in this very public arena where I’m going to at times get excited and go off on tangents, but then how do I bring myself back?’ I think I’ve always got good listening skills, but like anyone, if you go too far down that tangent, how do you go and bring it back? I think that’s so important because you’re learning to articulate your ideas and make connections, as Cindy said at the very beginning.
Both of us have had that endeavor of bridging the gap between the science and what we understand about the classroom environment. That’s really our role. I think that continues to be a challenge, but I certainly think it’s something that I’ve improved and [been] more comfortable with. The other piece of it, I think, is obviously just dealing with our own insecurities. For example – and I like, already, I’ve got edits in my mind – I’m like, can you take out that my first response because the caffeine kicked in and I was a little bit hyperactive, right? But the key point is, it’s getting to that…I’ve interviewed Anna three times now, so she kind of knows, but it’s getting to that point where you put yourself out there, and accept that you make mistakes.
In an episode with Laura McBain and Ron Beghetto, we speak about the emotional side of failure. They’ve got their book, My Favorite Failure, and that’s why emotions have come up because that’s what we’ve just been writing about at the moment. It’s learning to say, okay, “I’m potentially a little bit embarrassed about what I just said”, but so long as it hasn’t caused offense or, or been misinterpreted, developing that comfort to let it go, put it out there. I think in terms of how as things progressed, I think Cindy and I are getting more comfortable and better at showcasing our personalities on the show. I think what has been fascinating is how long it’s taken us to get to that. You said we’ve been doing it for five years and you congratulated us on that time, but Cindy and I are getting better at showing who we are on the podcast. It took longer than I expected because we had to wrestle through that discomfort, so that’s the personal response to that answer. There’s loads of technical production elements that we’ve had to learn along the way, but the personal aspect of our journey, that’s how I would answer that question.
Cyndi Burnett
I would echo so much of what Matt just said. I think for me, it’s a very vulnerable space because you’re talking and you want to sound authoritative, you want to know your information, and sometimes you don’t know something. Admitting like, “I don’t really know about that. Can you explain that to me?” And Desi, you mentioned in the beginning, like, you listened to a recent episode and I was talking about my daughter in New York City. When we finished that, I said, “Cut that whole thing out about my daughter. Like no one cares about me going to New York City with my daughter”, but it’s a vulnerable place, especially when we talk a lot about our kids on the show and telling stories about our kids and telling stories about our teaching and times when we totally failed when we were teaching and things didn’t go well.
I think you have to model that creativity if you want others to be creative. Matt and I have both been teachers for decades and we still make a lot of mistakes, and we still will say things that we wish we could take back or we try things out and they were a total flop. But as long as teachers hear that and they go, “okay, it’s okay for me to make mistakes”, then it goes down to the students.
I’ll never forget a class that I had and I said something and I was like, I can’t believe that just came out of my mouth. That class was probably the coolest class I’ve ever had in my career. Because I think I was like, “I’m really sorry that I said this. I didn’t mean it in a specific way. It came out the wrong way. I really apologize”, and they came up to me and they’re like, “Don’t worry. It’s okay. You didn’t say anything that was inappropriate.” But I was very self-conscious about that because I didn’t want to offend anyone. In the bigger picture of it, that class was like … I remember all of them. They still stay in touch with me because there’s something that happens when you connect with students and you’re vulnerable with them and share that you’ve made mistakes, too. I’m not saying that you have to fabricate mistakes and do things that are inappropriate, but when things come up and you try a lesson and it doesn’t go well and they say, “that didn’t really go well”, then you can say, “Thank you for letting me know. What could I do differently next time?” Not feeling like you need to know everything, then they don’t feel like they have to know everything.
There’s sort of magic in that kind of connection with students. I think that’s sort of what’s come out of the podcast. It’s funny because Matt mentioned Ron Beghetto, and I think it was season one we interviewed Ron. Back then in season one, we had all of our questions and we knew exactly where we were gonna take our conversations. And we knew by the word, who’s gonna say what and what. And Ron was like, “can you just take it off script?” And we were like, “No.”
Matthew Worwood
Well, Ron, he asked a question of you though, right? I remember he turned around and said, “So Cindy, what do you think of creativity?” He invited us to be part of that conversation.
Cyndi Burnett
He asked me for a definition of creativity. Yes, he asked me for a definition of creativity. I can still feel the blush coming over me because I just blanked out. The funny thing is not only do I know a definition, but I’ve written a published article in one of the big journals around definitions of creativity, and I couldn’t get it out of my mouth.
At that point he said, “You know, maybe you should think about being a little less scripted.” And so that’s when Matt and I went on this journey together. We’re like, okay, we’re not going to be perfect. And are we okay?
We always go back to like, “Van we have B plus work? Is this B plus work?”
And most of the time what we’ve created is B plus, we’re happy, and it’s good enough for this moment and knowing that we’re going to keep producing and it’s going to get better. Even if it’s never A plus work, we’re doing a lot of good B plus work.
Matthew Worwood
And just to build on that very quickly, part of it, Cindy used the word modeling. So, I think it was maybe after about two years – I recognize that I think we might talk about the book in a bit – but we’ve got these actions and as those actions became clearer and clearer, I think there was a recognition about our relationship, how those actions, the relationship of those actions to the podcast. One of them is modeling creative behavior and Cindy alluded to it, every season we look at mixing things up quite often. I think we like the structure of our seasons, which are only in the fall and the spring, and they now align very closely to the academic year. But there is some predictability about them, there’s less uncertainty about them, and the reason why that’s helpful from a production standpoint, is we can actually go and pre-record them and we can release them.
Anyone who’s in academia or even in education knows there’s points of the year where you’re really busy and you’re struggling to respond to emails, let alone trying to find time to organize an interview. So that’s great for those seasons, but the off seasons, which we quite often refer to as these Listen and Learn episodes, that’s where we get creative and every year we’re trying new things out. So, this would be the first season, season 11, where we are completely on video, so long as the guests are comfortable with it, we’re going to be producing a video. That’s going to challenge us even further because now it’s a lot harder to make cuts.
The YouTube piece, you’re going to be even more vulnerable with that because it’s even harder now to edit it. But so long as we keep challenging ourselves to do new things, I think – and I think, Cindy, you agree – it’s hard to get that ‘A’. We can’t change, we can’t produce content at the speed we’re doing with no budget, no help realistically, and keep trying to do new things and expect it to be great.
That is also part of creativity. I think it falls under that modeling of creativity, so that’s something that has definitely occurred over kind of like after two years, we said, “You know what? This is about the creative process. This is our creative space, our passion project.” Our journey through that is just as important as the conversations that we’re having with our guests.
Anna Abraham
It’s really interesting; when you said you just shifted to video, I had a flashback to my last interview with the both of you over the summer and I was not expecting to be on video and I was kind of nursing some sort of illness or something. In some ways I’m like, it’s impossible to be perfect because you don’t have a camera crew here working on your guests’ faces, all sorts of things that go into a production unit doing what they do really well.
I think what I love about podcasts is just that they are just interesting. When you guys were saying ‘B +’, I was like, that’s so interesting… I would always just think of (when I listen to you), it’s just interesting and therefore ‘good’. I think it’s this valuation thing that we always get, that’s the way we look [at things]. We’re creating work. Work must be evaluated on some scale, so it’s wonderful to hear that doing it has changed the way you think about what you’re doing, as well, and how some things are so hard to evaluate because there might be a little nugget in part of that whole conversation. Like the whole conversation is not going to be riveting maybe, but there’s something there which is this wonderful center point, which I think is a nice thing about conversations, how they unfold and evolve. I think you guys do an A+ job actually, if I might say so, even if you don’t think so yourself.
You must do a pretty good job because you’re going to make a book out of this! Leading on to your favorite episodes and your favorite insights and so on, can you tell us about what has come out of season 11 (congratulations on that!) and what has led you to the book? Why do you think about doing a book, or books, as the case may be? And where are you at with that?
Cyndi Burnett
When we started the podcast … ever since our first interview, which was with Susan Keller-Mathers, who is a professor in the creative studies department, we asked all of our guests for three tips that they would give to educators to help them bring creativity into the classroom. We always knew we wanted to take all of those tips and put them into a book. At the same time, we were looking at this concept of the ‘future creative’, which Matt came up with – Matt, I’ll let you talk about that in a minute – but Matt had this idea of the future creative, what would the future creative look like? So, we started crafting this book, we weren’t sure if we were going to go to a publisher with it or if we were going to self-publish it, how do we want to go through this process? And we were approached at the NAGC conference by Prufrock and they said, “We’d like to work with you. Can you submit a proposal?”
We are in the depths of writing the Ten Actions to Fuel the Future Creative. That’s the tentative name. That’s the name today. It’s probably going to change, but it is ten actions based on all of those tips that we’ve gotten over the last five years. We tell stories and we use these actions, Ten Actions to Fuel Creativity, these are actions that teachers can take based on our interviews. We tell some of the stories, we share some of the tips, we give really concrete examples, and we also bridge it with the research that’s happened in the field. We bridge that gap again in each of those actions. So, Matt, you want to talk about the ‘feature creative’?
Matthew Worwood
We didn’t address this in some of the questions, but that’s been a really interesting journey, as well, to see how those actions have emerged over a couple of years. Because you do … I think it was maybe after five seasons, we saw an opportunity to say, we’ve asked the same question from education practitioners, researchers, teachers, administrators … and we were starting to reach that saturation point where the same stuff was coming up again and again, so we did a little bit of the old-fashioned qualitative approach, and went through everything to find what were the themes, and that ultimately contributed to the actions.
It’s been an interesting journey to kind of think about how much Cindy and I bring to this. We’ve had some great conversations about failure, for example. Do we focus on it an “action” or as it a “theme”? The ‘Future Creative’ piece came in because it felt timely. Cindy had referenced the episode with Bryan Alexander and we kind of had it had a few episodes, which by the way, that the interview with Bryan Alexander was actually two years before OpenAI released ChatGPT, so we were already starting to talk about chatbots. We had David Cropley on the show in January, 2022, talking about AI and creativity. He raised this really good point – again, before OpenAI came out – that the challenge for the future of creativity is identifying what humans do really, really well and what perhaps AI might do better. You’ve got these types of conversations occurring along with conversations about the side-hustle culture. In higher education, I’ve seen a really big trend over the years with more and more students coming in. It’s almost as if they want a job that provides some stability and flexibility, so they can support their side-hustle. We were starting to see these conversations centered about the future, and so that naturally led to this idea of the future creative, which Cindy and I had this great back and forth over a period of 12 to 15 months.
As these actions were coming up, we recognized an opportunity to be presenting a book about it. We started to play around with doing presentations about the future creative, defining what it is, because ultimately a big part of the future creative is thinking about students across disciplines and students who have interests or creative potential in different domains. But ultimately, as we understand, they all represent the future creative. So, how do we support them and continue to cultivate creativity? And I think more than ever, I think we all probably agree on this, in a world of AI, we want to see that human creativity is going to remain critical. That’s how we’ve seen now that these two ideas come together in this book. Probably part one will have that future creative, setting it up, and part two of the book is going to be those actions. Each of those actions, as Cindy advocated for as we started the process, will have a section on: ‘What does this mean for the future creative?’ If it’s about emotions and teaching the feelings behind failure, then how does this all relate to the future creative?
Desiree Sharpe
Matt, you’re leading me into my next question so well. It’s not about GenAI quite yet, but I did want to get back to the challenging emotion component. I work with a lot of teachers doing teacher training. I teach them how to score the TTCT, the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, as well as some professional development tailored to their school system or program or type of curriculum that they’re currently using and updating. I would love to hear from you what you have learned about how teachers, when they’re first learning about bringing creativity into the classroom, the second they hit that point with their students, they really don’t know what to do when their students are feeling terrible about failing.
Matt, you were speaking to your experiences of that when you’re teaching. I would love to dive a little bit deeper with you, Cindy, as well, on your own understanding based on your experiences, but also what, when you’ve interviewed people and you talk about how teachers truly handle those moments with their students, because I think that is usually the first point in which they’re like, “I already have this prescriptive curriculum handed to me by my lead, or whoever the supervisor is for the academic component of the school, and I’ve tried to kind of adjust and now, I tried this thing and my students felt awful.” Maybe not even all of them. Maybe it was just one, but it was just so overwhelming of an experience for that teacher. I’d love to hear – you did kind of start to speak about changing your own attitude and experiences – but I know there’s got to be more that you guys have thought of and would weave into those actions. I know so many teachers would love to hear about that.
Matthew Worwood
I remember we did a Listen and Learn episode on this. We wanted to create some Listen and Learn episodes to support communities of practice. Cindy, I think I remember you talking, I think you took the lead in that and shared your story of experiencing having to navigate the negative emotions that your students had experienced in one of your classes.
Cyndi Burnett
Oh right, I can certainly speak to that. I think so much of it is about talking to your students about the process that you’re going through. When things don’t work out the way they want them to, to talk about what were the steps that you took. If you’ve given your students a challenge and they are working on it and they are frustrated… I remember I was working with a group of young girls, maybe like middle school age. I was in a school with just girls and I gave them a challenge and they got so angry with me and they’re like, “Can you just tell us what the answer is?” And they were trying to figure something out, I gave them a challenge to try to figure out. I could see there was one girl who just said, “Do not tell us what the answer is. I think we need to figure this out.” And I said, “Okay, all right, you figure it out.” And the rest of them were just, they were so beside themselves in the struggle.
And I said, “Just take a deep breath. So, what’s going to help us in this process? Okay, I want you to just take a deep breath and just, let’s do a little breathing exercise,” and trying out ways to let go of the frustration and take an incubation break. So, an incubation break, if a student is frustrated and you don’t want to give them the answer because that’s not going to help them, you need to let them work through that productive struggle, unless they’re in a point where they’ve totally spiraled out of control and they’re in tears, which I have had students do. I actually had a student once who was so worried about presenting her final project. She got up and she was shaking uncontrollably. I just gently put my hand on her arm and I said, “Are you okay?” She was shaking, but she did it. She said, “I am going to get through this,” and she did it and there was thunderous applause at the end of it. But if I had gently touched her shoulder and said, “are you OK?”, and she [had] said, “no”, I wouldn’t have made her go through that. You know intuitively when a student has gone over the edge of sort of spiraling in that emotional state. You don’t want them to go in that space, but you do want them to try to work through that productive struggle, because that’s what life is about. And so much of it comes from the debrief: “this process that I’ve given you, this problem I’ve given you, now you’ve tried to work through it and what’s worked, what hasn’t worked. How would you do this again if you were going to do this all over again?” All of these questions in the debrief are so essential because then when you go to the second one, you say, “Okay, here’s your second challenge. Now, think about what worked in the first one. This worked, yeah, okay, this worked, yes, what else? Okay, and this worked. What didn’t work was when I got angry, when I stopped thinking, when I crossed my arms and said, ‘no, Cindy, you’re making me angry.’” All of those sorts of things are so important in the debrief of the experience. Even if they have failed spectacularly, you have to celebrate that.
I do an activity, it’s on my YouTube station. I have a YouTube station with a bunch of creativity warmups, but it’s a failure activity.
You get into a circle and you have categories and the purpose of the activity is to fail. You celebrate when people fail. There’s something about setting the stage for, ‘you will probably fail. I want you to fail. Guess what’s going to happen when you fail? We’re going to celebrate, figure out what we need to learn from it and try again’.
I think all of those aspects, and I know I sort of went into a bunch of different areas, but I really think that if we can sort of normalize failure as part of the learning process, this is part of the creative process…we are going to fail – Matt and I will tell you we have failed multiple times on our podcast. We have done interviews that have been total flops that we have had to figure out what to do with those – it is all part of the process. If we can just give ourselves a hug and say, ‘here’s what I’ve learned and it hurts’, acknowledge those emotions. I think that’s something that Matt’s been writing about, [which] is really acknowledging like, ‘I know this is hard. This does suck. We’re gonna keep working through it.’ That’s the best thing that I think we can do. So often we don’t because we just want them to have a good experience and have a great time in class and really enjoy learning. I think that’s something that’s come out of [this]. Matt and I have had a lot of these conversations where we have a hard time letting that productive struggle, creative struggle, happen. We just need to step back and let it. Trust the process, right?
Matthew Worwood
To quickly build on that, I think an important thing that Cindy was referencing at the start of the story (it was subconsciously what I was trying to send to her head when I was talking about the debrief), but I think – and this is something that we as educators do, this is not something you can ever offload to any type of technology in my view – first things first, we have to identify what is a productive struggle. And just talking about emotion and failure, the thing that we’re writing about, something that came up on the future creative and something that has been written in the literature, right, is that we can have very short-lived, powerful emotional responses to things that occur as we’re engaged in creativity or a learning experience. Those feelings and emotions can then go and put us in a mood and have an effect on how we perform in the classroom environment.
Now, there’s a whole bunch of different reasons why we can be struggling in that moment, having this intense emotion. We as educators have to be very mindful of (in that Listen and Learn episode that Cindy and I did, you’ve got to be able to identify when you’re facilitating this experience) what is a good productive experience and what isn’t. I use the example of technology, in a perfect scenario, yes, you can have it.
What I’ve now thought very much about is that I can create ill-defined problems and they are designed with some uncertainty for the students to deal with some ambiguity, and obviously there’s going to be some emotional struggle with that, that’s deliberate, strategic, and wanting to do all the things that we’re talking about.
At the same time, there are times when my assignment isn’t very clear. The deadlines aren’t very clear. I’m actually perhaps expecting too much of the technology, right? Or I’m using a technology for the first time at all and I haven’t had time to test it out and therefore the students are now having to deal with, on top of all the uncertainty I’ve created, on top of all the challenges of the semester, they’re now having to deal with the fact that they have to download a plugin. It’s not working and at the university-level, they’re calling IT. Is that the type of struggle we want at that moment?
I’m not convinced all struggles are productive. Likewise, we have to, and this is where it’s hard, we have to work out the different levels of anxiety where we want to nudge. In my classroom, students are always asked to do public speaking and we go through the semester of getting them more comfortable presenting their ideas to the point at the end of the semester, they’re presenting to stakeholders. Now, I have to modify my expectations of different students, and then there was one student about five, six years ago, she came into class with the intention to present. When I called out, “is there anyone else in the class who hasn’t presented?” she hadn’t presented and didn’t say anything. But for the last six weeks, she would not come to class when there was a presentation requirement. On that day, she came to class. So, after class, I had a conversation with her. She was apologetic, “I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t do it.” The point was, you could see that there was still growth because she had come with the intention to present. She had stayed in that classroom and not left. That is huge growth. In that moment, clearly that student was making progress in how they were responding to those emotions. But I had to also recognize that that is probably that level of anxiety and discomfort that I have to recognize as a teacher that I’m not qualified to get into and might not be able to provide that support.
So, there is that challenge there. That’s the first thing teachers have to do, “I’m facilitating a learning experience. I’m observing a productive struggle. I’m going to let them work through it, but I have to make sure that they’re working through the emotional struggles that I want them to and make sure that they’re going to come out with the outcomes that I want, like any other learning objective.” So that’s the big thing that I would say to educators as they take that on, and the other part, as I said earlier in the story, as Ron Beghetto says, “Be careful with that. Trust it. It’s all part of the process.” I mean, we talk a little bit about normalizing failure and really what it comes down to is just acknowledging those emotions.
The emotional intelligence piece is really what Cindy and I have recognized we’re talking about when we talk about failure. That emotional intelligence takes time, and sometimes that student just needs time and they might need one to two weeks potentially before they re-engage again. That’s all part of the human contribution that we as educators make every day. We are probably making it subconsciously and maybe this conversation is just being a little bit more conscious about those subconscious decisions that you’re making.
Cyndi Burnett
I just want to add one more quick thing to that, which I think is addressing the psychological safety aspect; if you see a student that has sort of spiraled and is in an emotional state, that you do what you can to check in with that student after, to meet with that student, and just check in with them. You don’t want to leave them with all of that to manage on their own. That is really, really important, to make sure that they have processed it in a way that they feel okay about it walking away.
Anna Abraham
I think it’s useful to think about productive versus unproductive struggle. I taught students about stress and the brain yesterday, and it was interesting to get a sense of … they’re very keenly aware of what feels unproductive. I think sometimes things can seem, I think Cindy, you call it ‘debriefing’ or, I don’t know, pre-briefing perhaps. I think it becomes productive if you frame it in the right way. A lot of the time, I think with creativity, Desi and I see the stress of having to incorporate creativity is not worth it because it’s not something that teachers are incentivized to do. They find it actually quite stressful and see it as a sort of add-on to class. “How do I just add it on to what I do?” So, we’ve seen a lot of variability in how easily people take to the fact that this is going to be a struggle, whether it’s going to be a productive struggle or not. I think it’s a really useful distinction to make.
Speaking of struggles, we come to our last question then, which is AI in the context of the struggle. Do you see it as a way of making things easier, more difficult? What are the promises and perils do you think since you’ve – I had no idea you guys have had such a head start on the conversation of AI in education, so this is actually super, super thrilling for me – what are your views, first of all, on AI in the context of just, I would say teachers, because pupils are another thing, but teachers using it? Using AI-based tools as part of their pedagogical practices. What are the considerations? What are you excited about? What are you less excited about? Very excited about, what are you less excited about or perhaps even scared about, if at all? What do you think are the considerations that educational professionals should bear in mind when taking on such tools? What are the questions they should be asking?
Cyndi Burnett
I also want to do a shout out to Matt, who just about to publish an edited collection with James Kaufman on creativity and AI.
Matthew Worwood
It is called Generative Artificial Intelligence and Creativity: Precautions, perspectives, and possibilities (Explorations in Creativity Research). Yes, I think in December or January. Thanks for the shout-out, Cindy. Ultimately on that journey, I’ve changed my mind a lot. I think I saw on a LinkedIn post that someone referred to themselves as an ‘AI centralist’. I love that because we can find ourselves going a little bit too much one way, or a little bit too much that way. My first point is that this is really an unfolding story, right? It’s a little bit challenging for us to kind of, I think, draw too many conclusions. We have to embrace uncertainty and we’re also going to have to navigate a lot of emotions that are going to come along, including when we’re battling students that we feel might be cutting corners. Likewise, working with some ethical considerations that at times might make us feel like, well, this is too easy. I shouldn’t be using it in this way. So, for me, I think it’s important, first of all, to acknowledge that.
The second thing that I’ve learned; I do have a chapter in the book called the “Convenience Trap.” The caution is that just be mindful when you’re talking about – so, we take generative AI and that’s one type of AI, right? Generative AI, we’re going to have different types of AI technology emerging over the coming years. So, I’m talking primarily right now, generative AI, because that’s what’s most disruptive in the classroom at this time. We’re in this scenario where we have to view it from different perspectives. From a very easy level, teachers should be looking at their learning objectives, they need to be asking, “how might the use of a generative AI tool, assist my students or assist me in my instruction of that learning objective or in helping students reach that objective?” And likewise, you need to be in a situation to also identify the potential hindrances that might exist. Talking about struggle, for example, is interesting because I don’t know if learning is the type of thing where we do actually want to reduce struggle. I’m talking about the right types of struggle, right? So again, perspective, we could have a conversation about equities and education and learning disabilities and how AI provides that support. When I have this conversation, I try to stay laser-focused in one particular area.
If we look at struggle, let’s talk about struggling with a text. There might be scenarios where the text is a tool to provide students with new perspectives, new information, and in essence, to construct knowledge that will assist them in meeting that learning objective, right? The text, in that moment, is just a communication method. Perhaps it’s okay if they were to use Notebook LLM to provide a summary, because now maybe they can unlock language and make connections that they wouldn’t have made without that tool.
But, there might be scenarios, for example, where it’s a historical text and there are lots of different ways…it’s an open question. You’re being invited to interact with that text and the struggle of trying to work out what you felt the author was trying to express or what you felt that particular passage said about that time; to me, that is an individual learning experience that as a teacher, you want that student to go through and you want them to bring those unique ideas to the table. In my experience, one of the things that I really started to miss is that, six months after OpenAI, I lost all of these unique perspectives about the text I used to get. I’m sure everyone listening knows, you get 30 responses to a question and about 18 of them are pretty much saying the same thing.
I would say from a creativity perspective, we’re losing that creativity, so to try and bring it back from a general perspective of creativity and AI in the classroom – my biggest concern is the fact that we’re both, educators and students, having to navigate using this, but we don’t really know how to use it correctly. Is there a potential danger that we might undermine those struggles and all of the things that are happening as we’re interacting with that learning experience, we’re offloading to AI?
There’s some research coming out around reduction in critical thinking, things like that. We’re only going to kind of discover that as a problem 20 years from now in a similar way to what we [discovered] with social media. I mean, if you could go back in time and look at social media and how difficult it’s been to research, but now we’re saying, “well, under these conditions, it actually does do a lot of harm and it does harm to this particular group…” we don’t know that right now [about AI]. What I would say is really the case of right now is to address it as educators, you have to stay open minded, stay focused on those learning objectives and make sure that you continue to identify: Is this assisting students in meeting that learning objective? They’re learning and it is process-orientated, so we’ve got to stay away from the product.
More than ever now it’s about process. GenAI may be an industry, and it’s about product, but right now it’s learning, and learning is a process. We have to focus on the process more than ever - is AI use potentially hindering or even harming students in that journey of meeting those learning objectives? I think that’s all we can do right now. I think it’s going to come on a case-by-case basis and it puts a lot of pressure on the teacher, but at the same time, it also demonstrates the agency of the teacher because they’re the ones that ultimately are responsible for that teaching and learning environment. They should have faith in themselves and their capacity to continue to adapt and make changes to the teaching that they’re trying to achieve in their classroom, no matter the technology being used.
Cyndi Burnett
To build on what Matt said: I think one thing I would advise teachers is to be informed. I’ve met a lot of teachers and I’ve asked them what they think of generative AI, and they say, “I don’t want to know anything. Like, I don’t want it. Like, no.” That’s not going to be helpful to you. If you just ignore it, that doesn’t make it go away. Like, it’s here, acknowledge it. Start having discussions. Matt’s writing the chapter on emotions, I’m writing a chapter right now and initiating discussions about creativity in the classroom. Those discussions not only are about creativity, but they’re also about AI and using AI. So as an educator, you should be talking with your students about AI, especially (not in the elementary ages) in middle school, especially high school, definitely college.
What is ethical? What is ethical for you as an educator, for the teachers, to use it? I like to say, “Use it as your editor. If you were to hire an assistant to go through your work and tell you how to do it better, you’ve written a paper and you say, how can I make this paper stronger? Well, you could add this. Did I miss anything in writing those papers?” Those things are very useful for students, but having AI write papers for you? That’s not ethically what we want you to do for college and if you’re coming here – or even in high school, anywhere, really – but I think if you’re having students write their papers and they’re a college student of yours then you have to ask, “What are you actually doing here, do you actually want to learn anything?” In the high school space or the middle school space, maybe you use it for Grammarly and you’re having it give you several options on how to reframe something, or a new title for your paper – that can help you in the creative process.
There’s just so much that we need to be talking about and to ignore it or to completely embrace it and say ‘this is the best thing since sliced bread’ is a mistake. Like Matt, I think I’m a centralist, but I often vacillate between, ‘this is the best thing since sliced bread’ and ‘this is going to end all of our careers’, so I think hopefully, as we go forward, we will use it ethically. Now, if we were going to put that in parallel with social media, if I could make social media completely go away right now, I think I would choose for it to go away because it has become a really challenging place. It’s used in unethical ways, and we will see that with AI. I think the critical thinking aspect is something we really need to talk with students about: “When you see something, is it real? What is real about it? How do you know if it’s real?” Those aspects of AI, I think, are also incredibly important.
Now on the ‘yay’ side, if we can use AI to help us individualize learning, then I think that would be tremendous. When I talked in the beginning about ‘evolutionary’ versus ‘revolutionary’, this could revolutionize education. There’s a school, I think in California, where the students sit there on computers for two hours a day and they’re working through their typical math, english, science… learning at their own speed. It’s giving them feedback. Then they spend the rest of the day doing projects and going out into the community and building things. That’s fantastic. I think that’s a really interesting model. Totally revolutionary in my opinion. Can we use it for the betterment of our classrooms? There are lots of ways. Do we need to keep informed on what we need to be considering in terms of our students’ brains and how they process things and work through challenges? 100%.
I think the most important thing is just staying informed.
Matthew Worwood
I will, I’ll do a little plug. I did something called, Teacher Roundtables. It’s on YouTube, Teacher Roundtables, and it’s ‘teacherroundtables.com’, too, actually. It’s a website. But there is – Riding the First AI Wave is one of the films – and there’s some incredible teachers and educators. There are also some student voices in that round table discussion [and] I think it’s a good entry point into the conversation because these teachers are extremely knowledgeable. They have conversations about ethics. A big thing that came up in that conversation is transparency. I have recognized that I must model transparency, so if I’m using AI, I need to be transparent on how I’m writing [with] AI. Sometimes I’ll put at the end of the message, ‘I wrote this message with AI’.
I spoke to you earlier about one of the challenges with struggle, making sure assignments are easy to understand. [AI] will go and take my assignment, my creativity, my objectives – I have got to a point where I’m customizing my own large language model, so it knows what I am and the type of tone and goals that I have – but I will go and use AI because its writing is clear. As Cindy said, it can help with the copy, so be open and find ways of using it, and then promote transparency: ‘this is how I’m using it, this is how I want you to use it.’ If you’ve got K through 12 educators, if you’re not already doing this, the ‘draft back’ functions are really, really important. Encourage students, if you want them to experiment with AI, to use the draft back feature; that way, you can see the content coming to be, you can capture the copy and pasting, but ideally, when we write, we’re going back and making changes to that 10th sentence. So AI has more clearly written what you’re saying, but also – typically you see the idea revolve a little bit as you’re going through the process of writing it – so if you’ve got the draft back features turned on, you can actually see that process. So again, trying to transition, find ways of identifying, and following, and (potentially) grading the process.
Getting away from our culture, our transactional culture in education – because a lot of people say, ‘let’s do AI trackers’ and that’s not addressing the problem – the problem I have in education (I need to be careful not to end with a tangent) is that we have a transactional culture. I give you something, right? Here, I hand you a paper and I’m going to get an ‘A’ in return. If that is the relationship we have in education, like the teacher in education with our students, then that’s really the bigger problem with AI because why would students have to engage in that struggle when now AI means they don’t have to?
So really, in fact, the big challenge at the moment, and AI is forcing us to take this on, is how do we promote the struggle? How do we say, “No, I know you can do this easier, and I know that I’m asking you to work 90 minutes instead of three minutes,” but I’ve now got to sell that experience to our students in a culture, I would argue, this transactional culture, where it doesn’t exist?
Going to social media – I think James Kaufman said it nicely, I think he referred to my chapter as ‘glum’ at one point, but this was a little bit more of a negative view – I’m concerned that the technology companies will continue to lead the way and that fight against our current culture is a little too tough, I think, for one teacher to take on by themselves. That’s the big problem. I’m not sure where we’re going with that, because the culture aspect is going to be a big challenge for us.
Anna Abraham
Thank you so much for your views. I do like the line, ‘how do we promote the struggle’; that, I think, is the key point, and how do we get the focus back on process? We can create the product because like you said, it’s very transactional and the transaction is all based on the product that’s created, so essentially, by not thinking or thinking about the struggle as only a negative thing, we’ve essentially thrown the baby out with the bathwater. It’s interesting that some of the cases that teachers or educators generally have to make are for us – I can’t say for all of us, but for many of us – just so, like, obviously you have to do the work! But I don’t think we’ve made the case for that because everyone has been just pushing for, ‘we need more As’ or ‘we need this percentage of students to make this grade’ or something along those lines. In that, just by taking, sort of thinking of the process as being so implicit, we find ourselves in this bind. I think the idea of promoting the struggle is a good way to think about it. Acknowledging that it’s a struggle, but also that it’s a struggle that’s worth striving for.
Thank you both so much for your insights and for sharing with us your experience of doing this podcast and being, I think, the first I imagine, to do it like a creativity-based, creativity and education podcast. So well done on your success! We wish you the absolute best for your book and you must keep us informed about when it’s out. We look forward to it greatly. Thank you so much, Cindy and Matt, for speaking to us today.
Listen to the Fueling in Creativity podcast at this link!