Teresa Amabile:
I think if you can allow your children to explore and experiment with things, even if they’re making monstrosities, they’re learning. They’re learning and they’re having fun and they’re discovering what their strongest interests and talents are without a lot of judgment on your part or the part of other adults, without a lot of expectation about what they will stick with or won’t.

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

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 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. Are you ready for a double espresso of insight and inspiration? Because today we are serving up an energizing conversation with one of the world’s leading creativity researchers, Dr. Teresa Amabile. In this two part series, we’ll highlight four major chapters of her career, from her early work on childhood creativity to her latest reflections on lifelong creativity and retirement. Get ready for a full thought provoking blend of research, wisdom and practical takeaways you don’t want to miss.

Cyndi Burnett:
Today we welcome to the show Dr. Teresa Amabile, who is a world renowned expert in creativity research with over 50 years of groundbreaking work in the field. She is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School and originally trained as a chemist before earning her PhD in psychology from Stanford University. Her research has explored the intersection of creativity, motivation and the work environment, shaping how we understand and foster innovation. Dr. Amabile is the author of several influential books including Growing Up Creative, Creativity in Context, the Progress Principle and most recently, retiring Creating a Life that Works for your as well as over 100 research articles and scholarly chapters. Her work continues to inspire educators, leaders and organizations to cultivate environments that nurture creativity and innovation and she is probably the most requested guest we’ve had on the show. So today we are very excited to have Dr.

Cyndi Burnett:
Teresa Amabile joining us. Thank you.

Teresa Amabile:
I am so pleased to be here with you, Cindy and Matt and I’m looking forward to this conversation and please call me Teresa. None of this Dr. Amabile stuff. Okay?

Cyndi Burnett:
So today we want to celebrate your incredible journey in creativity research and what better way to do that than by Exploring the key insights from your four books, each representing a unique chapter in your career. So I want to start with nurturing creativity in children and growing up creative. And I should mention. And Matt, I don’t know if you know this, but Teresa is from Buffalo, New York, which is where my hometown is and where I live.

Matthew Worwood:
No, I did not know that. And actually, not that I’m great at spotting accents, I would not have picked that up from the accent.

Cyndi Burnett:
So can you tell us what first sparked your interest in creativity research?

Teresa Amabile:
Well, yes, this definitely goes back to Buffalo. I heard the word creative or creativity for the first time when I was in kindergarten, and I really believe that that was the initial planting of a seed of interest for me in the field of creativity. I was in kindergarten, and my wonderful teacher, whom I adored, Mrs. Bollier, had come to our home for an end of the year conference with my mother. Of course, being five, I was eavesdropping from the next room. I wanted to hear what Mrs. Bollier had to say about me. And I remember at one point she said to my mother, I think Teresa shows a lot of potential for artistic creativity, and I hope that’s something she really develops over the years.

Teresa Amabile:
I was so thrilled to hear this. I’m pretty sure I didn’t know what creativity meant, but it sounded really good the way Mrs. Bollier said it, and I was glad I had it. And then I, you know, over the years, I came to learn what creativity meant, at least in sort of general layperson’s terms. I loved that kindergarten year. We had free play access most of the day to wonderful art materials, which I didn’t have at home. There was a clay table at this kindergarten, and there was a table with wonderful crayons, large crayons that were in good shape and large white sheets of paper. There were easels to paint on and big pots of paint and paintbrushes.

Teresa Amabile:
I was in heaven with these things. There were other wonderful toys and things in the classroom, but I know I gravitated to those art materials, and I think that’s what Mrs. Bollier had noticed. And when I went home after school every day, I wanted to draw. So my mother would give us whatever we had at home, which was some little broken crayons and some stiff paper towels, which were very stiff in those days. And I would draw away on those. Unfortunately, kindergarten was kind of like the high point of my artistic career. I’ve never done anything with art after that.

Teresa Amabile:
While I was in grade school, I wondered. I wondered about that was Mrs. Bollier wrong, or did something happen to get me off the track of artistic creativity? And when I went to grad school in psychology and began studying with Mark Leffer, one of the pioneers of research on intrinsic motivation at the Stanford Psychology Department, I thought back on my school experiences with art, because after that kindergarten year, my parents enrolled me in a very strict, traditional parochial school. Kindergarten was in a public school, and this parochial school didn’t have art materials like that. And in fact, rather than free play access all day, we had art as a subject. Once a week, Friday afternoon, I think the nuns were too tired to do anything else with us, and they would have us sit down and each of us would get a little a copy of a reprint of one of the great masterworks in painting, like a da Vinci or a Chagall, and they would tell us to take out our crayons and our loose leaf paper and copy it. I’m sure that these were meant for discussion, for art appreciation. Right? But that’s not what we did.

Teresa Amabile:
We were supposed to copy these things. And I was a good little student, but, oh, my goodness, Cindy and Matt. My drawings were monstrosities, and we were strictly graded on these things. And I was getting poor grades in art, even though I was trying my best. And as I learned about Mark Lepper’s research, I thought, you know, I think that those experiences I had with art in elementary school undermined my intrinsic motivation to do art. And I didn’t want to engage in art activities at home after I left kindergarten. And I never wanted to play around with learning to sketch or anything like that. And that, I believe, was really the start of my interest in trying to understand the connection between intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, or motivational state in general, and creativity.

Matthew Worwood:
I can’t help but just slightly go off script and start reflecting on my own parenting and now worrying about all of the things that I’ve done to potentially impact the intrinsic motivation of my children. I don’t know if there’s anything you can just quickly share. We will be talking more about your research, but is there anything you can quickly share to perhaps make me feel a little bit better, given the fact that they’re still young?

Teresa Amabile:
Yes. I think that every child, and there’s a lot of research to show this. Every child has intrinsic motivation to explore, to try out new things, to play around with things. Give them the opportunity to do that with whatever is before them, whatever they’re interested in. It might be art, it might be words, it might be mathematics, it Might be things in nature, but allow them to explore without a lot of constraint other than, you know, safety constraints and being aware of other people around them, but let them try things out. I think that what was so detrimental about those art experiences in elementary school was that we were incredibly constrained in what we could do and how we could use those materials that we did have. There’s only one time in all those eight years of elementary school that I remember even hearing the word creative. I think it was seventh grade, and I think the reprints didn’t show up that week.

Teresa Amabile:
So our teacher just told us to take out our art materials and do whatever we wanted with them. And this is what I’m going to encourage you to do, Matt, with your kids. Do whatever you would like with these. You know, make something that pleases you, that’s fun for you to make. And I was making an abstract, a kind of mosaic thing. Well, sort of. Like, I know your listeners can’t see the jacket I’m wearing, but it’s a mosaic of colors and different shapes. And I remember Sister Carmelita walking up the aisle behind me, and she stopped by my desk.

Teresa Amabile:
That’s never good, right? That gives you a knot in the pit of your stomach. And she looked down at what I was doing, and she said, I think maybe we’re being a little too creative. That was the one time I heard the word creative in connection with art in elementary school. And I think if you can allow your children to explore and experiment with things, even if they’re making monstrosities, they’re learning. They’re learning and they’re having fun and they’re discovering what their strongest interests and talents are without a lot of judgment on your part or the part of other adults, without a lot of expectation about what they will stick with or won’t. So is that helpful, Matt?

Matthew Worwood:
It is. It is. It makes me feel better. And it also leads me into the more serious question that we wanted to ask you. Because I think when it comes to your work on motivation, I mean, Cindy and I talk a lot about bridging the gap between research and practice, and both of us probably see ourselves more as scholar practitioners. We don’t engage as much in empirical research, but we’re very familiar with the research. But I think even before I got into the field of creativity, I had hear of your name and your work around motivation. And I think it’s because you’ve also been referenced in a lot of kind of, you know, Malcolm Gladwell, for example, is referenced you in some of his work.

Matthew Worwood:
And so I think this idea of motivation is something that everyone can connect with. It can be applied to lots of different spaces or social contexts. Of course it can. And I’m wondering if you could just share a little bit around the. If we. I know so many of our conversations center on interests, and I think sometimes we. We are sometimes talking about intrinsic, motiv in our students. And I’m hearing you say that there are things that we could do.

Matthew Worwood:
But I was also just thinking about some of your work around the extrinsic factors that actually can sometimes be conducive for creativity. Help it. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that from the perspective of what a teacher might do in their classroom environment, but as well as what administrators might do for their teachers as well to try and just assist in that motivation, which is so important for both student and teacher creativity.

Teresa Amabile:
Yes, that’s a really complex question, but let me try to unpack it. The early research that I did was in the form of controlled experiments. So I’ll just briefly describe the very first experiment I did when I was in grad school. I guess you would say it was a field experiment. I lived in an apartment complex in Palo Alto, California. They had a lot of young kids in it. So I decided that I would run two art parties on a weekend. A Saturday art party and a Sunday art party in the community room.

Teresa Amabile:
So I reserved the community room for those afternoons. And I gave every family that had children an invitation to this art party. And half of the families got an invitation to the Saturday party and half got an invitation to the Sunday party. I was inviting only the kids, but, you know, I gave the invitations to the adults so that that was, you know, their implicit consent for their. For their child to participate in this. And I explained that it was for some research I was doing. And one party was the experimental condition, one was the control condition. I wanted to look at the effects of expected evaluation and competition and reward on children’s artistic creativity.

Teresa Amabile:
So I gave them all, in both parties, a collage making material set. This was after they did some other art activities and had some snacks. I said, okay, now the next activity. This is the last activity. You’re going to all have a chance to make a collage. Do you know what a collage is? Yes. These were 7, 8 and 9 year olds. They knew what a collage was.

Teresa Amabile:
Okay, you’ve all got a piece of poster board. They all had an identical piece of poster board in a little container of glue and a nice Array of origami papers in different sizes and shapes and colors. Everything was identical for every kid. And we had them spread out over a few different tables in the community room. And we said, okay, you’re going to have about 15 or 20 minutes to make a collage that gives you a silly feeling. So we everybody, same instructions, Make a silly collage and use these materials in any way that you want. In the control group, which was the Saturday party, the first one, we said, and we are going to have a raffle at the very end. After all these art activities are done and you’ve had your final snack, we’re going to have a raffle for these three cool toys.

Teresa Amabile:
One was an Etch a Sketch, and one was one of those magic eight fortune telling balls. These are things that were really exciting to kids that age range. I can’t remember what the third toy was. So we had two identical sets of these toys. One for Saturday, one for Sunday. So we said, you all have a name tag, and you’ve all got a number on your name tag. So we’ve got all the numbers in this bowl up here and unfolded pieces of paper. And we’re going to blindfold one kid who’s going to come up and pick out a piece of paper.

Teresa Amabile:
And whoever’s got that number is going to get their first choice of the prizes, and then the second one will get their choice of the remaining prizes. So that’s what we did on Saturday. And all the kids made a collage. They had fun, had their snack, we had the raffle. They went home the next day. Everything was identical, except rather than saying, we’re going to have a raffle, just before they started the collages, I said, my assistants and I. And I had two sisters who were living out in Palo Alto near me at the time. They were my assistants.

Teresa Amabile:
My assistants and I are going to judge your collages when you’re all done. And we’re going to pick out the three best and. And the very best. The child who made the very best is going to get their choice of these three toys. And we unveiled the toys and everybody was all excited. And then second place, they’ll get their choice of the remaining toys. That’s the only thing that differed. Right.

Teresa Amabile:
So in the. In the contest condition, that was the experimental condition, the kids were expecting the possibility of reward. They were certainly expecting to be evaluated, and they were competing with each other. So those were three what we call extrinsic motivators, external sources of motivation that we were laying on Them. And in the other group, there was no such extrinsic motivation. We assumed that they were just going to be enjoying the art activity. And then I had all of these collages randomly intermixed with just identifying numbers on them. Judged on creativity by graduate students in the art department at Stanford, I just asked them to use a scale rating that I had made, you know, rate them relative to one another on creativity, according to your own subjective judgment.

Teresa Amabile:
And I found that these 12 judges I brought in did their ratings, Agreed pretty well with each other. They came in individually, so they didn’t confer with other judges. There was pretty good reliability of those assessments. So using their assessments as the measure of creativity, I found that the kids in the experimental group, where they were expecting this competition for prizes, those kids made collages that were rated as significantly less creative by the judges. So that was a basic form of experiments that I did for several years with kids and with adults. And in the subsequent experiments, I didn’t combine extrinsic motivators. Typically, I would only use one. Or I would.

Teresa Amabile:
In a factorial design, I would use maybe two different extrinsic motivators. And I found over and over again that placing people under these extrinsic motivators undermined intrinsic motivation and creativity. So I came up with what I called the intrinsic motivation principle of creativity. And the intrinsic motivation principle of creativity says that people will be most creative when they’re motivated primarily by the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and personal challenge of the work itself, and not by external pressures or external motivators. I then realized, after a few more years of doing experiments, that it wasn’t quite as simple as that. Under certain circumstances, reward could boost, add to intrinsic motivation and creativity. And in some kinds of situations, expecting evaluation or having evaluation could also add synergistically to intrinsic motivation and creativity, rather than undermining them. If intrinsic motivation is strong to begin with, and if the reward or the evaluation confirms competence or leads people to feel like they can more deeply engage in something they were already interested in doing.

Teresa Amabile:
And that’s what we call synergistic extrinsic motivation. So, for example, telling kids, you know, if you do this activity, you’re going to get art materials to bring home so that you can do more art on your own, that probably would have. I suspect, that would have had a synergistic effect on their intrinsic motivation and creativity. We found in working with adults in organizations years later, that intrinsic motivation was supported. If a creative team was rewarded for great performance on A product development project, if they were rewarded by being given access to equipment that they had wanted or to an additional team member that they felt they needed, or if they were allowed to have choice of the next project among several projects that were going to be done in the company. So all of that can add to intrinsic motivation. So the revised intrinsic motivation principle says, yes, intrinsic motivation is positive. Intrinsic motivation supports creativity and controlling extrinsic motivation, where people are feeling constrained in some way by that motivator that they have to do things in a certain way, that they’re concerned about what someone else is going to be thinking of what they’re doing, that undermines intrinsic motivation and creativity.

Teresa Amabile:
But if there’s a reward or feedback that supports competence, supports deeper engagement in this activity, that can add to intrinsic motivation and creativity. What is the implication for teachers and administrators in schools? I think one clear implication is we need sufficient teachers in schools so that they can understand what is intrinsically motivating to each child. Because children don’t have interests that are identical to try to understand what will get this child excited about engaging in reading. For example, not everyone is going to be excited about reading the same book, the same story. But if you give them some choice and if you can allow choices that you know will resonate with their intrinsic interests, that’s going to be much more powerful. So more teachers so that children can get that kind of individualized motivation and more resources so that children have things that they can explore with, have manipulables in elementary school, have access to building materials as their older kids, where they can use what they’re learning in mathematics and geometry and physics to actually put those into practice. I believe that is so key. But it’s also important to avoid killing creativity, which unfortunately happens all too often in our current classroom environments.

Teresa Amabile:
I think because there’s such an emphasis on testing, because there’s such an emphasis on judgment, and there’s so much regimentation in everyone in the class, being in too many classrooms, lockstep, moving through each learning segment. And I understand why. It’s because there are not enough teachers, there are not enough resources. But that experience that I had with art in elementary school is replicated across subjects I think now in all too many schools.

Matthew Worwood:
And I think just to finish that up, I think it also speaks from the administrative perspective. Trying to cultivate the creativity of teachers is one that choice and giving them a sense of freedom to explore, but also being very sensitive to that feeling of judgment when you are working on that professional growth, professional development plan. In your school. I think that was a big takeaway for me in that response as well.

Teresa Amabile:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. That’s a lesson for administrators and policymakers to allow teachers the autonomy to use their creativity and their knowledge of their own students to shape the curriculum to the benefit of the students.

Matthew Worwood:
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Cyndi Burnett:
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Matthew Worwood:
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Cyndi Burnett:
To learn more, check out curiositytocreate.org or check out the links in the show notes for this episode Teresa I think we could talk about intrinsic motivation for both expressos, but I do want to get onto the other parts of your work because there’s so much depth and breath to what you’ve done. And I want to shift a little bit into those creative learning environments you were just referring to with students because you’ve emphasized that creativity isn’t just an individual trait, but it’s deeply influenced by context. And a lot of that came out in the next book, which is creativity and Context. So we’d love to hear a little bit from you about how you think school environments, and you just talked a little bit about administrators giving teachers more freedom. But how do these school environments impact a student’s creative potential?

Teresa Amabile:
Let me begin by saying I don’t believe everyone has the same degree of creative potential. I think that’s obvious from certainly from years of research that each of us has talents in different arenas, different combinations of talents and skills, different abilities to be flexible and fluent in our thinking. All of this can be increased, of course, by appropriate learning environments, but we’re not all the same. However, each person’s achievement of their creative potential can be massively influenced by the environment in which they’re working. Even the genius Albert Einstein talked about his schooling experiences as having a dramatic impact on his interest in physics. This is someone who was in love with physics from the time he was five years old and his father brought home a compass. And he was fascinated with this thing, and he had to figure out how it works and why it works that way. From that age, he was interested in these invisible forces, and yet he described this very strict militaristic school that his parents enrolled him in when he was an adolescent, and he said he came to despise physics because of the rote memorization that was required and the rote regurgitation.

Teresa Amabile:
And he said that this experience made him lose all interest in science for a couple of years. And it was only when he left that school that his interest in science came back. So that regimented form of teaching, which is still all too prevalent, is a terrible creativity killer. Creativity flourishes in classrooms where children are excited about what they’re doing, where they are given projects to work on individually and with each other that allow them to use what they’re learning in a creative way, in a way that allows for. That allows for novelty and how they put ideas together and exploration. And when children, for example, are learning language and learning to write, it’s so much more important that they have fun getting ideas down on paper and maybe doing sketches to illustrate what they’re trying to get across than it is to be sure that they’re spelling every word correctly and that they’re making. They’re forming every letter correctly. This doesn’t fit particularly well with standardized tests, which do look at things like spelling and making your letters correctly and knowing the vocabulary words.

Teresa Amabile:
But this is the way to keep children hooked on learning, to keep them excited about learning and about learning creatively.

Matthew Worwood:
So that concludes the first part of our double espresso with Dr. Teresa Amabile. And please join us for our second episode where we will be exploring the power of progress and the progress principle, as well as looking at Teresa’s most recent work on creativity in retirement. My name is Dr. Matthew Worwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett. You’ve been listening to the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast, hosted by Matthew Worwood and Cindy Burnett. Our creative producer is Catherine Fu. Our editor is Sam Atkins. And this episode was made possible thanks to our sponsor, curiosity to create.