Joe Renzulli [00:00:00]:
That which is evaluated gets done. If we’re not evaluating creativity, then it’s not going to get done. And I know we can’t do it as precisely as achievement. We can’t say 87.5 percentile, but there are examples, rating scales and things. There are also other byproducts that can allow us to evaluate it.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:25]:
Hello everyone. My name is Doctor Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:28]:
And my name is Doctor Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:30]:
This is the fuel creativity and education podcast.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:34]:
On this show we’ll be talking about creativity topics and how they apply to the field of education.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:40]:
We’ll be speaking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and digging deeper into new and bearing perspectives of creativity.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:50]:
All with the goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers and parents with knowledge they can use at home or in the classroom.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:58]:
So let’s begin.

Matthew Worwood [00:01:01]:
Welcome to another episode of the fuelling creativity in Education podcast. Now, as you know, the primary goal of this show is bridging the gap between research and practice. And today we are joined by one of the most internationally renowned creativity experts who has done exactly that. Doctor Joseph Renzuli is a leader and pioneer in gifted education and applying the pedagogy of gifted education teaching strategies to all students. The American Psychological association named Joe among the top 25 most influential psychologists in the world. Doctor Ren Zuli received the Harold McGuire Junior Award for Innovation in Education, considered by many to be the Nobel for educators, and was a consultant to the White House Task Force on Education of the Gifted and talented. Joseph Renzuli is a professor emeritus of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut, where he served as director of the National Research center on Gifted and Talented. His research has focused on the identification and development of creativity and giftedness in young people, and on organizational models and curricular strategies for total school improvement, one being the schoolwide enrichment model which he developed with Doctor Sally Reese, another guest on our show.

Matthew Worwood [00:02:12]:
Doctor Renzuli, it is an absolute honour to have you on our show today. Thank you so much for giving up.

Joe Renzulli [00:02:17]:
Your time, honor and a pleasure for me to be here.

Cyndi Burnett [00:02:21]:
So, Doctor Renzuli, we would love to start off with your view on the relationship between giftedness and creativity.

Joe Renzulli [00:02:28]:
A number of years ago, I wrote an article called what makes giftedness? Re examining a definition popularly known today as the three ring conception of giftedness. And it’s a Venn diagram with three interacting circles, and one of them is above average but not necessarily superior ability in a particular topic or subject. The second is creativity, and the third is what I call task commitment, and think of that as a refined or focused form of motivation. Motivation is you’re motivated to be a good teacher or parent or swimmer. Task commitment is working on something very, very specific within whatever area you have an interest in. You can’t separate those things. In the development of what I call creative, productive giftedness, those are the kinds of things that cause people that we know to become famous people, our children who do an outstanding project and win a science award or get a poem published. It’s those three things working together.

Joe Renzulli [00:03:37]:
And the article I say with no amount of humility, is the most widely cited article in the field of gifted education. And I believe that it’s really more common sense. It’s what most people experience in their own work and in their own lifetime. They know that the energy, the task to be there. They know that they have to come up with ideas that are different from other people’s ideas. And obviously, they have to know a little bit about the area that they’re working in.

Matthew Worwood [00:04:10]:
Joe, there was something you said in there. You referenced famous people, and our first interaction was me kind of putting a last minute interview together for exploring the imbalance. I don’t know if you remember that, but you gave some great soundbites in that film. We was talking about why we should care more about gifted education in society. And we, you know, we started to run down a list, you know, when we’re talking about film, famous people in film, you know, we typically go to one person, Steven Spielberg, or we list Bill Gates. And what you reference in that is we as a society are typically referencing the same people. And you kind of pose this question of, what if there was a hundred Bill Gates or 100 Steven Spielberg’s? And then you really understand the true potential of human creativity. And so my question is, what are the greatest barriers for us increasing the number of people that are reaching that level of creativity within their field?

Joe Renzulli [00:05:05]:
I think that one of the things is that I make a distinction between what I call lesson learning giftedness and creative productive giftedness. And fortunately, or unfortunately, you have to determine for yourself too many gifted programs, especially advanced placement courses, honors courses, focus on young people learning more material faster. So that’s what I call, again, lesson learning giftedness. And I believe that if we’re going to create more people who are going to make important contributions to society, then we also have to shift our emphasis, or at least be more equal in our emphasis on what I call creative productive giftedness. And that means that even in an advanced placement course, that somewhere in that course, a capstone project, they’ve become more popular. Things like genius space and all of that, where kids are not just asked to learn something, but to do something, apply what they’ve learned. We know famous people not because of their SAT scores, not because of their rank in class, or even what famous institution they graduated from. We know them because they created something that hopefully will make the world a better place.

Joe Renzulli [00:06:31]:
And I believe that this contributes in any country, in any state, district, whatever, to the economy, to the culture, to the societal benefits. And part of my work does focus on using your creative, productive giftedness to improve social capital.

Cyndi Burnett [00:06:52]:
So how can we bring more of that creative giftedness into the classroom?

Joe Renzulli [00:06:58]:
Always a big challenge, because unfortunately, today we’ve got a couple of guns at our heads in schools. And one of those guns is basically the common core state standards and every name they give to it, you know, basic competencies and all of that. And the second is the way that we evaluate schools on mainly standardized achievement tests. If you look at state report cards where they actually grade schools a, b, c, d, f, on how good they are, the thing that always leaves the list is achievement test scores. And they have a lot of other things that they look at, but they’re all things that basically contribute. For example, something like the number of years of teaching experience of a school faculty that contributes to achievement test scores. And I would never argue against the importance of improving school achievement, but at the same time, we often do that at the expense of things that relate to what, again, I call creative, productive giftedness. I’ve had many a principal say, well, that enrichment stuff really sounds important, but my goal is to get the scores up.

Joe Renzulli [00:08:21]:
And so the testing companies have made fortunes on these tests, and oftentimes all teachers get our averages. These are the scores for all the fourth graders in X, Y, or Z school. We don’t know what little Susie or Johnny is doing as an individual. And so I had a good friend who was formerly president of the University of Connecticut, and he had a wonderful expression, that which is evaluated gets done. If we’re not evaluating creativity, then it’s not going to get done. And I know we can’t do it as precisely as achievement. We can’t say 87.5 percentile. But there are examples, rating scales and things.

Joe Renzulli [00:09:12]:
There are also other byproducts that can allow us to evaluate it. How many children entered the National History Day competition? How many children produced and presented a play or a musical performance? How many children did a film or submitted a article to a journal that publishes children’s work. And these are the kinds of things that are payoffs in the real world because they make a difference from just simply learning more material faster.

Matthew Worwood [00:09:49]:
What you just said there actually strikes me as something relatively simple to do in some ways, is if there is an administrator listening right now or there’s a principal, you know, quantify how many shows you produced, look at your extracurricular activities. One of the statewide innovation challenge. How many submissions were there? Did you receive any awards?

Joe Renzulli [00:10:11]:
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Matthew Worwood [00:10:13]:
Yeah. And get it, get it front facing. Right? Like, you know, go and show the community and the district that you take as much pride in all of these additional things that your students have done, as well as where your score is perhaps ranked on the achievement test. And that seems something we can do.

Joe Renzulli [00:10:29]:
In a lot of ways. I think it’s sort of a political problem, again, the leading political influence being test scores. But one of the things I recommend, for example, the school districts, is decorate the board of education room with things that young people have done. Have young people come in and talk for five or ten minutes about a project that they worked on so that they understand that these are the kinds of things that are equally more important, in my opinion, to just simply, what were the scores of our fourth graders this year?

Cyndi Burnett [00:11:04]:
I think thats a wonderful example. Now, id like to talk a little bit about the Renzuli learning system. And for those of you listening who arent familiar with this, its an interactive online system that provides students with a personalized learning environment, allowing teachers to easily differentiate instruction to increase engagement and achieve higher academic performance. So you get that engagement piece and that higher academic performance piece. So can you talk to us a bit about how this learning system works? How did you develop it, and how has it benefited the thousands of educators who have used it?

Joe Renzulli [00:11:38]:
Well, one of the things that Sally and I realized a number of years ago was that you can’t do the kind of teaching that we advocate without easy access to technology. And so about ten or so years ago, I don’t actually remember when we started it, we started meeting with some tech people. And one of the things that I’ve done over the years is develop several different instruments that look at student strengths, what I call assessment for learning rather than of learning. And one that always leaves the list by 100 miles is interests. And so I developed a series of instruments called interest elisers, and I have them from diapers to doctorate. If you apply to my doctoral program, I’m going to send you an adult interest ELisa, because I want to know where you’re coming from. And we have them for very young children, everything in between. And we even have some separate area ones like Sally Reese developed one in reading, let’s say as children what they want to read, and you’ll get better reading scores.

Joe Renzulli [00:12:50]:
And she has research to prove that another one has to do with learning styles, asking young people the way that they learn best. And another one is expression styles, which is becoming more and more important to me as time goes on. If I can find out that a child doesn’t want to write poetry, but would love to do cartoons, for example, or do a mime or do something that relates to their way of expressing himself or herself. And when we look at, again, famous people, they’ve always expressed themselves in a certain way. And so right now I’m working with a couple of my colleagues on another addition to what we call the profiler in Zulu learning. And that has to do with executive function skills. And it’s called my way, I believe. So this information is all recorded by students right at their computer keyboard.

Joe Renzulli [00:13:53]:
They answer those questions, and out the other end of the printer comes a profile that describes their three major interests or three major learning styles, etcetera. The real beauty of the program is this search engine that scans through probably 50,000 different resources, and they’re all high engagement resources. It’s not just text online or, heaven forbid, worksheets online. And, for example, a youngster that’s interested in ancient Egypt can build their own pyramid virtually, or a thing called a shadoof that raises water from one level to the other. They can dissect and preserve their own mummy, and that’s sent to the student based on their profile. Teachers can also use it. If a teacher is teaching a unit, they can put ancient Egypt into the search engine, the grade level of the children, even the ability level, if they’re working with children of different ability groups. And it will help the teacher find these quickly and easily.

Joe Renzulli [00:15:00]:
And I believe that in all the work that my work’s always been very practical or pragmatic. I think an idea is not worth a dime unless you can convert it into something that’s easy for teachers to use. And some of the workshops that I’ve been to over the years are so complicated that it causes teachers to have brain fog rather than a skill that they can use tomorrow. And actually, Sally and I wanted to give this away free from the University of Connecticut, but their system is for faculty productivity to be converted into a commercial product. But I think that it is one of the most important things, because again, you can’t do the kind of teaching that we’re recommending, which is at the opposite end of prescriptive didactic over to the creative investigative end on the right hand end of the continuum. You can’t do that kind of teaching without letting the machine do the heavy lifting for you.

Matthew Worwood [00:16:08]:
I mean, just a sidebar. We’ve spoken a lot, Joe, about this idea of co bots, collaborative bots, and how the future creative per se, is going to have to be better at collaborating with machines and artificial intelligence. And so just as a sidebar, I see a connection with the future creative teacher getting better at kind of like working with some of these algorithms that can assist us when it comes to identifying specialized interests.

Joe Renzulli [00:16:34]:
Training teachers is the key to so much of this, and of course there has to be some administrative support for it. But I’ve developed a thing which is called the creative idea generator, and it works like this. I get groups of teachers together, usually by grade level and or subject area, and I ask them to listen some of the things that they consider to be mainly memory oriented in their work. Then I divide them into groups. Let’s just take something that every american child learns three times during school, maybe more times tables and the names of the US states and capitals, for example. And I ask them to brainstorm some ways that can make this more engaging and more interesting for young people. And one of the things that I firmly believe is that if we don’t have a vehicle for getting teachers themselves to be a little bit more creative in their work, they’re never going to move away again. The common core and the gun at your head on test scores is always going to be that which evaluates gets done.

Joe Renzulli [00:17:57]:
So, for example, I’ve done this in a number of workshops and I train teachers and how to do it. And one of the workshops on states and capitals and they pick the topic. I don’t tell them the topic, they pick it. I got, over the next year or so, so many unusually creative ideas for just. For example, this was a workshop in Florida where they developed a debate for a better location for the capital of the state, Tallahassee, way out of the way in the northern part of the state, where the population is very slim. And some kids argued for Miami because that’s where the major population is. Others argued for Orlando because that’s where Disney World is and that’s where more people go. And some kids developed a matching game where it was ten items per game and they list ten states and then ten things that were unique about that state.

Joe Renzulli [00:19:10]:
And so kids had to do a lot of research to find out, for example, that the frisbee was invented in Connecticut by some workers at a plant that made ice cream. They were selling the tops of the ice cream containers during their lunch hour. And kids had so much fun doing this. There were many, many other very creative ideas. And then, of course, the next step is to say, okay, you want to make learning more fun? I always to me, if you know my three e’s, enjoyment, which leads to engagement, which leads to enthusiasm for learning. Well, anything that children find fun triggers the process, which we all do in our own lives. I’m a bread baker, and basically, you know, I follow the recipe, and then I add to it and try a little of this and a little of that. And some are great failures, but others turn out to be really good.

Joe Renzulli [00:20:11]:
And so I think that these are the kinds of things that have almost been squeezed out of schools because of those two guns that are pointing at our head. And we’ve got to give teachers a little bit of room in their own classrooms to do things like those, for example, on the states and capitals on the times tables ones. There were some really remarkable ideas that came in just a very simple one. Teacher would ask, how much is six times four? And she’d write 24 on the blackboard. Then she asked them, how many different ways you can make 24? And the kids that were really slow in math said, well, 23 plus one is 24. But then some kids came up with using multiple and division in the same one. The more advanced kids, some kids that knew algebra came up with remarkable ways to come up with 24. And we talked today a lot about differentiation and personalization of instruction.

Joe Renzulli [00:21:21]:
That’s an activity that I could do with kids that are struggling learners, and I could do it with the kids with the highest math scores in the country.

Matthew Worwood [00:21:29]:
And keeping with the theme of differentiation, and you’ve spoken about the guns to the head, could you talk a little bit about the concept of curriculum compacting just because, you know, looking at strategies that teachers can look at applying when they feel that their creativity is restricted a little bit?

Joe Renzulli [00:21:47]:
Curriculum compacting is something that I came upon when I started teaching, which is in 1958 at that time, post world War two and everything. And heterogeneous classrooms were the name of the game. No slow, medium advanced classes. And so I had some children in my math classes. I was a math and science teacher, some kids in my math class who couldn’t add. And I had some kids that could have done calculus. And so I started what I called was a game. And the game went like this.

Joe Renzulli [00:22:26]:
You know how on a math worksheet the problems get harder as you go down the page? You did the last row. You brought it up to my desk if they were. And I did this later on for homework, but mostly for seat work. If you got everything in the last row correct, you were through with your math for the day. Now, that presented problem number two. And that is, okay, what do I do with those kids? And so that’s when I started looking for enrichment activities in math that kids could have more fun with. And so they wanted to get that last row so they would be able to go and do a fun activity. And I actually also did it in science as well.

Joe Renzulli [00:23:12]:
And so that eventually evolved into. And we’ve done a great deal of research on taking out material from the curriculum that either young people already know or can learn more quickly and easily than others, and getting rid of that and replacing it with something that reflects the three e’s.

Cyndi Burnett [00:23:34]:
And you have a book on this topic.

Joe Renzulli [00:23:36]:
Yeah, we’ve written a lot, and we’ve done a lot of research on it. And, in fact, I think Sally wrote an article once with a really creative title, why not let bright children start school in February? Because the fact of the matter is that most of the first part of the year, at least in the reading and math basic skill areas, you know, is just a repeat of what they already know. And I think that just working on a short piece, I don’t know if it’s in my short stuff yet or not to take off on NCLB. No Child left behind. And the title is no child left bored. That’s what causes children to be bored. Therefore, they lose good work habits. They lose the enthusiasm for finding out new material on their own.

Joe Renzulli [00:24:26]:
And again, it’s really hard to change our profession because of the test scores and the common Core standards that seem to drive everything.

Matthew Worwood [00:24:41]:
I think what’s important, though, it’s hard. It’s a challenge. It’s something that everyone’s acknowledged. But there are small things that we can do as educators. And I think from an administrative perspective, I think there’s some stuff that you’ve brought into this discussion, Jo, that administrators can think about. How might I create an environment that kind of promotes this? What might I do to try and promote this type of creativity in the community? But I think if you’re a teacher listening right now, we’ll share some of the resources that Joe’s referencing for you to think about. How you might be able to actually apply that in your classroom. It’s a great time.

Matthew Worwood [00:25:16]:
It’s the summer months, and you can kind of like have a go at starting small for the next academic year.

Cyndi Burnett [00:25:25]:
I would also love to know, Joe, what you would recommend for parents who are listening. So we have a lot of parents who listen to our podcast who are interested in having, in bringing creativity into their home life with their children. So what would you recommend if you have a parent at home who has a child that accelerates what they’re learning, shows creative production and wants to, is motivated to learn, what would you recommend for them?

Joe Renzulli [00:25:51]:
One of the things I would recommend is to look around for any opportunity where some of this is going on outside of school. I think that different kinds of camps and clubs focus on these kinds of things. There’s a nature camp, for example, here in mystic, that we’re going to get our four year old granddaughter into this summer because she’s very, she’s always looking at butterflies and looking at plants and things like that. And so if it were something more scientific or mechanical or some other area dramatic, we would look for something like that. I think that parents should do everything possible to influence the schools, but the schools are hard to influence. And I think that one of the things that you should do for people that are looking at this podcast is say, please ask your principal, your director of curriculum, your superintendent of schools to look at this podcast. Because a lot of teachers, I think would, when I talk about the three e’s, I talk about it is as appropriate for teachers as it is for students. But a lot of teachers just feel like, no, you know, I’ve had principals say to teachers, we’re not doing that stuff here.

Joe Renzulli [00:27:14]:
We got to get our scores up. We’re lower than the next town over as far as our achievement scores go.

Matthew Worwood [00:27:21]:
I’m going to keep saying this again and again, and I’m sorry if there are people listening now. They’re getting bored of it. But I think particularly in response to COVID, we as educators demonstrate the tremendous creativity of the teaching profession. And I do hope that as we come back after COVID and things look like they’re beginning to normalize and maybe it would continue to do so, we can hope is that we don’t lose that. You know, we keep talking about the value and importance of creativity that’s within the entire school system, including the educators, because, you know, Cindy and I have had guests, and one of the things that’s regularly coming up, Joe, is this idea of modeling creative behavior. And if teachers can model creative behavior within their profession, within their instructional activities, then they’re actually getting a better sense of creativity and all of the kind of attributes and characteristics and skills associated with it. And therefore, they’re, they’re going to model it and then probably more comfortable in promoting it in the classroom as well.

Joe Renzulli [00:28:19]:
Yes. Let me give you a quick personal and recent example. Yesterday, we had our almost four granddaughter with us, and we went down to the beach and we dug up some seashells, and then we brought them back and washed them all off. And she has this acrylic set of paint. We started painting the seashells. She did. We all painted, but she did. And there was a little ceramic turtle that my wife bought in the store for a dollar sitting there.

Joe Renzulli [00:29:01]:
And she said, grammy, can we paint the turtle? And we brought the turtle over, and next thing you know. So that, again, is her choice. I mean, she loved painting the shells and be glad to send you a handful, but she then just got really excited about painting the turtle. And I do think that even parents, in their own way, need to understand the difference between lesson learning help and creative, productive help, giving children a chance. And then we said, what do you want to do with the turtle? And she said, I want to put it in my fairy garden, which she has designed herself, out by our swimming pool. She’s got all little knickknacks and little toys in there. And so the turtle now sits proudly in the middle of the fairy garden. And I think that that’s the way that we can get these kinds of things promoted a little bit by just letting parents know that those are things that can easily be done.

Joe Renzulli [00:30:05]:
And we had such a talk about the three E. Sally and I enjoyed every minute of that activity.

Cyndi Burnett [00:30:12]:
Thank you so much for sharing that beautiful story. All right, so we’re running out of time, and I have, we have probably 50 more questions to ask, so I’m going to start with the next one. What do you think is the future of gifted education, and where do you think we need to focus our energy?

Joe Renzulli [00:30:29]:
First of all, I’m going to give you one of my fears, and that fear is that because of the underrepresentation of low income students in gifted education programs, we are facing a crisis because we’ve had parents protesting in New York from low income groups, and we’ve had parents from kids that are at the prestigious schools, Stuyvesant and Bronx science protesting equally. We don’t want kids in here that are not the same as our kids, meaning middle class white and asian kids. And there’s a thing in law which is called the drowning man analogy. And Joe and Matt and Cindy are walking along by the river one day, and there’s a drowning person out there. And I say, I’m not such a good swimmer. I’m not jumping in. And Matt says, yeah, you know, I don’t know how to swim at all. But Cindy jumps in and she dives out and she swims out, and she grabs the drowning man.

Joe Renzulli [00:31:42]:
And on the way back, unfortunately, the man struggles loose and drowns. Who goes to court, Joe or Matt, who refused to help, or Cindy, who helped but didn’t quite get the job done the way it should have been done? Who do they sue?

Matthew Worwood [00:32:00]:
I am, sadly Sue Sydney. Yeah.

Joe Renzulli [00:32:03]:
Yeah. And so what’s happening, we get called as witnesses and, yeah, well, what’s happening in schools is that superintendents are saying, you know, we can’t deal with this. So we’re going to look at New York City, get rid of the gifted program, and we’re going to differentiate for all students. And sometimes all this means is that slower kids will get more worksheets and brighter kids will get two extra books to read. And I believe that unless we can do something to show that we’ve got some suggestions that will improve again learning for all kids with a focus on creative, productive, as well as lesson learning giftedness, we might be in the same position as the drowning man analogy. I’d rather get rid of it so I don’t have the problem than trying to solve the problem. That’s going to satisfy both groups. And by the way, that’s one of the reasons that Sally and I developed a school wide enrichment model.

Joe Renzulli [00:33:12]:
Many people have said, well, couldn’t, shouldn’t all kids want to do this? And we said, yeah, that’s great. You know, it’s all done in the gifted program and other kids. You know, I had one teacher who said, I’m sure glad that my child’s in the gifted program at school, because when she comes home with these great ideas and things that they did, I do them with my whole class. And so all kids should have these opportunities. And I’m not saying all kids are gifted or not gifted. What I’m saying is that we have an opportunity gap, and that is something that we need to cover and that will also, I think, help us with the achievement gap.

Matthew Worwood [00:33:55]:
Joe, you’ve listed, you’ve got a lot of accomplishments, but one of the greatest accomplishments that I’ve seen that you’re most proud about is your work in professional development with teachers? And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the comfort you program at the University of Connecticut, which is coming up in the month of July. It’s typically held in the month of July, particularly from the perspective of the educators listening that hungry and want to do more around the things that we’re talking about.

Joe Renzulli [00:34:25]:
Well, confitute by the way, it’s a made up word. It’s a combination of a conference and an institute with a lot of fraternity in the middle. And unfortunately, this year we’re going to have to do it virtually because I think that a group of really excited teachers being together for a week, the kinds of energy that evolves from that is just something that’s always amazed me. But I think that one of the things about confrtute is that the focus is on practical applications of our work. That we don’t have professors lecturing from behind a podium, and many of the people that teach at confrtude are still working classroom teachers. I mean, we do have people that give keynotes and things like that, but I’m constantly encouraging the confitute faculty staff to practice what we’re preaching right in their confitute sessions. And so all kinds of great things are done that are more hands on. I believe that the only value of a theory is if it is also followed by very, very practical implementation activities.

Joe Renzulli [00:35:49]:
And so I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s been as successful. We’ve had people that have come back many, many times over the years and always say they come home with something new. And I’m very proud of that because we can talk about all of these ideas, but getting them into the tool bag of teachers is a much more difficult thing to do.

Cyndi Burnett [00:36:16]:
Doctor Manzuli, we end every show with three tips that you would provide to educators to bring creativity into the classroom.

Joe Renzulli [00:36:24]:
Well, I think that one of the first tips that I recommend that is as practical as I can get, is that working with the school librarian, a separate section of the library should be set up with things that I call how to books. And these are books that give young people the investigative and creative skills for tackling a problem just like adults, but more at perhaps a more junior level. And so, for example, a how to book on how to design and build or write a puppet show and how to make puppets is something that there’s a how to book just about everything. Cookbooks are how to books, by the way. They should be very, very practical. And step one, step two, after the ingredients are listed in the cookbook. What’s over there on the right next page, mix this with that and put it in a blender or whatever. And so I think that that’s one of the most important practical things that we can do.

Joe Renzulli [00:37:33]:
The second is, again, trying to get in touch with some basic ideas. And one of the reasons that I make the short stuff, which I’m going to send to you so easily available, is that they are basic ideas that are quickly read. And then if people want to follow up, they can find more advanced information. But I do believe that long lectures and long articles can only contribute to more boredom to teachers. And, you know, yet another workshop there on this, that or the other thing is not going to do it. So I do think that that’s a second thing that I would strongly recommend. And the third thing I would strongly recommend is that teachers try to ask some open ended questions, questions every single day. As a matter of fact, I have a thing.

Joe Renzulli [00:38:36]:
I’ll make a note of this. If I can find it, I’ll send it to you as well. And it’s just a list of verbs and basically some verbs that deal with just simply finding information. Some are a little bit more advanced, the middle level, think of those as more along the lines of thinking skills. The third set are more creative and just have teachers check themselves. How many of the verbs from column one, column two, and column three have you used? And one of the things I ask teachers to do at the end of every topic or unit of study or sometimes even lesson, what’s an open ended question that they can ask children that doesn’t have a single predetermined correct answer?

Cyndi Burnett [00:39:28]:
Well, Doctor Renzuli, thank you so much for joining us today. If you’re interested in his work, we encourage you to check out the links in the comments and to follow him on LinkedIn. We’ll send a link for that as well. So that concludes this episode of the Fueling Creativity and Education podcast. If you have any questions or thoughts about this episode or past or future episodes, please reach out to us@questionsuelingcreativitypodcast.com. My name is Doctor Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood [00:39:55]:
And my name is Doctor Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:39:58]:
This podcast was produced by creativity and education and in partnership with dadsforcreativity.com. Our editor is Sina Yusef Sode.