Mark Runco [00:00:00]:
Creative potential is very frequently overlooked, and that’s in part because it is so hard to see. By definition, creative potential is latent. If an individual has creative potential, but they express it, it’s no longer considered creative potential. It’s creative activity or creative behavior.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:21]:
Hello, everyone. My name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:25]:
And my name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:27]:
This is the fueling creativity in Education podcast.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:31]:
On this show, we’ll be talking about creativity topics and how they apply to the field of education.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:36]:
We’ll be speaking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and digging deeper into new and varying perspectives of creativity, all with the.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:47]:
Goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers and parents with knowledge they can use at home or in the classroom.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:55]:
So let’s begin.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:57]:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another season of Fueling Creativity in Education podcast. Yes, don’t forget, we’ve changed our name. We’ve added in education to our name. And that’s because we’re talking about creativity in education. And today’s episode begins with a double espresso. So, Cindy, why don’t you tell our listeners what we mean by double Espresso?

Cyndi Burnett [00:01:17]:
So a double espresso is two short episodes with one guest. And this season, we have a very special guest to start us off with our season four, and that’s creativity researcher Dr. Mark Runko.

Matthew Worwood [00:01:32]:
Now, in the first part of this episode, or rather the first of these two episodes, Dr. Mark Runko will be talking about creative potential. And in the second one, Cindy and I challenge Mark to talk a little bit about the future of creativity research and also a conference that he’s got upcoming. So without further ado, let’s get started with our double espresso with Dr. Mark Ronko.

Cyndi Burnett [00:01:56]:
We are thrilled to kick off season four with worldrenowned creativity researcher Dr. Mark Runko. Mark has a PhD in cognitive psychology from the Claremont Graduate School in California and is currently the director of creativity research and programming at Southern Oregon University. Mark has published approximately 200 articles, chapters, and books on creativity, its measurement and enhancement, which we’ll be talking about today. His textbook, Creativity theories and themes, research, development, and practice, has been translated into six languages. Welcome to the show, Mark.

Mark Runco [00:02:34]:
Thank you. Happy to be here.

Cyndi Burnett [00:02:36]:
Matt and I are thrilled to have you here to talk about creativity and creative potential is where we’d love to start. So I’d love to talk to you about creative potential being the real target of education, which is something you’ve written about. Can you tell us more about what creative potential is from your perspective, good question.

Mark Runco [00:02:57]:
And you’re right, it’s very important. Creative potential is very frequently overlooked, and that’s in part because it is so hard to see. By definition, creative potential is latent. If an individual has creative potential, but they express it, it’s no longer considered creative potential. It’s creative activity or creative behavior. It’s something that has been articulated or manifested. Creative potential, on the other hand, is that which an individual has, which might need something before it is actually translated to behavior or activity, or eventually perhaps, creative achievement. So creative potential is there.

Mark Runco [00:03:41]:
It’s, I believe, shared by everyone, but it’s very difficult to see. There are ways to infer that it exists, including some measures like divergent thinking tests, which get at creative potential. They indicate that an individual does have cognitive and emotional and attitudinal capacities and skills. Many people with creative potential do need something. They might need to value creativity more, so they invest more in it. They may need some strategies and tactics. They almost definitely need some encouragement, probably some opportunities. So most students and most individuals with creative potential need something.

Mark Runco [00:04:30]:
And of course, that’s where education comes in. So creative potential is that which allows an individual to think in an obviously creative fashion. And I’ll refine that and get a little bit more specific and say it allows them to think in an original and effective fashion, but they may not use those skills or know how to use those skills. So it’s potential rather than actual behavior.

Matthew Worwood [00:05:00]:
What I find fascinating, just keeping on this idea of what is creative potential, how I interpreted that, I’m sure ourselves right now, and some of the listeners have been in that situation where we’ve been in a social context and someone has shared an idea, or we’ve been exposed to an idea, we’ve watched a film, we’ve seen a mobile app, and we say the words, oh, I thought of that. And sometimes we go and we reflect and we say, well, why didn’t I do that? Why didn’t I enact that idea? Do you think that there is a connection between those experiences that I’m sure we can all relate to and this idea of creative potential?

Mark Runco [00:05:37]:
There is actually one of the best indicators of creative potential is ideation. That is an individual’s capacity to produce ideas. But ideas, I actually view them as creative products. I consider them immediate creative products because you have an idea and it may not go anywhere else. There are intermediary creative products which are things like you do to solve a problem. So you have an idea and you do actually apply it. Ultimate creative products might occur over the lifespan. They might be famous things, they might be books or musical scores or designs.

Mark Runco [00:06:21]:
But ideas, I think, are in fact creative. Your situation or your scenario could easily occur when an individual has an idea and they don’t recognize its value. They don’t realize that it’s got creativity and some importance. They may not know what to do with it. You may have an idea and, well, that’s just an idea, and I don’t really know how to implement it or refine it and extend it and share it. So there are a couple of things going on there. But really, on a simple level, ideas are immediate creative products. They are creative even if they don’t go somewhere else.

Mark Runco [00:07:06]:
Now, of course, that reflects my theory of personal creativity, which is that which creativity, which an individual has, which may not be shared with anyone else. If they share it, it may become social creativity, which of course is a great thing. Unfortunately, the field of creative studies has shifted towards manifest creative behaviors, objectivity in an attempt to be scientific, which is a great thing. But it’s gone too far, such that now personal creativity, creative things which aren’t shared are often dismissed. There are many creativity theorists who say that creativity requires social recognition. That’s probably my least favorite part of what I read in the creativity research, because I don’t think all creativity requires social recognition. I think an individual can be personally creative and not share it with anyone, and ideas fit in there. So I’m not quite sure I’m answering your question, but yes to ideas, no, you are.

Matthew Worwood [00:08:19]:
And I appreciate that response. And I think what that helped me clarify within the literature, it’s this idea of building on these concepts of creative metacognition and creative self efficacy, which are very close to what we as educators talk about. Anyway, the idea of self efficacy, the development of metacognitive strategies that can hopefully help us realize our creative potential and engage in creative behaviors.

Mark Runco [00:08:45]:
Definitely the self efficacy can give the individual the confidence to move forward with an idea, even if they’re not receiving social recognition and they’re unsure of its value. And the tactics are absolutely vital, both for the finding of new ideas, but also the refining of them, and then also sharing them and communicating them and maybe selling them depending on the situation. So you’re absolutely right.

Cyndi Burnett [00:09:13]:
So Mark, you mentioned a lot about divergent thinking and what you just described to us. And I know you’ve done so many articles, research articles and studies on divergent thinking. So can you tell our listeners how you view the difference between creativity and divergent thinking and then how do you propose educators and parents teach divergent thinking to children?

Mark Runco [00:09:35]:
Divergent thinking is a form of creative cognition, thinking called divergent because an individual’s thought process and perhaps their associations following one idea to the next, is nonlinear. And that’s where the divergence comes in. We often think in a linear fashion, which can be a very good thing. But we have the capacity to think in divergent directions and to move to ideas that we haven’t really experienced ourselves, or to things which are possible, but uncertain things which are not really logical in a traditional way. So our thinking can be linear or it can be divergent. Both of them are very valuable. But divergent thinking allows an individual to find new ideas. If you’re linear, you might be following what you’ve been taught, you might be following logic, you might be following convention, you might be following experience.

Mark Runco [00:10:38]:
And very frequently those things take the individual to a cognitive place, to an idea that they’ve already had or other people have already had. Divergent thinking, on the other hand, can take an individual to a new idea because it’s moving in different directions. And sometimes those new directions aren’t all that valuable or even all that original, but they’re diverging off of the linear, traditional, conventional, logical path. So the ideas found through divergent thinking have the potential to be original. Now, divergent thinking in research not only includes originality, it also includes fluency, which is just your productivity, how many ideas you come up with. And that in and of itself is a good thing. In research, we know that when you produce a bunch of ideas, you’re very likely to have a good idea and a creative one. So fluency is a good thing.

Mark Runco [00:11:39]:
Divergent thinking research and tests also provide some index of flexibility or ideational flexibility. And that indicates that the individual is tapping different conceptual categories. So if they’re thinking about round things, if they’re not divergent, they may think of baseball, softball, volleyball, soccer ball, ping pong ball. And all of these ideas are in one conceptual category. There’s not much flexibility there. Flexibility would occur if they’re thinking about round things and the individual said a softball, a squash the moon, an atom, and they’re tapping diverse conceptual categories, and that’s good. In fact, theoretically, it’s likely that if you are flexible, you will also be original. That’s not a certain thing, but it makes sense.

Mark Runco [00:12:36]:
Tapping diverse categories, you’re most likely to be original. But originality is really important. I’m just filling out the picture there with fluency and flexibility. Originality is critical because it is a part of the standard definition of creativity. All creative things are original. They are more than original. They have to be original and effective. But at a bare minimum, a prerequisite, necessary but not sufficient is originality.

Mark Runco [00:13:03]:
And originality is obvious. When you monitor or assess someone’s divergent thinking, very easy to see that they have found original ideas, ideas that they and perhaps other people have never thought of before. So the reason divergent thinking is so important, it actually is a good index of the creative potential that we mentioned before. In fact, it’s very clear that a person thinking in a divergent way might have an original idea, and that has the potential to be creative, but it may not be enough, and that’s true of all originality. But an idea might be original, it might need refining. It may not yet be effective. It may not fulfill other task requirements, including the second main requirement of creativity, effectiveness. But divergent thinking helps us to understand originality, where it comes from, and to assess originality.

Mark Runco [00:14:03]:
Your second part of that question, I believe, was about educators and support and enhancement. And there are all kinds of things that you can do to support divergent thinking. The main thing is to, and this sounds very ambiguous, encourage it. But I have to mention that, because if you think of the schools, I don’t think there’s nearly enough encouragement for divergent thinking. Schools tend to emphasize convergent, linear, conventional thinking. We want our students to know the right answers, and I always ask my students to think back on their education and all of the tests they took, and to think about how many of those tests were grading them on correct answers and how many of them were giving points for originality. And usually my students say it’s like 90%, 10%, or 95. Ten schools are really good at teaching students factual knowledge, conventional knowledge, traditional logic, but there isn’t much opportunity for divergence and originality.

Mark Runco [00:15:16]:
If an educator appreciates the idea of divergence leading to originality, and originality being one way of getting at creative potential, they’re going to do more to encourage it. They will, for example, probably model it. They’ll do a little bit of it themselves. They’ll think divergently when they’re communicating information to students, and that modeling is really important. It may tell the students how to think. That is, they’ll see the teacher jumping from conceptual category to conceptual category. So it’ll model in a literal sense. But also if a teacher is up there thinking divergently in an original fashion, that communicates to students that divergence and originality are valuable things, and this is the great thing about modeling.

Mark Runco [00:16:11]:
It communicates specific behaviors and techniques, but it also communicates what is important. So one of the big things is just for an educator to think divergently, him or herself, and thereby to model and value divergent thinking and originality whenever.

Matthew Worwood [00:16:32]:
This opportunity presents itself. Cindy and I really like to highlight the number of times that on this show people have come on and spoken about the importance of educators practicing and modeling creative behavior in front of their students. I think it’s critical and it’s something that has come up again and again and again. So kind of transitioning a little bit. You mentioned it, this idea of kind of assessment, this culture of teaching to the test and teaching to the single right answer. Could you talk a little bit about your work around assessment? Do you think we are moving in a direction where teachers actually have a tool that allows them to assess for originality and creativity in the classroom? And therefore, could we get to a point where, yes, this is your math test and this is also your assessment for creativity?

Mark Runco [00:17:28]:
Well, I guess I’ve got to say yes and no. A math test, I’m glad you chose that because math nearly always, 99.99% of the time, has a correct answer. Math is a very strict, and at the higher levels it actually doesn’t. But any case, and if you think about creativity and originality, this has been the difficulty in research and assessment forever. You give a math test and you know what you’re looking for, you know what is correct. Now, a good educator, of course, will look at the method, the student used, the process, and even if a student comes up with the wrong answer, if they use the right process, points should be awarded. There should be an appreciation of that. And that does apply to creativity.

Mark Runco [00:18:22]:
Educators can look at the process, and this really takes us to an important part of education. And that is because educators don’t only need to model. Modeling is only one of the things educators need to do, one of the things very high on my list. I summarize with the phrase tolerance. They need to tolerate originality. And there are a couple of things here. One is just that, unfortunately, in the US, educators are usually faced with fairly large groups of students. It is very difficult to deal with originality in a group of students, because you have a group of students and you can imagine being in a classroom and having 30 or 40 students thinking divergently.

Mark Runco [00:19:15]:
The educator would by no means keep up with 10% of that. Every student would be going in a different direction. You could not possibly offer good feedback. So the educational setting makes it very difficult to appreciate originality. Even more than that, although related to that is if a student is thinking divergently and coming up with an original idea, the teacher may not understand it. I’m going to pause because that’s very meaningful. You may not see it coming. It wouldn’t be on your curriculum plan.

Mark Runco [00:19:50]:
If it’s really original, the teacher probably has not thought of it and may not understand it. Now, of course, good educators will pause and try and understand it or value the process that led up to that idea, even if he or she doesn’t understand the idea. But think how difficult that is in a classroom to value creativity when you don’t really even understand the truly original ideas. It just makes assessment and education very difficult. Now, assessment, because we’ve been doing this for about 70 years, at least their methods have been developed and refined and they’re pretty darn good. In fact, it amazes me that some of the tested divergent thinking actually have better predictive validity coefficients predicting real world behavior than do IQ tests or grades. There’s creativity research using divergent thinking tests with predictive validity coefficients of zero point 55. And I don’t mean to throw statistics out there, but that’s basically on a one to 100 scale, like a percentage 00:55 IQ and GPA are lucky to be predictive at 0.3.

Mark Runco [00:21:10]:
A good test of divergent thinking if the criteria are correct. And here’s the trick. If you look at real world creative activity, things in the natural environment that reflect creative ability and give a divergent thinking test, you’re going to see very high, very accurate predictions, much better than IQ or GPA. But you have to have the right criterion. The criterion, the real world creative behavior has to be used in the research anyway. I’m really talking about tolerance. You asked about assessment. Think how difficult that is.

Mark Runco [00:21:47]:
I mentioned the difficulty for educators, but also when testing with assessment, if you’re trying to get originality, you can’t really decide what answers are going to receive credit as you write the test and as you score the test, you have to be open to ideas again that you hadn’t thought of, that aren’t in your norms. But that’s actually what you appreciate, a new idea. You have to accept the fact that newness, that is originality, isn’t sufficient for creativity, but it does indicate the potential for creative thinking. So educators and measurement, people doing assessments can look at process and they can be open to originality, but they can’t, like a math test, predict what is an acceptable answer and what answers are going to receive credit.

Cyndi Burnett [00:22:47]:
Thanks, Mark. That makes a lot of sense. And I know from personal experience in using, say, the torn’s test of creative thinking, even taking the time to go through those measures and sit down with children takes an exorbitant amount of time to go through, especially with the little ones know it’s a half an hour to do just one test. And to try to do that on a massive scale to identify the creative potential can be very challenging. And it reminds me of a conversation Matt we had with Jonathan Plucker, where he talked about how do we look for creativity in our students? And he didn’t identify it as creative potential, but he did know if you see anything, anything in a student that you recognize as being creative, you don’t need to give them a test, just go with it. Because there’s no harm in giving students enrichment to help amplify their creativity versus just leaving them alone or expecting them to take a test and go through this whole testing process. So would you agree with that?

Mark Runco [00:23:46]:
I do. And I’d add that if I’m going to make a mistake as an educator, I’d rather go in that direction than cut off that student or not appreciate what they’ve done. That’s original. So as an educator, I always think it’s kind of like my golf game, which of course, is all over the place. I’m a horrible golf. But when I do line up a shot, it’s kind of like, well, I can hit it over here. Very low probability. I don’t want to make that mistake.

Mark Runco [00:24:14]:
I’m going to hit it over here. It’s not as good of a shot in the long run, but I know I can make it, and it’s not going to get me in as much trouble. I decide which kind of mistake is the best and the worst. In your example, I would say that I would much rather appreciate a student for using a process that seems to be creative and comes up with an original idea, even if I don’t understand it and maybe it’s not all that valuable. I’d much rather make that mistake than cutting off a student who has a potential idea.

Cyndi Burnett [00:24:50]:
And in partnership with dad.

Matthew Worwood [00:24:52]:
That concludes the first part of our double expresso. Editor, please join us for the second part, where Mark Runco will talk about the future of creativity research and also an upcoming conference on creativity. My name is Dr. Matthew Werwood, and.

Cyndi Burnett [00:25:06]:
My name is Dr. Cindy Burnett. This podcast was produced by creativity and education and in partnership with dabsforCreativity.com, our editor is Sina Yusefzade.