Matthew Worwood:
Hello, everyone. My name is Doctor Matthew Worwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Doctor Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood:
This is the fuelling creativity in education podcast.

Cyndi Burnett:
On this podcast, we’ll be talking about various creativity topics and how they relate to the field of education.

Matthew Worwood:
We’ll be talking with scholars, educators and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and exploring new perspectives of creativity.

Cyndi Burnett:
All with a goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers, administrators, and emerging scholars with the information they need to infuse creativity into teaching and learning.

Matthew Worwood:
So let’s begin. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Fuelling Creativity in Education podcast. And this is our final debrief and therefore our last episode of season eight. And it’s been a super fun season, hasn’t it, Cindy?

Cyndi Burnett:
It sure has, Matt. And we have had an incredible season of guests. Twelve guests. Actually, we’ve had more than that because the last few episodes we’ve had two guests per episode. So I think we’ve had 14 guests on the show this season.

Matthew Worwood:
Obviously, with this being a debrief episode, why don’t you tell us who our final three guests were on the show?

Cyndi Burnett:
We did the first episode on building a collaborative culture and breaking down silos with the principal, Kathleen Scott, and a teacher at the school, Alyssa Matuthniak. And then we did unlocking educators creative potential with Rosie, Leonard Cain and Alan Morgan, who were from Ireland and run the innovation Academy for educators over there. And then the third one we did was creativity and art visualization and sense making with doctor Cheryl Yin Lo. So let’s talk about it. What was your first insight?

Matthew Worwood:
My first insight? Well, hmm. I think my first insight actually was with Cheryl. I was really interested in that phrase, everything is designed by someone. And of course, you know, it’s something that people in design often talk about. But the idea of getting students to just notice more. And I just want to share a story with you because this is when I first started to think a little bit about everything is designed by someone. And I’m not like an over germaphobe, but I want to wash my hands. I’m at a university.

Matthew Worwood:
I want to make sure I’m not getting more sick than I have to get sick. And so, you know, when I go to the restrooms, I wash my hands. And of course you have to open the door, right? And suddenly this one year we had this kind of thing at the bottom of the door. I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s like a footholder. So when you’re leaving the bathroom, you get to put your foot and you get to kind of, like, open up the door. And I was really fascinated. In fact, I was referencing that kind of, in essence, what I saw as an innovation to my students because it addressed the problem with the fact that after you’ve washed your hands, you don’t have to use the handle to open up the door. But it got me really thinking about the person who designed it.

Matthew Worwood:
Why did they design it? But then, at the same time, I recognized that it was kind of a heavy door. So if you had a sore leg, you know, or you didn’t have a strong knee, opening up that door was a little bit tough. It’s interesting because everything is designed by someone. There’s a story behind everything. And I think, within Cheryl’s work, getting us to think about it and more importantly, getting us to teach students to recognize that everything’s designed by someone and then thinking a little bit about the story behind that design, I think is super duper fascinating and obviously really connected to creativity.

Cyndi Burnett:
And, Matt, that reminds me of our episode with Edward Clapp from Project Zero, where he talked about participatory creativity and how we continue to build. And if we look at the, we don’t look at the inventor, but we look at the biography of an idea. I loved that episode. It was so mind expanding because I never had thought about sort of an idea. So I have an invention here, and let’s just say I have this. You know, if you’re watching this on YouTube, I have this little button. It says, nailed it. So I have this invention.

Cyndi Burnett:
But this is a series of ideas that were built upon from all different sorts of people. So what was the iteration before this one, and what was the iteration before that, and how did it come to be this? And then how can we improve on that?

Matthew Worwood:
Yeah, I love that. And I love that connection to Edward Clapp. And I’ll be honest with you, I did wonder if he was going to make that connection, because I certainly did as well. And that idea of kind of the biography of an idea, because we do, we all build on each other. And I think what I really like that putting into a classroom environment is getting students to notice. Let’s kind of shift it now and say, just get students to notice all of the different innovations that they interact with every single day. There’s a story behind those innovations, but actually, they are tasked with furthering those innovations because, as Jonathan Plucker said in one of our episodes, he posed the question, do we ever start with a blank canvas and so ultimately, for our students, our students are going to graduate, and they’re going to be tasked with going and furthering innovation. And that comes from building upon the ideas that already exist in the world.

Cyndi Burnett:
Matt, I’m so glad you brought up Jonathan Plucker, because I always remember his definition of creativity, which is old stuff plus old stuff equals new stuff. And I really think that two of our episodes was about intersection and the intersection between two different things and how we might build together things to create new stuff. And I remember in Kathleen Scott and Alyssa Matuchnak, they were talking about bringing together two different disciplines at the school, at the high school, and looking at ways in which they might teach them together. And it left me wondering, and I’m curious of your thoughts on this. It left me wondering, is that the future of education? Will we be taking two different domains? Could we teach fashion design and writing at the same time? Could we teach the history, you know, historical perspectives and dance at the same time? How might they influence each other, and how might it get us thinking in new and creative ways? What do you think?

Matthew Worwood:
We obviously always talk about interdisciplinary work, but I think what’s interesting about your question is this, this idea of taking one discipline, merging it with another discipline, almost like an ideation strategy for education. What happens when you kind of, like, take the ELA class and merge it with the science class? What happens when you take the math class and merge it with the art class? Right. And I think that is super duper fascinating. Do I think education to get ahead in that direction in the short term? No. But, you know, I wonder if there’s some connection here with generative AI, because it can generative AI fill in the potential gaps in knowledge, and therefore me as an individual, maybe I’m really passionate about art, but now I’m being tasked with, you know, doing an assignment in math class. Maybe I can work with generative AI to assist me with my shortfalls in math as I go and lead the charge with art. I don’t know, but that’s really, really fascinating. Cindy.

Cyndi Burnett:
Well, it also reminds me earlier this season we had Kristin Lehman, who was talking about artistic mathematics, mathematic artistry. That’s it. Mathematic artistry, and sort of teaching math through the arts. So there’s another connection. I just feel like this particular season, it’s been all about connecting different disciplines and different ways of looking at things. And I know even with doctor Cheryl Yin Low, she was talking about using arts in the sciences, and how can we teach science using some art methodologies.

Matthew Worwood:
I mean, I was fascinated, first of all, with Kristen’s episode because of this idea of mathematical artistry. You know, art, science. You know, we probably do think a little bit about those, but I’ve never really thought about this idea of mathematical artistry. Of course, I have no doubt there’s listeners who are saying, are you serious? I think I’ve thought about that for years, but I didn’t. And I was really fascinated with Kristen’s work. I think the examples that Christine bought in her episode, and I feel like now we’re talking about, you know, another episode, but the examples that she brought, if someone hadn’t assisted me in seeing the mathematical connections that were being made, I would have only exclusively seen them as art, maybe design, maybe technology. But she came in it from that mathematical perspective and viewed these artifacts completely from math and saw opportunities to teach math through them. So the other question is, maybe there’s a case of, should every teacher have more than one domain because you know, or learn more than one subject, right.

Matthew Worwood:
Because if we are just taught to learn to be a math teacher and see and perceive everything in the math curriculum and the math standards, then maybe we do limit ourselves on forging some of these connections that I think you’re talking about. What if every teacher training program, you have to have a minor, right? So you got to say, right, you got to do, you got to be trained in math, but you’ve also got to have to have a minor in training in another, another discipline to teach as well. I mean, that would be fascinating.

Cyndi Burnett:
That would be fascinating. I’m sure every teacher listening right now is like, no, no, please. But I do wonder if, one, to keep open, and two, if it might be even better to collaborate with someone who is different than you. So when we think about the collaboration that Alyssa shared with us, I remember, I think it was science and English. So can you find someone in your school system that you can collaborate on just one project to really bring that interdisciplinary nature to it? Because I think interdisciplinary research, interdisciplinary work is going to be a big wave in the future, particularly in higher education.

Matthew Worwood:
Absolutely. And just to stay on that episode with Alyssa and Kathleen, I remember having a conversation. I remember that part of the episode, and I had asked her, does she kind of look at potential disciplines that can come together. Right. And forging connections with disciplines, or does she prioritize looking at the teachers and what teachers are likely to work well together? And she said she primarily looked at the teachers and whatever discipline they were, so be it. Right. So the personality factor probably is something to think about as well when bringing disciplines together.

Cyndi Burnett:
And I think finding a partner like that, you have to be willing to take the risks together to know that you’re going to be able to collaborate and show that collaboration to your students, which is also brings a lot of benefits. Right. So if you can show your students how you can work together. I remember actually, Matt, you were a student in one of my courses. I think it was 1013 years ago, maybe.

Matthew Worwood:
Probably, yeah.

Cyndi Burnett:
And I was team teaching a course with my colleague, doctor Susan Killer Mathers, who was on the first season of the feeling creativity education podcast. And I loved working with sue. We had such great synergy together. And while we were teaching the same thing, most of our students responded with. This shows us a really good model of collaboration and working in teams versus just having a silo person teaching just one person.

Matthew Worwood:
Yeah. And I think we probably, in our conversation are transitioning a little bit to the idea of silos and working within a team. But I think for some listeners right now, they probably are saying, I already do this. What I’m interested to hear is whether or not you work in a school with a large faculty community, because I think sometimes with larger schools, obviously, I’m thinking a little bit about large high schools, and maybe there’s anywhere from 1000 plus students. You know, you have lots of math teachers, you have, you know, lots of ELA teachers, times limited. There’s lots of information that you have to give, get out, which is very kind of like domain or discipline specific or departmental specific. And therefore, it makes sense to have all the math teachers meeting at this time and all the english teachers meeting at this time and all of the history teachers meaning of this time. And that’s when you start getting those silos.

Matthew Worwood:
It’s why when you start getting kind of like, you know, the vocabulary, it’s only shared within that small group. Ideas are only shared within that small group. And so I suppose to take this conversation and throw it out there as a question is, how do you build those interdisciplinary connections at these kind of larger high schools when there might not be as many opportunities to meet within the current system of professional development or teacher prep hours? Because I think that’s probably a bigger challenge than maybe some of the smaller schools.

Cyndi Burnett:
Yeah, I agree, Matt. I think that’s a really good problem that could be potentially solved, but would need a little bit of fleshing out and problem solving. So how do I.

Matthew Worwood:
Before we move on, before we move on, let’s throw it out there. If you’re working on a high school project, you know, again, I’m, you know, defaulting to the fact that I’m seeing this environment more likely to be at the high school level. But if you’re working a large school where, you know, typically, you know, you see your, your colleagues working and interacting within their respective subjects, but somehow you’ve been able to crack this and actually develop a project. Or maybe you’re working on a project or a project’s coming to your school which is forcing different disciplines to work together. Reach out. Let’s bring you on the show and have a conversation. See if you can kind of assist us in seeing how we can make this work within the current system of k through twelve education. Do you want to bring more creative and critical thinking into your school? Look no further than our podcast sponsor, curiosity to create.

Cyndi Burnett:
Curiosity to create is a nonprofit organization dedicated to engaging professional development for school districts and empowering educators through online courses and personal coaching.

Matthew Worwood:
And if you’re craving a community of creative educators who love new ideas, miss out on their creative thinking network. Get access to monthly webinars, creative lesson plans, and a supportive community all focused on fostering creativity in the classroom.

Cyndi Burnett:
To learn more, check out curiositytocreate.org, comma or check out the links in the show notes for this episode. All right, Matt, let’s talk about our final episode with Rosie, Leonard Cain and Alan Morgan, who, if you remember, they were the, the team that work at the Innovation Academy for Educators in Ireland.

Matthew Worwood:
Yeah, I think, I mean, it was a really good conversation. Two scholar practitioners who are teaching creativity know a lot about creativity pose some really great and interesting questions for, I think, our community to think about. For me, that relationship with entrepreneurial ship, they specifically said they’re talking about entrepreneurial mindset, which is important, I think, because obviously entrepreneurialism does have a kind of like a distinct discipline and typically associated with kind of like obviously designing a business. And you’re thinking a little bit about money and organization and all of those things. But the idea of an entrepreneurial mindset, I think, does have a very close relationship with creativity. They kind of said that they try and avoid the e word and really just focus on what exists within that entrepreneurial mindset, which is that curiosity and imagination and the value piece, because obviously you’re trying to produce something of value. But I felt like it took us back to that discussion that you and I have had a couple of times. I know we dedicated, I think one debrief primarily centered around like semantics around creativity.

Matthew Worwood:
But I was wondering if that kind of, like, sparked up anything for you, you know, is it innovation? Is it creativity? Is it entrepreneurship? Is it another word? Does it even matter if we call it a thing? Right?

Cyndi Burnett:
I definitely think it has a name, but I am under the umbrella of please call it what it is. I get very frustrated with the word innovation. And we have had this conversation because I don’t know if you remember, I think it might have been season three. We had Monica King, who was a practitioner of creativity and from DC, and she talked a lot about how she uses the language. And I think as we move forward as a discipline, it really surprises me, Matt, when people say, especially teachers, who just associate creativity with the arts or with gifted education, and, you know, I sort of cringe. And my wonderful colleagues, I’ll go, oh, no. Here Cindy goes cringing again, like, oh, no, please, can we just all say what it is? So creativity is the generation of novel and useful ideas, novel and appropriate ideas. And innovation takes it to an entrepreneurship aspect, which is you’re selling your ideas and they’ve been accepted by people.

Cyndi Burnett:
So if we want innovation, and many schools say we are innovative, we are an innovative school, but if you want innovation, you have to have creativity. And I think if I said that over and over and over again, I hope that it sort of rings true for people that you can’t have innovation without creativity. So start with creativity. Actually start with curiosity. I think curiosity is a good conduit to creativity, because if you’re curious and you start asking questions, then you will find out what you need to create, to work through whatever it is you’re looking at and then build it and get it accepted. Which is the innovation part.

Matthew Worwood:
Yeah, I don’t know if I’ve got a massive follow up on that. I think within different spaces, probably they might have different perspectives of that. I think you definitely seem to be associate innovation a little bit associated with profit. I think there’s something to be said there, right? Because she’s, you know, new and appropriate, new and valuable. Often within the world, when we come to like, we’re gonna go and invest in something, right, we are thinking about what’s the value? What’s the value proposition here? And obviously, quite often we think about the monetary value. And so I think it’s a natural connection to be had. I think that entrepreneurial mindset, therefore, how does that come into play in this then? Is an entrepreneurial mindset a little bit of that transition from creativity to innovation, or is it something that has a completely separate pathway?

Cyndi Burnett:
Those are great questions, Matt, I’m going to have to go off and ponder that.

Matthew Worwood:
Well, no. So the reason why I bring this up, my interpretation, the way Rosie and Alan phrased it, which I liked, was if you think about the idea that it’s about creating something that has value, and if we were to kind of, like, take away this idea of it doesn’t have to be monetary value, but you obviously want it to have, if you’re going to invest time in it, you know, you’re going to want it to have some type of impact in your life. Right. That that’s the value proposition. And so, you know, if teachers can develop an entrepreneurial mindset, then perhaps they can look at engaging in developing innovative solutions within their classroom environment, which, as you know, is getting closer to what I promote, is this idea of teacher creativity. And as you know, I kind of wrestled with, do I call it innovation or teacher creativity? In the end, I kind of landed on a project called Teachers Innovation Studio because I thought the word innovation was more applicable. But what’s interesting with all of this is whether it’s, you’re engaging in an entrepreneurial mindset. The goal is to produce innovation.

Matthew Worwood:
And I think it’s interesting, the fact that you’re saying it all starts with creativity. You mentioned, does it start with curiosity? I think that’s another topic of conversation. Right. But I think that’s, you know, the key point is you probably could have an entrepreneurial mindset. Doesn’t always lead to innovation. You probably could focus on innovation and not necessarily tick all of the boxes of an entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurialism. I’ve got to be careful because Alan and Rosie, I think, were, you know, very generic in how they proposed entrepreneurial mindset.

Matthew Worwood:
I do think it was very similar to a creative mindset. But I think you need creativity at the forefront of everything. And I think it starts all with creativity, whether or not there’s a point at which the value piece, maybe it’s that pro c element or going from mini c to little c. So maybe you can have creativity without the innovation, without the entrepreneurialism, but you can’t have the entrepreneurialism and innovation without the creativity.

Cyndi Burnett:
And my insight from Rosie and Alan’s session really was around the pandemic and how the pandemic impacted teaching and how we had to suddenly switch to the virtual and how we had to find experiential ways in which we had to teach our students. And I really enjoyed having that conversation with them because I like exploring sort of what teachers had to do, like they had to be creative, right? And in ways they delivered the material to make it more interesting. They had to find ways to engage students in meaningful ways and relevant ways and even getting them online. And I also want to mention that because I know, Matt, you just finished a documentary on the teacher roundtable around the pandemic, and I want to give that a shout out because you’re going to be having a special premiere on the creative Thinking network later on this month. So if you are part of the network, you get to be part of the premiere, and then you get to ask Matt lots of questions. So if you’re interested in talking about hearing about what happened on creativity during the pandemic, I hope you will join us on the creative thinking network, and we’ll make sure we link that to the show notes below.

Matthew Worwood:
And I really appreciate you making that plug. And I think actually it was a really good connection because Alan and Rosie did talk a lot about their program, which is focused on teaching entrepreneurial mindset and creativity specifically to teachers in the hope that they can go and apply these skills and be innovative in their classroom environments. But they spoke about that relationship with the pandemic and a feeling that more teachers, or maybe I propose this, I can’t remember, but we had spoke about, did more teachers make the connection of how important creativity is while they were kind of navigating the pandemic, because there wasn’t necessarily a how to guide or a roadmap, they really were having to engage in a situation that no one really had best practices for. And I think we spoke a little bit about those best practices sometimes get in the way of kind of original ideas within the world of teaching and learning. The key point within the roundtable is that that’s what I wanted to do. I just wanted to bring teachers together to have a conversation, reflect on that experience, because I knew by reflecting on that experience, they would be sharing stories of how creative they were as they were kind of responding to the various challenges that were coming up. So thanks so much for making that connection. And I just want to bring it back to Rozzie and Alan’s episode.

Cyndi Burnett:
Excellent. Well, Matt, it’s been a great season. Eight. High five.

Matthew Worwood:
High five. Yeah. Boom. It has been. It has been a really good season. And we should say that we actually did all of our debriefs via video. Right. That that was a plus for us, and we did more debriefs.

Matthew Worwood:
This season has been kind of like a groundbreaking season. Number one, we brought in multiple guests. Right. For kind of, you know, every day.

Cyndi Burnett:
The most guests in one season.

Matthew Worwood:
Most guests in one season. Yeah.

Cyndi Burnett:
Yep.

Matthew Worwood:
We brought, we did the video and then we increased the number of debriefs that we did. So.

Cyndi Burnett:
Oh, we also did. How many presentations? Three presentations.

Matthew Worwood:
We did. We did do three presentations as well. It’s been a great start to 2024. We should go back to listen to that episode where we shared our goals to see whether or not we’ve made a dent on those goals.

Cyndi Burnett:
I think we’ve done pretty well.

Matthew Worwood:
We have. Unfortunately, we do have finishing the book by the end of 2024. So.

Cyndi Burnett:
We’Ll do it. I’m not worried.

Matthew Worwood:
We’ll do it. So here’s what’s important. We obviously kind of, as we finish season eight, we kind of go into what we refer to as kind of our end of spring summer programming. We recognize a lot of teachers are going away. So what’s going to follow is a few special episodes that are coming up. We’re going to be our, actually, our next episode is going to be with Cindy Burnett and her colleague John Canberra because Cindy and John have just released another edition of the weaving creativity into your curriculum. However, it’s specifically focused on higher education, and what I’m really excited about that is it allows us to have a higher education special on the podcast. So that will be our next episode.

Matthew Worwood:
We also will actually have a go at sharing the audio to the documentary that I produced as well that’s going to be released over the summer. I’ll do provide a little bit more context to, to that documentary. And then we’ve got some other specials, including an app dedicated to promoting a creative mindset that teachers hopefully can play around over the summer. And then, of course, we will also be releasing another listen and learn series during the summer. We’re not going to give away too many details yet, and our listen and.

Cyndi Burnett:
Learn series will again have a special code so you can win some great prizes from Matt and I and curiosity to create, which is our sponsor. And we are currently looking at season nine. We’ve got about five guests already booked, and if you would like to be a guest on our podcast, feel free to reach out to us and let us know what you’re doing inside the classroom or in research or in practice. And we’d love to have a conversation with you. So send us an email@questionsuelingcreativitypodcast.com. My name is Doctor Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood:
My name is Doctor Matthew Worwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
This episode was produced by Matthew Warwood and Cindy Burnett. Our podcast sponsor is curiosity to create. And our editor is Sam Atkinson.