Corey Gray:
Some key things that I think that our listeners can look for if we’re thinking about creative school is one instructional design. How are the teachers teaching? How do they teach as a parent or as a teacher? As a colleague? When I walk the halls, do I see the teachers up engaging with students, or do I see them sitting at desk? Do I see rows and columns, or do I see groups for collaboration? Do I see students sitting doing worksheets, or do I see students standing at whiteboards on the walls working on questions, talking with their classmates? What do I actually see? And how do the students interact? And how does a teacher engage with those students? That’s one aspect of a creative school.

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

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Doctor 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 field of education.

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

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

Matthew Worwood:
So let’s begin. If you’re interested in teaching creativity through a culturally responsible lens, or perhaps you’re an emerging scholar looking to find a topic of inquiry that might assist you as you go onto your dissertation, then we think we’ve got an absolutely fantastic and great super duper episode for you.

Cyndi Burnett:
Yes. So today we welcome to the show Corey Gray. Corey is a third year PhD candidate at the University of Georgia studying educational psychology with an emphasis in gifted and creative education. As a resident of Atlanta, Corey has taught in a variety of educational roles such as elementary educator, cooperating teacher, gifted educator, mentor teacher, middle school math teacher, special education teacher, which he is right now department head and adjunct instructor. Also taught in traditional neighborhood public schools, charter schools, and independent schools. His research interests include teaching for creativity, culturally responsive pedagogy, abolitionist teaching, excellent gaps in the culturally diverse communities and creative schools. So Corey, welcome to the show.

Corey Gray:
Hi. I’m so excited to be here and to have this conversation with you all today.

Cyndi Burnett:
So let’s start with how can educators teach for creativity through a culturally responsive lens? What is a culturally responsive lens? And then how do educators teach for creativity?

Corey Gray:
So a culturally responsive lens is very much a perspective that an educator has regarding their teaching practices. So when it comes to teaching diverse students, teaching students within culturally and linguistic diverse communities, it’s a way of life. It’s a way of living, it’s a way of interacting with my students, and it’s a way of teaching them to where I am engaging and honoring their creative genius, their academic genius, through the lens of their personal identity and their personal culture. So it’s very much rooted in the work of doctor Gloria Latin Billings, Doctor Jamieva Gay, who are famous in the world of academia and education for culturally relevant pedagogy, cultural responsive teaching. So that’s very much what it’s framed in. But we can go beyond that and look at how do these practices impact our high ability and our gifted scholars, because these are very general pedagogies and pedagogical practices. But when you think about how they impact our gifted students. So we have a lot of students in gifted programs where black and brown children are underrepresented in these programs.

Corey Gray:
That is a very well known fact. And in my philosophy, in my belief, it’s because these programs and our identification practices are not honoring their culture. In the actual policies and in the practices, there’s implicit bias. There’s different factors that are really causing these inequities when it comes to the achievement of diverse students in gifted programs. And I truly believe that it can start with starting with creativity. So you asked about teaching for creativity, and that very much is including creativity based frameworks in my instructional design. That’s the basic definition. I believe Sternberg, who I’m sure is going to be on this podcast, which I’m so excited about the episode, but they’ve written a lot about that term and it goes against the grain of traditional teaching, right? I think when people hear the term teaching, they think about lectures, they think about classrooms with rows and columns and a traditional whiteboard.

Corey Gray:
But when I teach for creativity, I create an environment that truly awakens the creative genius in my students and it engages them. So it’s a two part process. I’m awakening them through the design of my classroom, through the practices, and through my mindset as an educator. But then I’m also engaging them through what I’m doing as the educator, through my practices, through including project based learning, problem based learning, STEM based learning, inquiry based learning. I’m going against the grain of traditional teaching to again, allow my students to see all the connections that there are in content fueled by creativity.

Matthew Worwood:
Before we move on, I do want to bring it back to the culturally responsive lens because I think what you’re sharing from a creativity perspective is fantastic and you’re certainly preaching to the choir and talking about topics that come up a lot. But what’s the connection with you doing this culturally responsive lens? Tell me some specific examples of how that manifests in your classroom environment.

Corey Gray:
That’s a great question. So I am very much an advocate that in order to be a culturally responsive creativity educator or culturally responsive gifted educator, you must start by knowing the history that impedes the classroom. So when I get to know my students and I know what their cultures are, I don’t stop there. I do the history, and I learn about those cultures prior to them stepping into my classroom. So I am a black man. So when I teach students that are also identified as black individuals, black students, I dig deep into what that culture means. So I dig deep into what that educational experience has meant for the black community. And this is very much a big part of my research, and a big part of my work is the history of education.

Corey Gray:
Looking at how black students prior to the civil war and after the abolishment of slavery, there wasn’t a formal essence of education in the black community. But they. They had a lot of moments of education within Sunday school services and churches and through community educations. It was there, but it wasn’t honored through the federal government or through that formal education system until, again, that civil war came around. And that’s when we see these ideas of freedmen schools, where they were established buildings for newly freed individuals. And that’s where we had this formerly established sense of education, if you will. So from there, we then go about 100 years later, in 1954, we have brown versus board of Education. Where this freedmen school, that was an amazing institution.

Corey Gray:
These were schools where you had PhD individuals who were teaching because they could not get jobs anywhere else. You had principals who were invested in their community because that was the only department, the only essence, where their black excellence could really thrive. And they really poured into that. And all of these beautifully historic architects and beautifully historic buildings and curriculums were all thrown away once brown versus board of education happened. This integration of schools also came with the whitewashing of curriculum and the mass firing of all these individuals who were pouring into the black community. So now, at that point, we had these gifted, beautiful black individuals going into these schools that were not representative of them at all. They were not learning a culture that was representative of them. They were not learning one that affirmed them, and they were not learning one that encouraged or uplifted them.

Corey Gray:
So because of that, we now live in a system of the residue of that. So as a culturally responsive teacher who understands that I can do things in my classroom to start to unravel those practices. Obviously, I can’t go around all 50 states in the world and force every teacher to unravel those practices. But I can do something within my classroom context, within my building, within my locus of control, if you will, by actually unpacking that. So one, he thought about specific practices. It’s teaching my students accurate history. I remember a vivid example when I was a first year teacher that we were talking about Christopher Columbus and I had to read a book about how he was the hero of the world and how you did this and that, and it made my skin crawl because I know accurate history and know that that’s not true, that he was not the founder of America, that there’s actually a lot of history that we. That’s been covered up.

Corey Gray:
And because I know that I can teach it in an accurate way, but one that’s also developmentally appropriate and that’s affirming and that causes my students to be creative. So that’s when I bring in provocations where I might show my students a picture of the trail of tears and we might have a really deep conversation about what that meant versus me reading them a story about how Christopher Columbus stumbled upon America one day. And he was creative in finding that which is not accurate. So I think for me, being specific is one knowing the history, thinking of developmentally appropriate ways to teach the history, but also, again, including those creativity based frameworks in the way that I teach my students to accurate history.

Matthew Worwood:
And I just want to go back to something that you said is that you said you stand up and you say that you’re a black man. Like, you know, you introduce yourself to that class, and I read a book called critical pedagogy. After I read that book, what I took away was that within the classroom environment, when we are expressing or delivering information, it’s really hard to administer that without an element of bias. And even when I’m crafting my curriculum, I have began to become more sensitive to the fact that there are these default stories that I share and there are these default kind of topics that I have covered. And one of the things that I found really great about reading critical pedagogy is a recognition that really what I’m sharing is my single perspective and that I shouldn’t necessarily assume that my perspective of events is the perspective that I want my students to assume. And so by standing up and saying first generation college student, White, cis Male, I’m going to express information without meaning to in a biased way. And I’ve got to think about how I package that, but also facilitate the learning experience that allows students to make the connections based on their background. And it’s really hard to do because students aren’t necessarily aware of it and comfortable sharing with that.

Matthew Worwood:
Would you say that that fits or is moving towards being a culturally responsive lens? I’m just, I’m just curious as I’m keeping on that because I think this is such an important point. Before we move into the creativity topics.

Corey Gray:
We talked about the history and knowing the history of your students, but it also requires you knowing the history of yourself. So you knowing your culture, your identity and you tapping into your bias. So the fact that you’re admitting that and that a lot of us who are on listening to this podcast today, where we might sit in that same place, that’s step one. It’s knowing where you settle, where you sit. It’s knowing your culture in regard and in relation, in correlation to the culture of the students that you’re impacting. So that’s one. And it’s also understanding that I may never eliminate my bias. That’s okay.

Corey Gray:
That’s scientifically proven that your bias may never be eliminated, but you can lessen it through intentional acts like reading this critical pedagogy text and having those conversations. So I definitely think those are acts that lead you towards being this culturally responsive. So it’s. And let me clarify because I know that when I brought this idea, this theory up to my professor, his question was, what’s the difference between a culture responsive teacher and a culture responsive creativity teacher? Right? Because it seems very similar. But in my mind, the difference is, again, you have cultural responsive pedagogy, which is a general term. It’s very much used in general education. It’s also used in special education with Doctor Geneva Gay. And then you look at this term that I’m introducing was cultural responsive creativity.

Corey Gray:
It’s looking at this lens for high ability students, but not just because they’re high ability and we’re looking at just their intelligence. And this. And the third, it’s specifically honing in on creativity. And it’s for two reasons. One, I live in a state that’s multi criteria for gifted identification. So there’s multiple criteria you must identify in, and one of them is creativity. Creativity is the hardest one. There’s many articles about that, many books written about how creativity is the hardest area to qualify for gifted services.

Corey Gray:
So that’s one area why I want to focus on it, so that we can really teach our students to be creative. Because students can be taught to be creative. But two, there have been perceptions and practices that have deemed our students not to be creative. We talk about the IQ test, and this is something going back to like, am I on the right track? One, when we think about gifted identification, the IQ test, if our listeners are familiar with doctor Lewis Terman, right, revered in gifted education, revered for the IQ test. He also is known to not believe that diverse children could be gifted. He did not believe that children who were black, hispanic, brown, asian, anybody who was not european, he did not believe they had the ability or the innate traits within them to even be gifted. So he didn’t even want to test them. We have a lot of people who have been to unraveling the biases in the IQ test because of just the foundation of it.

Corey Gray:
But that’s another reason why I want to really tap into looking at creativity through cultural responsive lenses. Because what’s creative to me as a black man may not be creative to a white man, to a white woman, to a hispanic man, it may not be deemed creative to them. And that’s okay, because Sternberg talks about that creativity goes across cultures and it manifests across cultures. I wholeheartedly believe that. I also believe that culture can be influenced and manifest through culture. Your culture can cause you to be creative through that cultural lens, right. How they see the life that causes you to be creative. So when I think about this roadmap on becoming a culturally responsive, creativity based educator, this mouthful of things, it starts with being culturally responsive.

Corey Gray:
It starts with identifying my biases. It starts to understand those pedagogies. It starts with understanding the cultures and the identities within my classroom. And then it goes deeper by saying, okay, now, how have all of those aspects hindered or harmed, stifled or supported my students creativity? And how can I, as their educator, who I only had them for this year, I only am in the classroom with them for however long my schedule allows. How can I awaken and cultivate that beyond their wildest dream? And I think that’s very much the roadmap.

Cyndi Burnett:
I just want to build on this because when I was reading your bio in preparation for this interview, one of your research interests is creative schools. And I’m curious, your perspective around creative schools in the culturally responsive lens, based on what you just told us. So if you were to design your own school, if you were to look at schools, are there any schools out there that you’ve seen that represent a creative schools, how does that culturally responsive lens come into play?

Corey Gray:
Oh, this question is a dream. Okay. Yes. So if I were to design a creative school, one, it has to be rooted in, like I said, these philosophies. I believe that before we talk about this class design and the nuances and all of those things, it has to be rooted in, well, what do we believe about students and believe about achievement before we talk about this school? So I believe that every student can achieve, every student want to achieve, and every student has a right to achieve. That’s my bill of rights, if you will, for education. And anyone that I’m hiring, anyone that’s going to work in the school that I plan to design or in this question or one day will have to also have the same belief. So if we have that belief, then we can go on and we can say, okay, now that’s the foundation for culturally responsive teaching me understanding, no matter where a child comes from, no matter their demographic, no matter their zip code, no matter their socioeconomic status, they’re going to achieve.

Corey Gray:
And I’m forgetting his first name. I think his name is Baturi Kafale. I have the book somewhere. He is a well known principal and well known assistant principal consultant right now in the world. And he says in one of his books that a teacher is a number one determinant for a student’s success or failure. The teacher is because I spend the most waking hours with them when they’re mentioned on achievement at the end of the year. It’s based on my teaching practices. So the teacher is what I really want to hone in on.

Corey Gray:
A lot of the ideas that I have for a creative school build upon what the creative teacher needs and what they understand about teaching and learning, about awakening that creative genius, about really tapping into those practices. So there are many schools out there that are creative? I think so I don’t want to act as though they’re not. But some key things that I think that our listeners can look for if we’re thinking about creative school is one instructional design. How are the teachers teaching? How do they teach as a parent or as a teacher? As a colleague? When I walk the halls, do I see the teachers up engaging with students, or do I see them sitting at desk? Do I see rows and columns, or do I see groups for collaboration? Do I see students sitting doing worksheets, or do I see students standing at whiteboards on the walls working on questions, talking with their classmates? What do I actually see? And how do the students interact? And how does a teacher engage with those students? That’s one aspect of a creative school because we shouldn’t see traditional aspects of it. And I hate to say it, but I’m going to just be honest. I have not found another word yet. I may create one, but to me, the antithesis for creativity is traditional, right? So when I think about a creative school, I think the opposite of that is a traditional school. And a traditional school to me is one that’s filled with lectures.

Corey Gray:
Like I said earlier, when it comes to discipline, a lot of punitive things, right? You see a lot of detentions and demerits and you hear a lot of that terminology. But in a creative school, you hear a lot of restorative practices. You hear a lot of you break it, you fix it, you hear a lot of creative problem solving, even in the way that they deal with behaviors, right? If somebody does something, I’m going to creatively think about a way to engage, because creativity is not something that is reserved for art class and for music and dance. It’s reserved for every aspect of this school, every aspect of it, going into the way that we teach, going into the curriculums that we use, even if that means we create one. Because if I buy a curriculum, that means that the people who wrote it did not know who my students are, which then means they didn’t have my students in mind when they wrote it. So why should I use that curriculum in the first place? So I might have to write my own curriculum, which then causes us to say, hmm, I wonder that in the lesson design, we write the objectives, we write the standards, we write on the materials we want the kids to do. At what point do I write genius? Like how Goldi Muhammad writes in her cultivating genius book, how in her lesson design there’s an aspect of every design that says genius, like it’s intentional. That every lesson I’m going to do something around genius.

Corey Gray:
What about creativity? I should be able to pinpoint aspects of my lesson every day that have some aspect of creativity, and then that lets me take a step back and evaluate, am I really being creative? Are they just doing projects? Are they just coloring on sheets every day? And am I deeming that creative? Or are my students actually going out in the community and solving problems through a creative lens? So that’s very much what I see for the school, is the way that we teach the interaction with the students. It’s going to be Disneyland for teachers and students. I think we get away from that at times that we think school are just for the kids. Yes. The kids are the primary goal. Yes, yes, yes. But the teachers too, you know, they’re the ones who are there all day. They’re the ones putting lessons.

Corey Gray:
They’re the ones who are essentially, I’m forgetting the latin term, but I think parentis locus, they’re the second parent, if you will. So we need to make the world the school, if you will. The school like Disney for them too. So I very much see a school that bridges the gap for it’s gonna be Disney World for teachers and students.

Cyndi Burnett:
That makes me feel happy. I wanna go work at that school. And I’m sure a lot of the teachers that are listening now will probably feel the same way as they’ll probably be reaching out to you saying, when are we gonna build this school? Because we want to make teaching fun again, as we know that there are so many teachers that are leaving the profession and we’ve got this gap.

Corey Gray:
Another quick aspect of that, too, is the way we prepare our teachers. In my preparation program, I was taught to teach very traditionally. I was never taught to teach in this creative lens. It came through my research and through my reading and through my investigation. So it also goes to how we teach our teachers to teach these ways because our preparation programs might not be designed to help our teachers awaken at gens and our students.

Matthew Worwood:
Do you want to bring more creative and critical thinking into your school? Look no further than our podcast sponsor.

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

Matthew Worwood:
And if you’re craving a community of creative educators who love new ideas, don’t miss out on their creative thinking network. Get access to monthly webinars, creative lesson plans, and a supportive community all focused on fostering creativity in the classroom.

Cyndi Burnett:
To learn more, check out curiositytocreate.org comma or check out the links in the show notes for this episode. So Corey, I want to talk now about abolitionist teaching and gifted education. Can you tell me what abolitionist teaching is and frame that for our listeners and talk about that relationship with gifted.

Corey Gray:
Ad so abolitionist teaching is a pedagogical framework that I believe was coined by Doctor Bettina Love, who is a professor currently at Columbia University. She was at UGA. She left before I got there, which I’m somewhat sad about. Actually, very sad about. But she defines abolitionist teaching as a way to create equitable classrooms that center the black and brown experience and black and brown children that fight for them by integrating social justice frameworks within the educational design. So it goes back to what I said earlier about the history and including those aspects in your classroom. Abolitionist teaching is where you begin to go beyond the four walls of your classroom to begin to deconstruct the policies and the practices that have caused inequities in our education system. So it’s pedagogical in the way that we teach, but it very much goes as a social Justice act, right? Because we talk about teaching is an act of social justice.

Corey Gray:
And abolition is teaching arms educators with the language and with the tools to fight against the system by agitating aspects outside the four walls of their classroom. So that’s how it’s defined. And Doctor Bettina Love has a book, has actually several books, but like I said, is defined by her. And the way that I see this coming into the gifted education space is very much by understanding the inequities that are in gifted education. We talk about them. There are a plethora of articles. I am a big fan of Doctor Donna Ford, who is well known in the field of gifted education for multicultural gifted education and for authoring so many books and chapters about that. And she is known for stating that in gifted education we have a representation problem, that black and brown students are underrepresented in gifted programs, but they are overrepresented in special education programs.

Corey Gray:
And that is because of the pedagogies that people have about students, about student characteristics. But it’s also because of the policies that were written. Go back to what I said about Doctor Lewis Terman, how even at the start of us beginning to look into gifted education, we had a test that was used for achievement and this test was not designed for diverse students. And then if you go deeper into that, into 1954, I talked about the Brown versus board case. It’s interesting that that is also the exact same year that the National association for get the Children was established. The exact same year that Brown versus board integrated schools was. The same year that a lot of professors and theorists and researchers say that gifted education came as a wave of segregation, again, where you were taking these students out who were qualified, but they were qualified through inequitable and through discriminatory means. So as an abolitionist teacher, it’s about dismantling those things.

Corey Gray:
It’s about questioning them. It’s about including aspects and identification to get out of that, right. I believe there’s a state, Alabama, it’s a great state that uses universal screening, I believe, and we can fact check that. But that’s one aspect, right? Instead of me saying I’m gonna cherry pick the kids to test, let’s test everybody to see where we all land, right? But then it goes deeper to say what tests are we using? How is that test? How are we going to validate that test and make sure it’s reliable? And all these different questions. But as an abolitionist gifted teacher, it goes to understanding the practices that have caused inequities and produce solutions to, right now, solve them, remedy them, because I know that I can’t solve everything, but I can do something for my students.

Matthew Worwood:
Right now, I’m going to take on a role of a teacher who, first of all, I’m a brilliant teacher in my subject, but I haven’t taken any gifted education. So I’m listening to this podcast and I understand what gifted education is, but you’re talking a little bit about identifying gifted students and the system. Could you give me an example of where the system is letting certain groups of students down, black and brown students down, and then the consequences of that? Because I don’t know enough about these tests. I don’t even know to a certain extent the type of questions that it might be asked.

Corey Gray:
That’s a great question. Yeah.

Matthew Worwood:
Could you help me in this role of me being this teacher?

Corey Gray:
Yeah. So I think one is understanding the role of the recommendation process and that there might be bias in the way that I think about student characteristics. Right. We talk about bias. And if I’m an educator who is currently unraveling and working through my bias and I get a profile or a survey for every student that’s being currently tested for gifted services, that I have to fill out a survey for each of these students. And the questions may be, is a student motivated in class? Is this student, like, do they have humor? Are they independent? Are they a responsible student? All these traits about this student. And there’s a Likert scale. So it’s not yes or no, it’s, I’m rating it and every student is, you know, they’re adding up these scores and they’re giving the students motivation score.

Corey Gray:
And if I. I don’t give a certain student the right score, if you will write that score to where they qualify, they don’t get that area for qualification, so therefore they might not get qualified at all for services because of my recommendation. That might be rooted in bias, which is statistically and researched well throughout literature that a teacher recommendation is one of the most research aspects of bias, that there’s so much bias in teacher recommendations. So that might be an essence where. Okay, well, the way that we recommend students, if that’s the entry, I might be gatekeeping students by recommending, because I’m the gate, if you will, they can’t get past me unless I recommend them. And if I have bias, then that means there’s so many students that won’t even get to be tested because I didn’t recommend them. So that’s one example. And Doctor Jonathan Plucker, who is also known for excellence gaps, he’s well known for saying that the teacher recommendation should be the last step, that rather than saying, do you think these kids should be tested? I’m going to ask you, here’s a list of students that we’ve recommended.

Corey Gray:
Who did we miss? That changes the whole perspective of the conversation then, because rather than you having to pick who I should test, I’m asking you based on a list who should be on this list that’s not there already. So that’s just one example and there’s several others, but I’ll stop there.

Matthew Worwood:
No, but that helps me as a teacher because we’ve had, you know, to. Jonathan Pluck has been on the show and he, one of the things that he referenced and he highlighted to Cindy and I when he was talking with him is the fact that one of the things with gifted students excellence is that they’re already doing what they’re really good at and you can usually observe that. But if we don’t care about that thing that they’re doing, I might disregard that because I’m looking for the traditional, to your point, the traditional things to which I see as being exceptional in this education environment. So I might be looking at reading, writing, mathematics. But then we’ve also had a conversation about twice exceptional learners. And one of the things I enjoyed in that conversation with twice exceptional learners is the fact that without getting into the weeds, how I’m going to interpret it is that sometimes there’s a barrier. There’s something that I see first that prevents me from going and seeing the giftedness that exists behind that could be some type of behavior that I associate as being disruptive, an ADHD student who’s struggling to sit down. I might not necessarily see the giftedness that they have in a particular set of skills and they don’t get tested.

Matthew Worwood:
And one of the things that you had said earlier is that if we’re going to go and have these gifted programs, everyone should have equal access to them. Everyone should be tested. And I’m going away thinking that the system itself needs to make sure that we go in with an open mind. We don’t know who’s gifted in our classes and we probably as an individual teacher aren’t qualified to make that judgment. And that’s a concern. You shared that. That’s a concern for me as this new teacher. I’m now concerned about how students are identified as gifted in my classroom, particularly if it’s first coming from teacher recommendations.

Corey Gray:
I mean, and even to go off of that, as educators, it’s well known that teachers desire more academic traits in the classroom than creative traits. That’s a well known fact that they desire that. So we might have a student that is non identified as gifted, but they are gifted. That has a trait of determination, which is one of the strongest traits and gifted students that Doctor E. Paul Torrance said. And to them, determination is them really working on an assignment. Their head is down. They are working on something.

Corey Gray:
And when you ask them to stop and transition, they might be defined and say, no, I’m not done yet. To you, you might say, that’s disrespectful. I’m not even going to deal with this kidde. To them, they’re determined because they want to get that done. They’re like, no, I have to get this done because once it’s done, I can move on and I can show you how creative I was and I can just, that’s what they wanted, but they can’t vocalize all that. So you just see a defiant child, but to them, it’s a creative child who’s being determined. Right. And if I don’t sit in my perceptions and say, well, I’m misperceiving this, then I’m not really noticing manifestations of giftedness.

Corey Gray:
And to your point, about twice exceptional students, if they’re twice exceptional, it means they have an exceptionality, which some people call it disability. I don’t like that word. But let’s say disability. For today’s conversation, that means that if a teacher knows that they have a disability, that’s the lens they walk in the conversation with. That this student is, they have traumatic brain injury. This student has this, this student has this that and the third.

Matthew Worwood:
That’s what I meant with the barrier, right? There’s a barrier that prevents them from going to that next step of excellence.

Corey Gray:
So then I won’t even notice anything. I won’t even notice it.

Matthew Worwood:
You know what? And also, it’s also just that general pursuit of excellence. It was really fascinating when you just said that, this idea of being hyper focused. But now as this teacher, I’m sitting there and I’m probably thinking, wow, how many times have I stopped a student’s workflow because of the time of the day or because I feel that it’s time to move to the next topic or because they’ve met my learning objective or no, no, I’ve got enough to assess. You don’t do anymore. And that student in that moment is in the pursuit of excellence and I’m stopping them, I’m robbing them. And it could be that the system, the agenda of the day makes it challenging for me. But that was another piece that you added there is that observing students who might be in pursuit of excellence in something, and now I need to probably make sure that I’m creating an environment or somehow facilitating perhaps outside the classroom that allowing them to have that continued pursuit of excellence.

Corey Gray:
But see, and I know we have to end soon, but I’ll say this. Yes. The flip side though is don’t get to the point. And I’ve gotten here where you give them all the time in the world and I then don’t teach them about time management. Right. Those aspects too, that are also really key to their functionality and their daily life, where I have to teach them all these aspects too. And if I understand it as a gifted educator, as someone who knows the perceptions and I understand why they’re displaying these behaviors, I can have interventions in place. But if I don’t know that, I either will stop them in excellence or I’ll give them all the time because I’m just like, I don’t know what to do.

Corey Gray:
No, just we can teach them, you can teach them to have self control. You can teach them how to manage their time. You can also teach them how to be creative.

Cyndi Burnett:
Love that. Well, corey, I think we could continue to have dinner. In fact, we should have dinner when we are together at the National association for gifted and talented. We should a few weeks away. So, yes, I would love. I think we could definitely continue this conversation, but for our listeners, I’m sorry, we have to end now. Before we go, I’m going to get in trouble if I don’t ask you what are three tips you would give to educators to bring creativity into the classroom?

Corey Gray:
Okay. First tip is to have your own disposition of creativity because you’ll find that there’s so many definitions of creativity and everyone has their own philosophy and their own thought of what it is and what it means to be creative. But first, just start with your own definition on what creativity means for you as a person, but also for your classroom context. So that’s, one is to have your own disposition. Two is to really settle in the fact that culture influences creativity. If I understand that culture influences creativity, then every act that I do beyond that point should honor that culture influences creativity. So that’s my first two tips and then my second or my third tip is a very practical tip. Please pick a creative problem solving process or strategy and start there.

Corey Gray:
Pick any process that you deem that you like and start there. And teach your students that process and how to use that process in their acts. Right. So you, you’ll be surprised that you can use a creative problem solving process with a worksheet. I can give students a worksheet that has maybe ten word problems. And before we just start doing all the ten word problems we start with, identifying challenges will create a criteria mechanism to see which problems we want to solve and what concepts are tested on these problems. Right. It’s like you can dig into concepts through a creative lens.

Corey Gray:
So I would say for my third tip is to pick a process and teach it explicitly. Teach students what it means to be creative, what examples of creativity in the classroom or through content is, and examples of maybe not being creative. Let me talk about that and teach them what that looks like and be explicit about that. And I think that would definitely be some great first steps to including creativity in the classroom.

Matthew Worwood:
Brilliant. Well, Corey, thank you so much. We are going to look forward to connecting with you at the talented and gifted conference that’s taking place in Seattle in November. And just for our listeners, given the fact that Corrie is an emerging scholar and did an absolutely brilliant job of making references, I did quickly grab the book. It’s critical pedagogy by Joan Wink, w I n k. So I do apologize for not referencing the author there. If you’re a gifted educator interested in this conversation, or you have a colleague who you think might have a student in their class who is gifted and perhaps not being recognized, please share this podcast episode with them because we think it’s packed full of some great information. My name is Doctor Matthew Worwood, and.

Cyndi Burnett:
My name is Doctor Cindy Burnett. This episode was produced by Matthew Worwood and Cindy Burnett. Our podcast sponsor is curiosity to create and our editor is Sam Atkinson.