Matthew Worwood:
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast. And welcome to an exciting start to season 10.

Cyndi Burnett:
Yes, it’s exciting because the first three episodes of season 10 represent a mini series on diversity and gifted education and were recorded on location at the 2024 National association for Gifted and Talented conference in Seattle, Washington.

Matthew Worwood:
Now, in our first episode of this miniseries, we sat down with Dr. Jeb Puryear, who is an associate professor at the University of Montana.

Cyndi Burnett:
Dr. Puryear teaches courses in educational psychology and gifted education. His primary areas of study relate to the intersection of creativity, talent development and education. Jeb has contributed to the work of state, national and international organizations in the creativity and gifted education communities and has published across top outlets in these fields.

Matthew Worwood:
So let’s begin.

Cyndi Burnett:
So Jeb, thanks so much for joining us today. So where we want to start is around creativity and we would like to know from you, in what ways can creativity research help address systemic inequities in education? So a big question, but geez, that.

Jeb Puryear:
Is quite a large question. I think a lot to the extent that creativity research, as far as I’m concerned, as it relates to educational psychology, as it relates to other areas of educational psychology, whether that’s motivation or whether that’s issues of metacognition really or personality and temperament sort of things, even too, just like having a background of things, I think that that the research on being able to train for creativity and train for those related skills super, super important. And I think in when I work with teachers I find that they just don’t realize how much they already do that is related to it. I also think that it coming from the field of gift education spec the way it ends up connecting with creativity is we talk about divergent thinking a lot, quite a lot in terms of assessment or identification for services, that sort of thing. The problem is I would argue that most of the time those are very decontextualized sort of things. It’s like asking somebody for uses of a fork or like what’s going to happen if people don’t no longer need to sleep anymore. How is that making sense in the context of actual education itself? I think, and this is actually a presentation you’re going to be doing tomorrow morning talking about. One of the suggestions for teachers is to try to better contextualize diversion thinking.

Jeb Puryear:
For example, if you’re doing an assignment on sort of a ubiquitous task of kids are given a chart or given a graph and they have to answer questions about that chart and graph. Well, if you have them do that. So you sort of can check for their content understanding, but you want to see that sort of value added creativity piece. Why not ask them to try to come up with their own questions as well? You know, try to come up with five questions. And so then that becomes, you can check them for fluency, you can look at, you know, flexibility. Are they all saying the same question? You can look at elaboration. Are they just taking a stem that was one of the questions on the front and changing a name or something? Or are they recombining? Are they going further and extended and then obviously originality. And also you could also look at appropriateness of it too, or the value of it, like are these questions that could actually be answered? So I think broadly in terms of education, there’s so much that we do that is creativity related.

Jeb Puryear:
I think a lot of teachers are not really clued into that. Again, teachers I work with in professional development situations, they just don’t, they don’t think of the all these things they do as being creativity related. Even though they would tell, if you ask them is creativity important, they would say yes, but they don’t really know what that means in practice. So that, that’s always a really big focus of mine when I work with teacher.

Matthew Worwood:
And just to pick up on that before I ask my question, when I think about mini C creativity within the 4C model, I always think that applies for pretty much everything that happens in the classroom. Those new discoveries that we’re making that we as individual students in that moment greatly appreciate and value. And so I certainly agree in terms of that mini C piece is something that we can all relate to. Now you referenced something a little bit about the content and knowledge and we know within K through 12, there’s that pressure in order to disseminate that knowledge and make sure students have acquired that. I quite often think about quote from Arthur Cropley’s article on convergent thinking. Knowledge is a world to which ideas are drawn. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to that idea of divergent thinking. And is there a certain amount of knowledge we need to provide to our students before we can really have a good divergent thinking strategy?

Jeb Puryear:
Yeah, I think you have to have another example I use. Having been a science teacher for a long time before I got into this more higher ed sort of game. The idea I’ve given the example before of like presenting students with laboratory materials from a science class and asking them what sort of experiments could you do, Give me sort of 50 word descriptions or 20 word descriptions of it. Well, if they don’t know the underlying mechanics of the materials that are in front of them, you can’t really do it. If you ask somebody to write in an English class, if you’re asking somebody to write a short story but they don’t really understand, have a concept of figurative language or grammar or just basic structures of things, if you don’t have the basic building blocks, you can’t do the advanced things. And I really that obviously that applies to all sorts of situations. In a math class if you don’t have a basic sort of number sense of how things work, it becomes very difficult to problem solve or apply really unique sort of strategies. I guess I’m trying to think of the diversion thinking specifically how it would apply is you do have to have.

Jeb Puryear:
You absolutely, totally agree with Cropley that you have to have sort of a body of ideas that you can come up with. But in that context, talking about convergent thinking like Cropley is that there’s always this divergent piece but then there’s this convergent evaluative piece. And that’s another thing that I think is important for teachers to appreciate in educational settings is we want kids to be able to generate ideas, but we also want them to be able to evaluate ideas ideas and decide on value for themselves, decide on value for a particular context that they might be in. You know, something that was a really good idea in the third grade might not be all that great an idea in the eighth grade. So there’s sort of some levels of development going on there. But I also think I’m very big on the idea of creative metacognition as well that teaching people to have the understanding of and it’s sort of a reciprocal thing like if you build skills of creativity, you’re sort of like going into that well, but it doesn’t really matter if you go into the well if you don’t know what you should be taking out of it and decide what is the good idea that I should take out in the first place. So I would argue that as you go through and are evaluating ideas, you can’t help but be making some sort of self regulatory or metacognitive sort of judgment which then builds those skills. And I would argue you can’t do reflective metacognitive sort of activities in general without it then feeding back to somebody’s abilities to evaluate the ideas to pick out the best one out of the well.

Jeb Puryear:
So I’m very much into that idea of that reciprocal relationship on the metacognition and reflective self regulatory knowledge sort of side.

Cyndi Burnett:
So imagine I’m a teacher, a K through 12 teacher and I want to understand what creative metacognition is because we know what metacognition is as educators. Can you go into creative metacognition and give us an example?

Jeb Puryear:
Okay. I was, I would. First I would argue there’s sort of two ways that people that write about this and think about it come at it. The first one is in a specific situation being able to think creatively anytime. I teach elementary school pre service teachers a lot and they take a course in early numeracy and so they’re always sharing these ideas of how they’re talking about having kids do number talks and talk about different math strategies and having them evaluate which ones work for them. Which ones do they think would work the most, which ones do they think other people understand. Like talking about them through those different contexts. When you do that sort of thing, anytime you’re making an evaluative judgment or metacognitive judgment, you are doing the same sort of thinking that Cropley is talking about of having to pick that idea out of a.

Jeb Puryear:
Well, it just might be a different context of the situation. And you know, somebody who might be really good at picking out that best idea in science context, maybe not as good in an English context, maybe they’re better in an art context, maybe they’re not so good in a social sciences or a history context. I think that comes back to the underlying knowledge piece too. Right. You have to have a certain understanding before you can, you have to know a lot about strategies before you can decide what strategies are the best. You have to know you have a lot, have to have a lot of pieces of knowledge before you can decide which ones are the best. So sort of, in short, the defining the creative metacognition is that ability to one know when to sort of be creative or not. And Bighetto and Cawthon have written about this and they call it a Superman and Clark Kent sort of thing like know which one you need to be and that that actually metaphor works really well for teachers.

Jeb Puryear:
Maybe it’s a little bit D kids now, but teachers understand it that teaching kids when to just share that crazy idea and when not that that’s an important thing, but then also in any sort of context where you have to evaluate ideas and what’s good or not, there’s sort of the metacognition about creativity and then there’s creativity that’s part of the metacognition. So it’s Sort of both and people write about it sort of from both directions.

Matthew Worwood:
And also just to build on that, we do do a lot of talking about creativity and education. But I think you also, within the piece you just shared, there’s times where it should just be about the knowledge. And we might not necessarily want to go and focus primarily on divergent thinking because there’s so many different pieces that factor into creativity, creative thinking, creative metacognition. And there’s a time and place for that. Now, going back to this context piece because we know there’s a lot of conversation about project based learning. It’s particularly popular when we’re having conversations about creativity and 21st century skills. The context piece it strikes me that part of being a creative teacher is thinking about the context to which you’re situating the learning. When we think about the problem, the ill defined problem that you’re presenting, that provides somewhat of a framework for students to say, well this is a really creative idea, but how does it relate to our audience, the community that we’re trying to serve? I was wondering if you could expand a little bit on that idea, particularly for maybe science teachers that find it a little bit difficult sometimes as they drift away from, dare I say, the script coming up with these kind of creative prompts or ill defined problems to package the real world learning within the curriculum.

Jeb Puryear:
Well, I think an initial recognition is on the teacher’s part. They need to realize when the teachers do put students in that situation of having to make those evaluative judgments or decide the value of a particular idea, I think it’s important that the teachers recognize that that’s creative thinking. I also think it’s important that they share that with the students. In the same way that you would like have a cognitive apprenticeship would be a term in education psychology where a teacher would explaining what they’re thinking themselves as they work through an example, sharing that same sort of thing when it’s a creative context as well. When I’m thinking about these sort of questions, here’s how I think about it and so modeling that to them, I think there’s a certain, like, just like there would be in any class, like it’s safe to have a certain idea and it’s safe to share that idea. I think a teacher needs to be able to model that. I really am into the idea. Bighetto Ron Bigetto’s idea of creative micro moments that there are always these sort of like tangents that come up in a classroom and sort of in a split second the teacher has to make a judgment of like, do I have time for this? Is there going to be value of this? And they’re doing this like dozens of times a day that they have to make these decisions.

Jeb Puryear:
I argue it’s very important that as much as possible you sort of go down that road and not prejudge the value. And a big reason for it is the context point. You may not have an idea of what was going on in the kid’s head or what the kid might be thinking that led them to say that in the first place. I do also think, as you were asking the question before, I think teachers own experience matters too in making those judgments. You know, if you’ve done a lesson, you know, every year, six times a day in a high school classroom for 15 years, you have a pretty good idea of what the common things that are going to be said or the uncommon things that are going to be said, right? So there’s a certain amount of experience in the same way that a student working with ideas has to have a background and a lot of ideas to be able to make those judgments of value. A teacher in those moments has to have a lot of experience with running a certain lesson. And I can tell you as a science teacher who was always like trying out new lab experiments and trying to figure out how things would work and they would just go terribly wrong, there’s not a lot of judgment you can make in that other than to realize, well, this didn’t work really well. And now since it didn’t, now we’re going to have, you know, a 30 minute discussion on all the ways it could be better, which again is a reflective piece, metacognitive piece, self regulatory sort of knowledge piece.

Matthew Worwood:
It strikes me and Cindy, we touched on this in our debrief at the end of season nine. But a very simple thing I think a teacher could do, particularly in regard to having a conversation about appropriateness and supporting that creative metacognition. There’s modeling, but then there’s also. Could you tell me why you think this is appropriate? Why. Why did you select this idea over another idea, particularly if, if that was shared and it might be a little uncomfortable potentially. You got to think about how you’re phrasing it. You were referencing the everyday creativity of teachers. We make strategic decisions of, of who might be best to ask this question.

Matthew Worwood:
But by asking that it hopefully do it in a strategic and successful way. We’re teasing out why they made that, that decision. And in that moment we are getting them to reflect and engage in creative Metacognition.

Jeb Puryear:
Anyway, Absolutely. I. I think in the same way that if you’re working with young children and you’re doing number talks and they’re going through seven different ways that you could solve this problem, and you’re having them evaluate that or, you know, writing these different poems and deciding all the different ways that it could be set up, or an adjective that might sound better in this place or that place, it’s all. And sort of practicing with it. Anytime you have that opportunity to make those judgments, it could be in what looks like a very stereotypical creative sense, like in a sort of over reliance on there being a connection to arts sort of thing. Like the decisions that somebody would make about a materials choice or a paint color choice or something that’s sort of like, pretty obviously you could make an argument as creative about a cognition, but really, anytime you’re giving a person an opportunity to evaluate strategies in a math problem or word choice in a poem, that that’s no different than any justification of any idea, really. Right. It’s the same process of having to think, okay, what is the value of this in itself? What is the value to me? What is the value to anyone else? And that me, my immediate surroundings, a broader surroundings, that’s like, that’s the essence of a context.

Jeb Puryear:
As creativity gets defined, you know, novel and useful in a particular context, that particular context could be any.

Cyndi Burnett:
So, Jeb, can you discuss the barriers that we’re facing now with equitable education for gifted students?

Jeb Puryear:
Oh, goodness. Where to start? First, I would say there’s a just enormous number of people who are doing this sort of work. Most of the sort of data driven work is very much about identification practices and using, you know, the rules that we use in combination to evaluate things. I think there’s very much an awareness of this is something we need to deal with. And I do think, though, how, for all the research that we’ve done, we really do have a difficulty pinning down what exactly is the thing that we should be doing. Because it’s pretty clear there is no magic test that you can use. You know, you have literally thousands of schools trying to figure this out, right. And you would imagine just by chance someone would have stumbled onto it if there was something that just worked all of the time.

Jeb Puryear:
There’s so much about, again, totally different topic, but context definitely matters. Even within, you know, a school district policy for identification and equity, there’s so often more diversity or more difference between schools within a district than there are across. Like if we looked at diversity of district A versus B versus C. There’s a lot less difference probably between A, B and C then if we dove down into district B, there’s this wide spread of schools, whether it’s by differences in race or socioeconomic status or whatever. So it makes it very difficult to have these. I think by the nature of it, when you’re looking at DEI sort of issues, diversity sort of issues, equity issues, it’s by definition not a one size fits all thing. But we spend a lot of time at these conferences. There’ll be a lot of presentations that are about, you know, this is the thing you should do, or this is the thing you should do.

Jeb Puryear:
I think it’s very much like any other curriculum piece in the sense that lots of times people sort of would like to do it this way and try it out without there being a whole lot of basis behind it. Perhaps though, like I said at the very beginning, there are a lot of people that do lots of evaluations of looking at sort of how kids perform and you know, diversity even by levels of ability in a classroom, that sort of thing. There’s just, it’s so difficult to meet kids needs just academically. And then when you add the equity pieces on, it’s just, it’s even more, it’s like exponentially more complicated.

Cyndi Burnett:
Right, so, so what do you suggest that we do in terms of research to really move the field forward? What are some things that you’d like to see happen in the next, say three to years to really advance this issue?

Jeb Puryear:
I think the difficulty is fundamentally looking at what are the interventions that we actually do in gifted education and what is the effect of those interventions. Even before we get into sort of disaggregating and figuring out issues of diversity and equity, I’d really like to see us pin. And this is the same thing. You could have done this, you could have done this episode 10 years ago or 20 years ago and 30 years ago and people would have said the same thing. We need to know exactly what is the point of what we’re doing and we need to know how effective are the things trying to do. And there’s just other than things like grouping, viability and then having like appropriate differentiation and having good acceleration options, there’s just not a lot of intervention that specifically has a lot of backing behind it. There are a lot of suggestions in terms of equity and identification about, you know, having universal screening, have, using what we would call or rules instead of. And rules.

Jeb Puryear :
If you have two, if you have two measures that you use in a district Have a student qualify if they have one of the things that they meet rather than both of them, they meet or rules be more inclusive, less likely to miss students that would benefit from whatever the intervention is that you’re offering. But again, I, I think more targeted studies about what is it that we’re actually doing and what effect does that actually have? A big problem is there’s that that needs to be sort of broad based, large sample sort of things which is very difficult to do without funding. And, and there’s just not the funding as there would be, for example, for special education in charge. Javits is sort of the only big funding mechanisms we have. And it’s sort of like you never quite know whether that stuff’s going to be funded or not. Year to year, administration to administration, you never know quite know how things are going to go. But I think specific targeted studies that look at particular interventions. And how effective is this? Because if you just ask people all over the country, even people at this conference, if you ask them, you know, what does gifted education look like? If you ask a hundred people, you’re probably going to get at least 90 different answers.

Jeb Puryear:
I would also like there to be a lot more focus on the intervention intervention piece rather than the identification piece. I think we spend so much effort trying to find the magic way to identify equitably when there are so many things we could do to just broad base offer interventions and see which kids bubble up in those different situations or have things where they’re sort of, I don’t know, hybrid things where the things we use to identify are more a short term intervention to see which, you know, which kids bubble up and then use that as a piece that then becomes something for a broader program that a kid would be involved in. I think about, I know there’s lots of schools in North Carolina who has, they have really robust, they call it AI academically and intellectually gifted programs where they do, I can’t remember, I can’t remember if it’s second grade or third grade, but they’re sort of required to do this universal screening. But you have these specialists that are in an elementary school and they have to have something to do for the kindergarten first. So they come up with, okay, what would the skills be that would lead someone to thrive when we get to the actual intervention later? And so you’re helping the kids that would have been identified anyway, but you’re also helping the kids that maybe wouldn’t have had that opportunity. You’re sort of democratizing and being more Equitable in terms of who has opportunity to demonstrate what they can do.

Matthew Worwood:
You know, I find that fascinating because you spoke at the beginning of your response to that question, reminding us that school schools have priorities and there are so many different things that we have to accomplish in education. And naturally some things become more important for one school or one district when compared another school or another district. It strikes me that, that some of this isn’t a priority for all schools and there’s no judgment being shared there. So then perhaps it comes down to an individual teacher or you know, the knowledge that an intervention specialist may have. And if they take an interest in gifted ed, then they’re more likely maybe to go and steerhead that in their school. But without that individual, you’re not going to have that. But as a potential solution. What I’m hearing you saying is a school could theoretically develop a project program that is implemented in a specific year strategically like second grade, and that everyone has access to that program, but through participation in that program, ideally every student benefits, enjoys the program, but actually at the same time, at the end of the experience, whether it’s one week, one month, one year, what I’m hearing you’re saying is that a couple of students have bubbled to the service and then we now know that perhaps these students might need similar interventions in grade three and grade four.

Matthew Worwood:
Is that a fair assessment?

Jeb Puryear:
I think that’s a fair assessment. And I think there’s a couple of important points I would make when you’re doing those early identification practice, what we called it’s important that probably you do some general things that would look like the sort of stuff that would show up on intelligence tests, ravens like logic puzzles, stuff like that broader thinking skills thing, but also do things that are just advanced curriculum. Also because even if a student doesn’t end up, or if they end up being identified or not, and they get whatever set of interventions they get in the classroom, I think it’s really important to realize there’s sort of this general intellect piece and then there’s the how that applies to school piece. A problem I think that we have in gifted ed is we spend a lot of time worrying about the magic test that’s going to, to identify that underlying ability, that aptitude, intelligence, whatever. But then the interventions we do that we spend far less time worrying about than we do the identification are very curriculum based. So. But there’s a disconnect there, right? Like there’s a, there’s a relationship between measured intelligence and achievement in school, but there’s A disconnect there. There’s a whole lot of variance that’s not accounted for in that.

Jeb Puryear:
Well, it’s a lot of things like interest and psychological terms would be things like need for cognition and honestly creativity and metacognitive self regulatory skills. There’s all motiv, there’s all these things that come into it. That’s the magic. One of the pieces of magic, I would argue of having those early intervention things is that you give kids an opportunity to see what one school could be and two, what learning could be. If you want to make that distinction. One of the things that really turns kids off over time at school is like, oh, there’s just not anything here for me. But if you had opportunity, some kids will just light up at doing logic puzzles or something like that. But like you couldn’t get them to apply logic in a setting of doing a science problem to save their life.

Jeb Puryear:
They would never be interested. But they’re very interested in sort of the abstract thinking part of it. And honestly that probably connects back to the creativity piece. Also some kids are just predisposed to, you know, in a creativity sense that would be like they just have a high resistance to closure. Like they just want to talk about a bunch of different things and want to go a bunch of different directions.

Matthew Worwood:
Sorry to cut you off, but I’ve been seeing the Rubik’s Cube crave craze.

Jeb Puryear:
Come out, always circles back around.

Matthew Worwood:
But I have to, I mean you sit there and you’re like, you’ve got these like 6 year olds and they’re just, and they’re doing it and you’re staring, you’re like, how did you learn that? And they’re like, oh, well, you know, YouTube, can you. And they can’t explain it. I’ve tried to get everyone to. No one can explain this. It just seems to come to them. But it seems that there are different ways things can bubble to the surface. I’m not necessarily saying, you know, that every expression of talent and giftedness is going to be expressed in that way. It seems like there’s so, so many variables.

Jeb Puryear:
Oh absolutely.

Matthew Worwood:
And it just seems challenging. I’m not going to sit here.

Jeb Puryear:
It’s.

Matthew Worwood:
There’s incredible issues.

Jeb Puryear:
Back to what you were saying before, like there are so many different ways that you could identify. There are so many different ways that you could intervene to help the kids and support the kids, whether it’s academic or sort of a general ability level. But also along with that, the point you were making before that very often these programs are very school specific or the human being that’s in the school running the program, Graham specific, that when that person retires, it’s gone. There aren’t systematic things. That’s why I really like the power of having sort of again the more democratized sort of higher level thinking opportunities. Very often you talk about this is sort of getting into the, the nerdy weeds, a little bit of education, but talking about a multi tier systems support MTSs sort of model where you have sort of, you’re trying to meet as many kids as you can in the middle and then they’re sort of like, like a little bit of intervention and then a significant intervention when you ask people about what you do for gifted ed. And I, I literally have had, had this experience a dozen times doing some sort of workshop on these tiered interventions and gifted and I asked them, well, what do you do for gifted education? And without fail, like two thirds of the things they will list will be things that anyone who is sort of versed in tiered instruction would say, well, that’s the stuff everyone should be be getting like opportunity for problem solving opportunities, opportunities for creative and critical thinking, ability to show things in different ways. Like all of these things that they sort of somewhere gifted education took it upon itself to sort of in a lot of situations with a lot of people sort of co op the idea that like the really robust high level education was just for those kids, which probably feeds into a lot of the claims of elitism, which probably also feeds into and it’s probably supported by equity issues that we have in the field.

Cyndi Burnett:
I have a question I want you.

Matthew Worwood:
To answer and we should, we should premise this. You’re the first one to ever get this question, Jeff. So a little bit of context. We are in season three, Season ten. Sorry. Well, three years, I mean three. Almost, almost. Doing the podcast for four years, we spent the first three years asking everyone this single question.

Matthew Worwood:
And so we’ve been in a situation now where we can say, well, we’ve got 300, 400 plus tips. And we said to ourselves, it’s now time for us to change our question. So we’ve been talking about this question. Cindy, I want to provide Jeb with some context.

Cyndi Burnett:
No pressure, no pressure. You can take a few minutes to think about it.

Jeb Puryear:
Okay.

Cyndi Burnett:
Okay. So I want you to think about your whole life and I want you to think about a creative educational experience that you have had either as a student or a teacher. And would you be willing to share with us a creative educational experience and it could be Something formal or informal. It could be something that was something that, when you were young, could be something that you taught yourself. But could you share with us a creative educational experience why you thought it.

Matthew Worwood:
Was a creative, educational.

Jeb Puryear:
And why does it matter if I would have thought it was creative at the time or if looking back at it, I think it was creative?

Cyndi Burnett:
Now that you are a professor and expert in the.

Jeb Puryear:
So I have a very clear memory of being in, like, where I live at the time, Pennsylvania. And this would have been like the sixth grade in, like, a gifted resource thing, where we went. I think we went like four days a week for an hour or something like that. But I had this very clear memory of the teacher, Mr. Sawyer, I think was his name. I can’t remember. I think something with an S. And he essentially was.

Jeb Puryear:
I looking back at it now, I know he was teaching us algebraic thinking. But here’s what. Here’s what he would do. He would have these little, like, foam balls. We start off very basic. You know, there’s five balls on the table, and then he would have you turn around and he’d be like, I promise I’m not taking any of them all away. And, you know, you come, you turn back around, and, like, there was a cup. There was a cup, and then there were three balls left over here.

Jeb Puryear:
And he would say, well, if I didn’t take any away, how many balls are there? And you would say, oh, there’s two. It was just like that intuitive human logic of. It’s algebraic thinking, basically, literally just subtracting the. The three away. But as we did that, he would get more and more complex, and it was things like. Like, you know, there were. Let’s say there were 10 things over here. And then he had you turn.

Jeb Puryear:
Yeah, you. He’d make you count it out. And a lot of it, I think, was sort of testing, like, how we would group it together and count the pile quickly in the first place. But he’d have you turn around and then you would turn back around. And now there’s three cups, and there’s just one sitting out there on the side. And he would say, okay, I’ve done the same thing. And now they’re all the same. It’s the same number of balls under each cup.

Jeb Puryear:
How many are there under each. Each cup? So you. You mentally have to go, okay, there were 10, there’s one, so there’s nine underneath. There’s three of them, so there must be three under each one. And he would show it, and it would be three under Each one. And I think. I think back to that. Not that he was tricking us into sort of learning the algebraic skills, but he was doing it in a way that wasn’t.

Jeb Puryear:
It wasn’t, you know, scribbling things out on paper. It wasn’t like doing the math on paper. It was very much just understanding. In younger kids, we would call it number sense. This was like algebraic sense. He was trying to build on this. And the goal was just to get you to think of that way. And looking back on, I just think it was a.

Jeb Puryear:
It was a very unique way to. Again, I don’t want to say trick kids into showing what they already knew or. So it was intuitive. If you had. If you have kids that are of a general higher ability, you could push things again. That’s a sixth grade. Even a typical advanced student is going to take it. Maybe algebra in eighth grade, but we’re doing sort of, you know, a couple years before that.

Jeb Puryear:
And I don’t have specific memories, but I know we did lots of things with graphs and like, drawing lines and stuff like that, which I’m sure was like precursor to almost algebra two things and systems of equations, stuff like that. But he was just like. He was providing us all of those raw materials and all those nuggets to where when we got to having to do the problems, we were going to have that well of information to be able to draw from. And looking back, it seems like a very creative way to do, do it. And I do think in my own teaching, I tell my secondary teaching candidates that I work with all the time too, that if you can get students to not realize all of the things they’re having to think about, like, if you can get them to be. To do really complex things without arguing with you. Teenagers want to argue about things, right? So if you can just get them to do the things, they’re going to, you know, be in a good situation. And then they look back and they went, oh, wait, I’ve done all of this.

Jeb Puryear:
It’s like. It’s like when you’re teaching a kid to ride a bike and you sort of hold the back and then you’ve let go and they’re 100 yards down the road and they realize, realize, oh, wait, like, okay, this is all right. I’ve been doing this for a while. I can do it again. I imagine that was sort of Mr. Sawyer’s idea was if I can just teach them these basic skills they’re going to be. Or these nuggets of sort of intuition of how things work that we’re going to be able to apply it in that other setting.

Cyndi Burnett:
Fantastic.

Matthew Worwood:
Fantastic. Well, Jeb, thank you so much for joining us at the conference. We really appreciate you coming down and helping us try out this setup for the first time. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, we encourage you to go to our website where you can find all of these episodes packed together. That that’s our website is fueling creativitypodcast.com My name is Dr. Matthew Worwood.

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