Season 9

Emerging Scholar: Brainwriting, Feedback, and Cultural Considerations

“ I think it’s amazing to change our mindset and to look at change, but how do we know what to change if we don’t even know what we’re doing or how we’re doing that? And two guests really spoke to this. ”

– Jimmy Wilson

Episode Transcription

Emerging Scholar: Brainwriting, Feedback, and Cultural Considerations

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

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood:
This is the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast.

Cyndi Burnett:
On this podcast, we’ll be talking about various creativity topics and how they relate to the fields 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 a, you know, somewhat new episode for the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast. If you remember, back in the summer 2024, we shared with everyone that we had brought on an emerging scholar, and we revealed that emerging scholar in one of our listen and learn episodes in June, I believe. And that emerging scholar was Jimmy Wilson, who is here back with us to share his debrief, his takeaway of the themes that he saw emerging during season nine of the podcast. And we’ve tasked him with making connections of those themes that he saw and some of the research that he’s been conducting as he continues his journey as an emerging scholar. So welcome back to the show, Jimmy Wilson.

Jimmy Wilson:
Oh, thank you so much, Matt and Cindy. I am just thrilled to be on and really honored that I can work with you guys as an emerging scholar, just to reintroduce myself because it’s been a bit since the summer. I am a former teacher. For 10 years, I taught in urban schools in Dallas as well as rural schools outside of Boston and San Antonio. And I taught a very tested subject, English, and I also taught a very creative subject with creative writing. And that difference with the kids inspired me to say, I need to research this. I need to spread this around to everybody about how to infuse creativity into the classroom. And one of the best programs, I think I’m a little biased, is at the University of Connecticut, where they have a school for creativity and education, advanced academics, where I can work with really good scholars.

Jimmy Wilson:
And incidentally, Matt’s also there on a different campus. But it’s been really wonderful opportunity. So that’s just a little bit about myself, and I’m really excited to dig into the season with you all.

Cyndi Burnett:
Jimmy, we’re so excited to dive deep into your key insights today. But before we begin, I want to reach out to our listeners and let them know that if you are listening, we would love to hear from you. We have a survey in the show Notes as well as our website, fuelingcreativitypodcast.com and if you complete this very short survey, it’s only two to three minutes, it will one help us in preparing for season 10 to give you the best possible information that you want. And you will be in the running for some amazing gifts. We have Matt and I’s books, we have some of our the people that we have interviewed books. So we have lots of prizes we’re going to be giving away to those of you who complete the survey. So please check out the show notes below. Now, Jimmy, back to you.

Cyndi Burnett:
What’s your first key insight?

Jimmy Wilson:
Well, it seems a little bit obvious, but the first key insight is that creativity is about change. And I’m going to dive into it a little bit more. But I feel like right now, I don’t know about you guys, but it feels a little chaotic. Have you been feeling like the world is getting a little chaotic lately?

Matthew Worwood:
We’ve literally staying silent, Jimmy, because you know, we can’t go down that road. But let’s just say the nodding at the heads are very enthusiastic. Yes, we, yeah.

Jimmy Wilson:
And I feel like teachers and I was here, I was teaching during the pandemic as a hybrid teacher in Texas and teaching to the little black boxes. And then we came back and we were working with kids who experiencing that change had to reintegrate to the classroom. And then the next year, 2022 hits and guess what, there’s a game changing technology with generative AI and you have to rethink how you’re doing everything. And one of the things in this season, between all of from Ruth Richards down to Talia Goldstein, I could feel a positive energy of change instead of that chaotic, frenetic, uncontrolled change. And one of the things that Colin Seale said in his episode about using discipline from law to help his kids, he quoted Angela Davis and saying, I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I’m changing the things I cannot accept. And I thought that was so powerful because when you asked him about creativity, as a listener, I was thinking, oh cool, he’s going to give us some tips. And he just flipped the script and said, look, the world is tough and we need to be creative to see beyond this and to move further.

Jimmy Wilson:
And so I think creative mindsets was a huge theme for this season of the podcast. What do you guys think? Were you seeing that too as you were interviewing all of these great thinkers and teachers?

Matthew Worwood:
Yeah, I mean, I think you’ve touched on some of the stuff we’ve done recently in our debrief and I am sitting here thinking that you of course, haven’t had an opportunity to listen to Robert Sternberg’s interview which is actually being released next week as of us recording this show today because he talks about transformational creativity and looking to better the world. But if I’m honest with you, Jimmy, you’ve, you’ve given me an uplifting thinking and it might been because it’s a busy semester, it might be that I don’t necessarily reflect, reflect on all of them in the way that you’ve done. But I’m. Let’s write to Cindy. That idea of this kind of like it’s been up, it’s been about positive change as opposed to negative change. That hasn’t stood out to me. But now Jimmy’s bringing that to the forefront. I’m like, yeah, I think it is.

Matthew Worwood:
I definitely could see it with Ruth Richards. I definitely can see it with, with Colin Sills and, and you know, transformational creativity. Yeah. It is about how creativity can help us and help us in, in to steer towards a positive future as opposed to dealing with the, the immediate problems that sometimes put us in a negative place.

Cyndi Burnett:
I would agree with that, Matt. And I think, you know, sometimes when I talk with teachers, one of the ways I position creativity is the ability to manage change. One of the questions Matt asked me on, on the debrief was can we live a life without creativity? And I, I don’t think it. There’s constant change. That’s one thing that we can guarantee is there will be change. And I think as educators particularly, there are so many changes not only in, you know, the educational systems and pedagogies, but also just within your classroom and the kinds of students that you have. And, and so there’s so much to manage in terms of change that you have to bring in your. Treat your creativity toolkit.

Cyndi Burnett:
So I agree with you that creativity is about change and I didn’t think about the positive aspect, but when I reflect back on some of the people we brought onto the show, you know, like Ruth Richards, for example, it was about, you know, the benefits and the well being that comes with being creative and really looking at yourself as a creative person.

Jimmy Wilson:
No, I, I’m glad that you guys are seeing the same things that I am sitting in my car driving to University of Connecticut, frantically getting to class on time. So, but I was going to say like just kind of tying things back together to research. There is a really great study done in 2016, so it’s a little bit older by Dennis Dumas and Kevin Dunbar at University of Maryland, where they talked a little bit more about the creative mindset and changing that. And the study is called the Creative stereotype Effect. And what they did is they took a hundred different students at University of Maryland, different ethnicities, different majors, different gender, and they asked them to do this use of objects task where they give them these objects. There’s 10 of them, and they have two minutes to come up with as many different uses that they can come up with. Very popular. One of the things I like about this, though, is that they norm them so that cultural differences that everybody could.

Jimmy Wilson:
In that a hundred group, they could say, yes, these are like normal objects that I’ve encountered, things like book, fork sandals. And then they gave them a tiny little prompt there to try to change their mindset. They said, envision yourself as a rigid librarian or as an eccentric poet. And, yeah, and it was really crazy, the results that they got from that. How do you feel like that would change your mindset if I gave you that task and said you’re a rigid librarian or an eccentric poet?

Matthew Worwood:
Well, we just had a great debrief conversation about Talia’s episode where we were talking about theater and theater filling in the gaps. So when you’re on the stage, you’re not saying anything, but you’re thinking of all of the different things that your character would be thinking in that moment. So it strikes me that in some ways, you’re proposing an acting assignment where we are imagining being somebody else. And by imagining being somebody else, invites us, encourages us to think differently. We’re not ourselves. So that was my connection.

Cyndi Burnett:
So, Jimmy, what you’re saying is, if we were to look at this glass from a rigid librarian, what else could it be?

Jimmy Wilson:
Definitely.

Cyndi Burnett:
So like a pencil holder that organizes your pencils according to color.

Jimmy Wilson:
Exactly.

Cyndi Burnett:
Okay. Oh, fun.

Jimmy Wilson:
I think the cool insight from this is that they put them in different groups and had them imagine these different things. The creativity and the amount of ideas that they could create, as well as the originality increase between the group with rigid librarian and the eccentric poet. But that’s not the most intriguing part. To me, the most intriguing part is that within subjects. So the same exact person doing the same task and imagining themselves as either one putting on that role. And perspective taking like Talia Goldstein was talking about, helps them to come up with more ideas and more original ideas, which I think is just so powerful for teachers in the classroom. And by the way, just a plug for. Matt and Cindy did a presentation at NAGC where they did this activity With a pencil, which was lovely.

Jimmy Wilson:
And I definitely encourage all the teachers out there to do this with their kids because it’s really fun and amazing to see what they can come up with.

Matthew Worwood:
And that is actually Cindy’s activity. So you kind of teed her up to speak a little bit about that. But I’m just wondering, Cindy, whether or not there’s an opportunity now to slightly modify that activity and have half of the room. You know, imagine that there are one particular type of character or person and another half of the room, or split them into four. That would be fascinating.

Cyndi Burnett:
It would be. And the way I’ve always used it is. And I buy pencils. You can buy pencils and have them say, be curious on them. And I give the students the pencils, and then I have them generate as many questions they can about a pencil in five minutes. And what’s interesting about doing that exercise is that students have this opportunity to look at something that they’ve been looking at since they were a child and to ask questions about it. And. And typically, you know, an average group of, say, 8th graders can come up with 40 questions about a pencil.

Cyndi Burnett:
So then you go, okay, now you don’t know anything about this. X, Y, and Z. Let’s ask as many questions as we can about that. Now, what I like about what you’re both saying is we could modify that, and this is a different exercise, but to take a pencil and say, what are all the different uses? So it goes back to the alternative uses test, and then look at it from the perspective of a. A clown, a shark wrangler, a librarian. You know, there’s so many different characters you can use. And. And this is sort of like another addition to this.

Cyndi Burnett:
If you wanted to use generative AI is you ask generative AI to come up with ideas based on a specific character. So what would Mother Teresa think? What are all the things that she could do with this pencil? So. And then have generative AI generate ideas as well. So it’s. It’s fun to sort of play around with that. And it’s a great use of generative as well.

Jimmy Wilson:
And we were just talking about wicked, too. So, you know, when your kids are coming back to school and talking about Glinda and the wizard and Elphaba, like, let’s come up with different ideas from the wizard’s perspective, right? Of, like, this hierarchical versus, like, Elphaba, who is, like, fighting against the suppression, right? And just, like, it opens up a lot of different possibilities with just a tiny tweak of putting on a different hat and being a different character. So another theme that I saw from this season is feedback and creativity. I think it’s amazing to change our mindset and to look at change, but how do we know what to change if we don’t even know what we’re doing or how we’re doing that? And two guests really spoke to this. And Jacoby talked a lot about the power of feedback, how important it was to get immediacy and feedback with dance, having a dance instructor move her body in different positions so she knew exactly what she was doing and where to do. And again, all these connections, right, With Talia Goldstein and body awareness and collaboration and flexibility. Another guest that I thought was really cool, came right on the heels of Anne was Neil Bergenroth, who used his passion for rowing to get a grant for rowing machines. And then the data from that would make these, like, parabolic curves, and the kids would use them in STEM to create their own apps and, like, make all sorts of interesting things with that and interesting connections because they could feel the push and pull and see that along with that.

Matthew Worwood:
Jimmy, you know, just really quickly, I’m sorry to cut you off, but. But with those two examples, I do think it’s important to highlight you’ve got one immediate feedback in the moment, and then you’ve potentially got feedback that you get from teachers that might come one to two weeks later. Feedback’s important. They’re very effective. But I’m just wondering if you had any thoughts about that, you know, like, is there a point at which it’s gone on too long? You know, because.

Jimmy Wilson:
Yeah, no, I think that’s a great insight, Matt. And the timing of the feedback is important, and delayed feedback can be just as important as immediate feedback. So as teachers and practitioners and researchers that are interested in creativity and education, there’s actually been some really interesting research on this. This is a synthesis review by Darfler and Colin Terry on expectation of feedback and its effect on creativity. And what these researchers found. This is a paper in 2022, by the way, is that feedback timing is very important. Like you just said, in the idea generation stage, we want to give feedback that is encouraging and exploratory. Right.

Jimmy Wilson:
Like, so we’re thinking of the example of dance. Maybe we’re ideating. I want a dance that is full of, like, crazy energy. Right. Or I want something more serious, and we’re coming up with those ideas. The teacher wants to push that and explore. All right, let’s think of what would it be like if you Combine those together, right? How could we make different movements express those things? Whereas in the refinement stage, which is maybe closer to what Angie was talking about, when you’re actually implementing that, you want to be more focused and technical, right? If you’re putting the silly movement, I need it to flow more. So I want you to lift your elbow up higher.

Jimmy Wilson:
Or if you’re becoming more serious, I need you to make more rigid and clean movements. I don’t know anything about dance. I’m just pulling this out of the air, guys. So sorry if I’m new.

Matthew Worwood:
So how I see it is I’m a huge advocate of project based learning. But I know that I’ve had times early on in my career where I probably was not implementing project based learning correctly. And I would argue a big part of that is the way that I was administering feedback. Because one of the things that I feel strongly about is that project based learning, I mean, I did hear teachers early on in the career say, oh, project basis is the easy. It’s, you know, to try and advocate for it. You just sit back and let the students kind of like work their way through the problems. And actually, no, that’s not what you’re doing. You have to be right in there with the weeds and you have to be very strategic with your feedback.

Matthew Worwood:
And I think what you’re talking about is identifying the just in time feedback that the timely feedback and recognizing when there’s opportunities as well to kind of bestow more knowledge, new knowledge on them. But you have to be very specific. Sometimes you, I’ve learned sometimes you do have to go and show them examples. You want to provide them with an ill defined problem. That’s great. But sometimes you do actually need to model divergent thinking. You do need to model what an idea might look like. You do need to model a specific creative thinking approach to an ideation session.

Matthew Worwood:
And all of that is part of that feedback. But I think you’re reminding us of the importance at times where you do need to be technical and you do need to model and you do need to scaffold, even when you are putting students in a very kind of independent, student centered learning environment.

Cyndi Burnett:
And it just reminds me of our episode and I think that might have been season three, Matt with Leon Tines, who talked about that role of facilitation and feedback in project based learning. So if you’re interested in that, check out that episode.

Jimmy Wilson:
That’s great. I’m definitely going to have to go back and check out that episode. Cindy and I, 100% agree with what you were saying, Matt, about how important modeling is. And I think that last aspect of feedback is like the product. Right. So much in project is the process. Right. And how do we get into that? And it reminded me of another big paper that’s known a lot in the education communities called the Power of Feedback by Hattie and Timberley, where they met at Analyze, which is a fancy way of just saying they take hundreds of studies and measure the effect and talk about how feedback is one of the best things teachers can do.

Jimmy Wilson:
And also that there’s level at the product, there’s the process, and then there’s also one that was more elusive that they couldn’t really find a lot of research on. But the identity. Right. And how does what you’re doing help students feel psychologically safe and able to create? And that’s something that leads into another big theme of the show, the third theme that I wanted to talk about and that is equity and creativity and making sure that like all students, no matter if they’re like, I’m not creative at all, or if they’re constantly rearranging things and making new objects in the class, they can participate in these activities. And I was just wondering your perspectives, like, how did you feel like you saw equity show up and creativity in the this past season?

Cyndi Burnett:
Jimmy, this was certainly deliberate in doing this. We brought on two guests particularly to talk about equity and diversity and inclusion and creativity. Colin Seale and Corey Gray. And I really loved our conversation with Corey Gray around intercultural creativity and working within diverse cultures and what we need to serve students in underserved communities. Matt, I’m really curious your perspective. Have you had any experiences in this?

Matthew Worwood:
Yeah, I mean, you’re probably pulling me in because before I went to the University of Connecticut, I had the opportunity, I think I worked with about 40 different school districts in the state of Connecticut and definitely experienced different communities and setups within the school. I think one of the things that I found fascinating was I’d set up the Connecticut Student Film Festival. And within the Connecticut Student Film Festival, we had the 84 hour film challenge. And as you’re putting together this over the sequence of years, it’s a very competitive challenge and you start to have to build parameters because small things, you don’t want to promote alcohol, for example, because sometimes the films have alcohol and if they were to win the award, it might frustrate a school who feel very uncomfortable with that. But one of the things that I ran into was there was something about promoting violence and There was a film, and it was. It was a. It was actually a relatively good film, but it had been flagged as promoting violence. And I can’t remember the film well enough, but I know at the time the judges and the people vetting the films felt that the theme within the film was uncomfortable.

Matthew Worwood:
Now, one of the teachers of the school came to me and I shared that, and they acknowledged that viewpoint. But then they said, but you have to recognize that within this community, that’s everyday life. And so they don’t. They won’t necessarily perceive that storyline in the way that someone else in another community would perceive it, because to them, it isn’t actually perceived in the way that you think it is. And I don’t want to get too much in the weeds about it, but I found that really fascinating because we’re Talking about probably two schools, you know, about 40 to 50 minutes away from each other with two very different views of what is acceptable and not acceptable within the film festival. And to a certain extent, the same with. We had an incident with alcohol, and there was a student who was pouring water into a glass, but it was a martini glass. And there was a strong feeling from one school that this is promoting alcohol.

Matthew Worwood:
And from another school it was. It was humor. And I share that because within my experience with these films and all of the different themes that were expressed in these stories, there were different perspectives of what was acceptable and not acceptable. And it’s obviously a chat. It was a challenge to manage all of that, but I think it highlights the conversation that we’re having. And I just want to bring in. And again, another disadvantage, because you haven’t seen. Listen to this episode, Jimmy.

Matthew Worwood:
But. But we’ve been talking about creativity and the challenge of conforming. Or rather, let me rephrase that. The challenge to break with conformity. And what does that look like? Perhaps in your environment you’re not even breaking with conformity, but you go to another environment and now you are perceived as not conforming and you’re a nuisance. And I think all of this is closely related to diversity and why creativity can be a challenge for some people, whether it’s from people from underrepresented groups or just people who are new to a team. You know, that disruption that they can bring, or at least be perceived as bringing. You know, you can get pushback, and maybe that does unfavor some groups more than others.

Jimmy Wilson:
Yeah, I totally agree with that, Matt. And I think you bring up some really important issues about the way culture influences everyday creativity, the way that personality types and even like neurodiversity can influence that, because there’s been a lot of studies about adhd, about how hyperactivity and inattention can correlate to more divergent thinking and different thoughts. And throwing those out in the classroom can sometimes be seen as disruptive or against the culture when it’s something we want to cultivate as educators passionate about creativity. Wow, this is. I feel like we could probably do a whole another 30 minutes on just this topic. It’s so rich. One of the quotes I have to connect it to is Corey Gray talking about quote, culture influences creativity. If I understand that, every app that I do beyond that point should honor that culture influences creativity.

Jimmy Wilson:
And I mean, I can’t say it better than that. But I just love that you brought on Corey and Colin and that a lot of your other guests. I think of Edward Clapp about talking about, like, participatory creativity. Like, we’re talking about how can we include more students? How can we make our classroom a place where everybody feels like they can engage at creativity at different levels? So I just want to highlight a little bit of research right now. I know we’re getting close on time, but one thing that popped into my brain and I can’t cite this study, so I’ll have to go back and do this. In my article for the wrap up was studies on brainstorming in China versus the United States and how culture in the United States. Brainstorming. We’re putting together more ideas as a group, shouting them out.

Jimmy Wilson:
And if I remember this correctly, you guys might have to correct me if I’m wrong. But in Chinese cultural context, brain writing, where you’re writing down the ideas first generated more idea. So because you could feel comfortable putting that out without more social pressure and that I feel like often when we’re in these spaces where it is college students that most of the research comes to who more often are more affluent and more white. And in these spaces that we need to just reality check research in general and say, like, this does not apply to everybody, everywhere in all spaces. And I think that as teachers and educators, we need to put on a researcher hat to try things and experiment and see, like, what is working for my kids in this space.

Matthew Worwood:
I think I do want to say, I think it’s really important you brought that up, though, because sometimes the reason why I bring that up is that there has been a shift in practice to starting off with brainwriting. One immediate example, if anyone has gone through the IBM design thinking practitioner Badge will know. And I share that because I make my students go through it, but they actually begin all that they promote or advocate. The all divergent thinking sessions start off with brainwriting for the reasons that you just shared. So that’s a company that is implementing that. I certainly have been implementing brainwriting now for, you know, I want to say about three, four years, but I don’t want to assume that this shift has actually occurred in all classrooms. And I think it seems simple, but we’ve got Google Docs, like, we’ve got technology that can assist us in getting students to contribute ideas quite quickly and effectively within a class environment that doesn’t necessitate putting your hand up and shouting out. And the other piece of that I heard a new word, and I’m sorry if it’s not new to others, but this idea of invisible diversity, I mean, you had referenced neurodivergent thinkers, for example.

Matthew Worwood:
But even things like invisible diversity, people who may have various reasons that aren’t immediately obvious based on appearance, that might find those environments very difficult, can participate in the activity a lot more effectively, I think, through these kind of brainwriting sessions. So I’m a huge advocate for brainwriting, and if you haven’t tried that out in your class classroom, I would definitely encourage you to start thinking about that shift. Just want to throw that out there.

Cyndi Burnett:
I would also build on that. I was part of a really big study on brainstorming, and we looked at the differences between debate and brainstorming and with guidelines and without guidelines. And then we had a control group, and I think we had 450 participants, and they were all adults. Some of them were trained, some of them were not trained. Some of them were a little bit trained. And one of the things that we found in our study was the fact that having some training in divergent thinking was extremely useful like that. It was significant in. In all sorts of ways, in originality of ideas and in terms of fluency of ideas.

Cyndi Burnett:
And so what that makes me think is before you even bring in brainwriting or brainstorming, which are just tools, you know, people think of brainstorming as like, it’s the end all, be all. It’s divergent thingy. It is just a tool that if we are going to bring in these tools, then we should prep students with other activities and get them warmed up to really make sure that they understand what it means to delay judgment and to not judge not only each other’s ideas, but your own ideas. Because so often, you know, imagine you’re in A brainstorming session of any capacity, Brainwriting, brainstorming. And you’ve got to post it in your hand and you crumble it up because you think it’s not very good. You have to work with students to really delay their judgment before they even go into those exercises. So that’s just another recommendation I have.

Matthew Worwood:
Which, which students to put out the delayed judgment includes I’ve got the idea, it’s awesome, it’s so good. And then you’re just engaging and generating 10 ideas because that’s the goal. But you love your first idea. Part of delaying judgment is, no, no, no, we’re not even favoring ideas either.

Jimmy Wilson:
I just want to make a couple of research connections that I was thinking about when listening to this podcast. One talking about mindset and that training. Vizali and their colleagues in 2016 did a study on 150 Italian elementary school students. And I don’t know if you remember, but with the civil war in Syria, there were many, many refugees coming into Italian schools. And they said, what is going on with these communities? How can we build a more communal mindset? And how does it affect their creativity and pairing these students with someone of a different cultural, linguistic background? Actually, when they had and only when they had that communal mindset. So thinking about Cindy, that background, that training, then they saw increase in their creativity and their feeling of connectedness with the class. And James Kaufman, another researcher, he actually advocates that these creativity and divergent thinking measures be used in college admissions because they are something that measures a different aspect of our thinking that helps invisible disabilities, like Matt was saying with neurodivergence and actually shown that race, ethnicity and gender is not as discriminatory on divergent thinking tasks as it is in things like the SAT and the actual. So anyway, I just know all those things being said, creativity is not a panacea.

Jimmy Wilson:
There’s a lot of work that we need to do in our country to address these problems that goes beyond that. But us as educators and practitioners and researchers interested in creativity, can use this knowledge and researcher and try to build more effective classrooms that really leverage everybody’s strength and backgrounds. So anyway, I want to thank you guys so much for bringing together all of these cool thinkers and writers and researchers and teachers because this has just been such a joy to go back over all of this and to try to connect some of my work I’m doing as a PhD student to the amazing guests that you’ve had on and the insights you brought to the show.

Matthew Worwood:
Well, Jimmy, it has been an absolute pleasure talking to you and having you as a colleague on this podcast. I think you’ve definitely proven that it was a great opportunity that we seized upon when you reached out to us back in the spring. So thank you and we look forward to continuing to bring you back on the show and help and having you make all these amazing connections that you’re making that helps facilitate a more in depth conversation for both yourself and then also other emerging scholars. So as a reminder, Jimmy, you’re going to be offering some additional pieces on the website fueling creativity podcast.com Jimmy Wilson has his own section on that site as well as tagging some of his favorite episodes. And we’ll also be adding these episodes to that section of the site as well. I do want to do a quick plug again for our survey that Cindy has referenced. We want to hear from you. We want to better understand you because we are really fueled to go and create an absolutely awesome season 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and beyond of the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast.

Matthew Worwood:
But this is probably going to be one of our last interviews for this year and we look forward to, as we said, providing you with some off episodes during the season and coming back in early February for season 10. My name is Dr. Matthew Worwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Jimmy Wilson:
And I’m Jimmy Wilson.

Cyndi Burnett:
This episode was produced by Matthew Worwood and Cindy Burnett. Our podcast sponsor is Curiosity to Create, and our editor is Sam Atkinson.

How can brainwriting transform divergent thinking sessions?

In this episode of the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast, hosts Dr. Matthew Worwood and Dr. Cyndi Burnett chat with emerging scholar Jimmy Wilson about the connections between creativity research and education. They dive into the growing use of brainwriting in creative thinking sessions, explaining how it benefits different types of learners. Cyndi shares her experiences and research, emphasizing the value of teaching students how to think creatively by delaying judgment and encouraging originality and fluency.

Jimmy highlights a study involving Italian elementary students and refugees, suggesting that college admissions should consider creativity to reflect diverse backgrounds. Together, they explore a fun exercise where participants take on different personas to think more creatively and brainstorm new uses for everyday objects. They also discuss how varying the timing of feedback can enhance the creative process and share practical examples, like Neil Bergenroth’s use of rowing machines to teach STEM concepts.


The conversation touches on equity in creativity, pointing out how cultural sensitivity and diverse environments can inspire new ideas. The hosts stress the importance of flexible and inclusive teaching methods to meet the needs of all learners. Wrapping up, they reflect on how creativity can drive positive change and help address challenges in education.

About the Guest

Jimmy Wilson, a doctoral student from the University of Connecticut, joins the team as a scholar-in-residence to inject fresh, emerging perspectives into the conversation. Jimmy brings a wealth of experience from his years of teaching and a deep-rooted passion for neurodiverse learners in creativity and education.

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We are thrilled to partner with Curiosity 2 Create as our sponsor, a company that shares our commitment to fostering creativity in education. Curiosity 2 Create empowers educators through professional development and community support, helping them integrate interactive, creative thinking approaches into their classrooms. By moving beyond traditional lecture-based methods, they help teachers create dynamic learning environments that enhance student engagement, improve academic performance, and support teacher retention. With a focus on collaborative learning and exploration, Curiosity 2 Create is transforming classrooms into spaces where students thrive through continuous engagement and growth.

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