Coming September 15 2026 · Prufrock Press / Routledge
The Future Creative
10 Actions for Fueling Creativity in Education
Drawing on more than 100 interviews from over a decade of this podcast, The Future Creative turns conversations with the world's leading creativity researchers and practitioners into ten concrete actions any educator can apply to support learning for the future.
“The strategies, drawn from interviews with 100 researchers and educators, are practical and will be useful in many educational and workplace contexts… If you're interested in helping increase human creativity in our technological age, you should keep this book close at hand.” — Jonathan Plucker, Ph.D., Johns Hopkins School of Education, Past-President, National Association for Gifted Children
Behind the Book
How The Concept Emerged
The 10 Actions emerged as part of a scholarly effort to organize more than 100 interviews with teachers, researchers, and administrators. We asked every guest the same question: What's one tip you'd give another educator for bringing more creativity into their teaching? Those answers piled up into hundreds of tips that were eventually grouped into the 10 Actions.
The concept of the future creative took shape later — across a string of presentations exploring how creativity will apply for future professionals working in a world increasingly shaped by AI. What kind of skills would those future professionals actually need, when machines can generate but not judge, mean, or originate?
- 100+ Conversations
- 300+ Tips
- 10 Actions
Connecting The Future Creative to a Portrait of a Graduate
Most districts now define success beyond test scores by creating a shared vision for a "Portrait of a Graduate" — a profile of the skills and dispositions every student should have by the time they graduate: High level creativity requires advanced human skills that develop through critical thinking, collaboration, and resilience.
But as generative AI absorbs more of the "good enough" cognitive and technical work, the bar for what actually counts as creative keeps rising. A bullet point on a strategic plan doesn't tell a teacher what to do differently on a Tuesday morning. The Future Creative argues that if creativity is going to hold its place in the portrait of a graduate — not just as an aspiration, but as something students genuinely leave school able to do — it has to stop being an abstract value and a defined goal that is both teachable and obtainable through the 10 actions.
The 10 Actions
- Be Deliberate — Creativity isn't a lucky byproduct of a fun activity; it has to be designed into the lesson on purpose.
- Keep Open — Progress starts with delaying judgment long enough for new ideas, tools, and perspectives to actually be heard.
- Ask Questions — Curiosity only becomes a habit in classrooms where students feel safe asking things without fear of getting it "wrong."
- Build Relationships — Creative work depends on trust, and trust has to be built deliberately with students, colleagues, and administrators alike.
- Initiate Discussions — Talking openly about what creativity actually means clears up the misconceptions that quietly shut it down.
- Model Creative Behavior — Students learn to take creative risks by watching adults take them first, failures included.
- Spot Creative Potential — Creative potential shows up before it looks like achievement, so recognizing it takes more than test scores.
- Maximize the Environment — The classroom you already have contains more creative possibility than the resources you wish you had.
- Face the Feelings — Fear, frustration, and self-doubt aren't detours from creative work; they're part of it, and need to be taught, not just endured.
- Enjoy the Ride — Joy and presence aren't a reward for creative work; they're what sustain it, for students and teachers alike.
Each action has its own dedicated resource page with episode links, discussion topics, and a debrief video — reachable by QR code from the book or via one of our workshops.
Bring This Book Into Your School
The ten actions are meant to be worked through together, not just read alone. Here are a few ways schools and districts are using The Future Creative for staff PD:
Book Study Kit
A facilitated discussion guide built around the ten actions — one per session — so a PLC or staff team can work through the book together over a semester.
Kickoff Keynote or Workshop
Matthew and/or Cyndi introduce the book's framework and the research behind it to launch a school- or district-wide book study.
Custom Workshops
Sessions built around the actions most relevant to your context — Maximize the Environment for a facilities-focused team, Face the Feelings for an SEL-focused staff, and so on.
A self-paced online course built around the ten actions is also in development — reach out if you'd like to be notified when it's available.