What do we really care about in education?
Because here’s the thing: what we care about, we usually deliberately target. We care about
literacy, so we deliberately teach letter sounds before blends, blends before sentences, in a
sequence we’ve mapped out year by year. We care about math, so we sequence number sense
before fractions, fractions before algebra. Nothing about that is left to chance.
So what about creativity? If we say we care about it, are we targeting it with that same
deliberateness?

Let me tell you about a time I focused so heavily on teaching content that I assumed creativity
would simply follow.

I was hired to build a brand-new digital media and movie-making program for ten high schools
across Connecticut. The goal was straightforward: teach students real production skills.
The first challenge I gave each school was wide open: make a one-minute public service
announcement on that year’s theme — Green.

That’s it. Just Green. It was the shared theme that year across every program at the Center for
21st Century Skills, where I worked. We wanted students in all of our STEM-based programs
thinking about the environment, but we didn’t want to push too hard in any one direction.
A few months later, we invited the ten schools that piloted our Digital Media and Moviemaking
program to a university to screen their films for the first time. I loaded them onto my laptop,
dimmed the lights, and pressed play.

First film: recycling.
Second film: also recycling.
Third film: also recycling.

By the end of the day, seven out of nine films shown that day were about recycling.
While there were some positives to take from the event, particularly around the teaching of film
production skills, some of our funders had raised concerns about the lack of originality, and that
was the question I had to sit with afterward: how does an open-ended challenge end up
producing almost the same idea, seven times over?

I wondered if it was associated with examples I had shared, but after a quick review I realized
there weren’t many examples of over emphasized recycling, so I decided to engage with some
of the schools to better understand how they went about their ideas, and it was through
conversations that a teacher said to me that the students felt like the theme was too restrictive. I
remember pausing… what was restrictive about the color green.

I continued to think about this as I drove back from the school, and I came to the conclusion that
the problem wasn’t the students, or the teachers, and it wasn’t the topic. Instead, it was an
assumption I had made when designing the challenge.

I had assumed that once presented with the assignments students and teachers would engage
creativity in their choice of topic, which would include the pursuit of originality and novelty in
their thinking. But this was wrong, unless there is scaffolding that supports originality, including,
enough exposure to other ideas and ways of thinking, open-end

This is why I now deliberately target original thinking when designing open-ended assignments,
and with that I deliberately integrate different strategies to achieve that goal.
Welcome to episode one of our Listen and Learn series, which provides us with the first of our
ten actions for fueling creativity in education: Be Deliberate.

WHAT “BE DELIBERATE” ACTUALLY MEANS

So what do we mean when we say Be Deliberate?
A significant aspect of teaching is designing learning experiences with the deliberate intention to
teach and target the learning of specific content.

When teaching young children reading and writing, we target the learning of letter sounds; by a
certain age we want children to know the letters of the alphabet, and know the sounds they
make. Later, we introduce them to digraphs, and how two letters combined can make a different
sound.

We are deliberate in our teaching of reading and writing, because we understand how
knowledge is constructed by the learner, and what young children must master first.
However, we as teachers are also responsible for designing learning experiences to teach these
skills; some of us may choose to utilize mobile apps, interactive whiteboards, letter games,
group work, and most of the time all of the above.

The attention that we place on these skills are high, because without them we know that most
children will struggle to read and write without them, and as a consequence not have the
education needed to produce and consume text-based information.

From our conversations with teachers and researchers, it is clear that while teaching learning
standards across the grades, many educators, when designing learning experiences, also
deliberately target the teaching of creativity or creative thinking skills.

And this is why our 10 actions for fueling creativity in education begin with Be Deliberate,
because whether it’s through short warm up activities, different modalities, or larger class
projects, teachers who are committed to teaching students skills beyond the standards, are
deliberate in their approach to teaching creativity.

So, I ask you to reflect for a moment, to what extent do you deliberately target the teaching of
creativity in your classroom? I’m not just talking about giving students open projects or asking
them questions, because these approaches won’t necessarily mean students will develop or
apply more creativity to that learning task? Because the teaching of creativity can look and
sound very different depending on the subject or context, that is why it is up to you as the
educator to design and develop specific strategies that you can use to promote creativity in the
classroom.

THE HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT

So here’s something to sit with this week — not an assignment, just a couple of reflective
questions.

Of all the things you say you care about in your classroom, which ones are you actually
designing for, and which ones are you just hoping will show up on their own? We get that
learning standards should be there, but those standards don’t have to be the only thing we
target in our lessons. And if creativity’s in that second group, that’s not a failure — it’s just worth
noticing.

And you don’t have to fix it this week. Noticing it is where being deliberate actually starts, but it
does set up our second question.

What opportunities in your classroom already exist for promoting creativity? Maybe it’s a
morning routine that can include a question or short activity to spark a little curiosity. Maybe it’s
a closing question at the end of a lesson to connect the learning to something new, or maybe
there’s a project that, with just a few minor tweaks, could better target the development of new
and useful ideas.

You don’t need to find all of them. One is enough for the upcoming semester — and as many of
our guests have emphasized, it’s good to start small.

THE BOOK HOOK AND CLOSING

In this chapter of our book, we provide a lot more information about being deliberate and its
close relationship with instructional design, but we also include more stories from educators who
gravitate toward specific teaching and learning styles because they see this as an effective way
to fuel creativity in education.

In many ways, being deliberate is ultimately why we started our podcast, because we wanted
the teaching of creativity to be at the front of a classroom. And being deliberate is also why we
wrote a book that offers 10 actions that support creativity, because when we are deliberate, we
are more likely to succeed in our effort to promote and facilitate this critical competency for our
future creatives.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of our Summer 2026 Listen and Learn series. And
don’t forget your letter for this week, it’s E.

Write it down, hold onto it, and keep collecting because you’ll need all ten to unscramble
the secret phrase and enter to win a signed copy of The Future Creative. You can submit your
entry at FuelingCreativityPodcast.com/summerreading2026, and that’s also where you’ll find
more information about the book, including where to pre-order it.

We are still booking guests for Season 13 of the podcast, so if you have ideas for
researchers or practitioners you’d love to hear from, or topics you want us to dig into, please
reach out at ideas@fuelingcreativitypodcast.com.

Stay curious, keep that door open, and I will see you right back here next week.
Matthew: Thanks for listening to Fueling Creativity in Education.