Anne Rizza [00:00:00]:
Now I’m sort of looking at myself a little bit differently as a educator going through the program. What are the things that I can focus on more in the classroom for myself? And now, okay, the bigger things that I want to attack, how can I go about doing that? And I think that gives me a little bit more of empowerment as an educator to help my students, because ultimately it’s about the students and going back to them. It’s a little bit about me, but it’s mostly about them.

Matthew Worwood: [00:00:27]:
Hello everyone. My name is Doctor Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:30]:
And my name is Doctor Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood: [00:00:32]:
This is the fuelling creativity in Education podcast.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:36]:
On this podcast, we’ll be talking about various creativity topics and how they relate to the field of education.

Matthew Worwood: [00:00:42]:
We’ll be talking with scholars, educators and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and exploring new perspectives of creativity.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:50]:
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: [00:01:02]:
So let’s begin. Hello and welcome back to another episode. And in this episode we have Ann Rza, a highly experienced and dedicated high school English teacher with an impressive 24 year tenure. Anne has known her whole life that she wanted to be a teacher, which led her to earning her bachelor’s degree in English from southern Connecticut State University and continuing on to earn her master’s degree and a 6th year degree, demonstrating her dedication to continuous growth and professional development. Throughout her career, Anne has played an integral role in curriculum development and her contributions to the school community go beyond the academics. She actively participates in extracurricular activities, including advising the national honour Society, Shades, which is a multicultural and diversity club, and as a class advisor, Anne believes in the potential of every student and has dedicated her entire career to helping them see it for themselves. And welcome to the show.

Anne Rizza [00:01:59]:
Hi, thanks for having me.

Cyndi Burnett [00:02:01]:
So, Anne, you are another graduate from a teaching training program called Teachers Innovation Studio, which is a program that Matt facilitates in partnership with Workspace Connecticut. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience with that program and how it changed your thinking as an educator and with creativity?

Anne Rizza [00:02:21]:
Yes, I honestly can say this is probably one of the best experiences I’ve had as an educator and it’s recently changed pretty much every, everything I do in the classroom. I use canva now as our tool to engage the audience members. So before that, students were using Google Slides, which, well, if the students know how to use Google Slides, well, it worked, but they really didn’t. So they were just using these like basic templates and just filling slides with a lot of text. And that really didn’t engage anyone because they just read it. So now what I did was I took canva and taught students how to use it to actually engage the audience. So I started that last year and worked with students. Now, what I found is that it took a lot of baby steps along the way to get them to remove text from the screen.

Anne Rizza [00:03:12]:
So looking back at those presentations now, in the third semester, working particularly with the film students on that, it was like removing text a little bit at a time for each presentation. What I can tell you now, just in their second presentation of the semester, is that the only text on the screen is the film title and maybe a term. And students saying to me, misses Rza. I was in another class and a student did a presentation, and it was terrible. And I said, well, terrible is a bad word. What do you mean? They read the screen, their backs returned to the audience, and I said, so it wasn’t effective in what they wanted to do. They didn’t engage the audience. He’s like, nope.

Anne Rizza [00:03:54]:
But my presentation was great. I asked questions. I didn’t read from the screen. There was no text. So the students, they’re taking what they’re learning in our class, and they’re applying it to other classes, and they’re recognizing the difference between what’s engaging and what’s not.

Matthew Worwood: [00:04:10]:
Now, Anne, just to build on that a little bit, because you referenced canva as the tool to which you used and to provide a little bit more context for people who aren’t as familiar with the program. In essence, we kind of thought about creativity as a way of professional growth, and you were challenged to identify an instructional challenge that you wanted to work on and then find a tool within your environment that you could use to address that problem. But a lot of it was packaged around your own creativity and trying to apply our understanding of creativity to be more effective in using this technology. Now, the reason why I wanted to provide context is that, to me, you came across someone who was very comfortable with technology. You were also familiar with canva at the time as well. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the creativity aspect and how that changed how you perceived that tool and also how it changed how you might evaluate impact of using that tool in your classroom environment.

Anne Rizza [00:05:07]:
Originally, I thought Canva was just a fun little digital design tool that was free, that I could use as an adult version of color forms. If people in the audience remember color forms, I just love to use that and make pretty flyers and make pretty presentations. So when presented with this idea of addressing a problem in the classroom and using a technological tool that I could use for that, I thought Canva was good on many platforms because I didn’t need anybody to fund it. It was free. Students could connect it right to their Google accounts. And since they all have a Google account with the school, that was an easy one to use. They could connect it to their Google Drive. I could show them how to do it.

Anne Rizza [00:05:53]:
So for me, that worked well. And then a lot of the students are familiar, but I was able to gauge their familiarity with it through an easy Google form. So from what is canva to I’m familiar with it, to canva and I are besties, I could sort of, you know, understand, you know, what I needed to fill in for them. I don’t know if I originally thought of myself as being creative in the sense that I think for me and for a lot of people was like, I can draw or I can maybe build something, versus what creative was in the teacher innovation studio, which was looking at something in a new way or, you know, solving a problem in a different way, which is what we did, you know, where we kind of, you know, like, think big, start small, where, you know, we were all looking at all of these different things. And for someone like myself, where it’s, I want to solve every big problem. But that was not our goal. It was to identify one thing and really be able to solve that and for us, improve the lives of our students and improve their learning, which is what we were able to do. So in that sense, I was able to do that and start to apply that beyond just my film students, but now apply it to my students and other classes because it makes them more of an expert of the material instead of kids that just read things off of a screen.

Cyndi Burnett [00:07:16]:
So, Anne, going back to this process that you use with Matt, can you explain a little bit about the problem that you saw and how you worked to overcome that problem and how you ended up choosing canva to help solve it?

Anne Rizza [00:07:29]:
Yeah. I’ve taught our film is literature course since about 2000, and students have to do presentations in those classes. So I’ll date myself and say presentations weren’t always done on screen. A lot of the presentations were done on posters. So when we graduated to technology, students would do PowerPoints, and then when we graduated to Google, they would use Google Slides. But what students understood as a presentation meant a lot of text on the screen and a lot of reading of that. What I had seen in recent years leading up to teacher innovation studio were Google Slide presentations, some more effective than others where students had too much text on the screen, which is just them reading text. I mean, I can read that.

Anne Rizza [00:08:21]:
You don’t want to read it to me, or too many images or videos that were embedded that were just too small. And we’re a film class, so we want to engage the audience. And if their goal is to teach us something, you know, that they’ve been active, not passive viewers, then we need to be able to see what they’re talking about. And for them to actually use the presentation to support their narrative, and their narrative should be their words that they’re saying to us. I knew that was the problem and knew going into the teacher innovation studio, which I was so fortunate to be a part of, that that’s really right away I was like, this is the problem now, how to solve it? I was like, well, canva would probably be better because it gives them more opportunities. They can have a student account, they can pick and choose different elements. They can easily embed video. They can use things from their Google Drive.

Anne Rizza [00:09:14]:
And because we’re a Google school, it was an easy marriage for them, and they can put all those materials in there. What we wanted to take away was them reading. So it was me trying to figure out how to sort of free them from the idea that they needed to put all that text on the screen and sort of rely on it and was sort of like baby steps, getting them away from it and saying, you’re an expert, you’re a mini expert now. You know this material, you don’t need to read it. Instead, you can use what’s on the screen to support what it is you’re going to say to us. And I think that was sort of an empowering moment, not just for me as a realization that they don’t need to have it there, but an empowering moment for them saying, you don’t need it anymore, and sort of this, like, freeing. And when you watch them and they can do something for ten minutes or 45 minutes and they don’t need to have that on the screen, it became, it becomes far more engaging for the audience in the class and for the presentation and the presenters drifting a little.

Matthew Worwood: [00:10:17]:
Bit away from the program now. And I think a common term is PowerPoint karaoke. And you see that so often in classroom environments. Maybe it’s because students are kind of, you know, rushing and putting the presentation together last minute. But something that you said that struck me was this idea of getting them to see themselves as quasi experts, that they’ve gone and taken the time to develop an understanding of this material, of this film, challenging them, I’m assuming, to reflect on that understanding and find ways to communicate and articulate it to the audience. There’s almost like a sense of this presentation is less about me trying to tick the boxes of what I think you want. It’s less about me trying to give you what I think you want to see in terms of my hard work and more about expressing my knowledge. Was there anything else that you did to try and tease that out? Because my gut feeling is there’s probably a slight different change in how they saw the assignment.

Anne Rizza [00:11:12]:
Yes. I had to sort of restructure how I was going to build a semester with them, because I knew instead of them just, you know, submitting written assignments to me, they were going to have to do presentations. So I changed how I was going to sort of scaffold everything. So what I started to do was model for them what was going to happen. In the beginning, they were going to teach film terms, and with the film terms, they were going to present those terms to me. And that was sort of like their first little baby step into something, and it was going to be them showing something on a screen with no text. And then the next presentation was going to be on the graduate, and they were going to take viewing notes, but each was going to have a specific area, and then they were going to work together in groups based on that. So, for example, if they were assigned to track water in the graduate, and there’s a lot of water imagery in the graduate, from pools, terrain, to fountains, the fish tank, they would have to look at that, and then they’d submit those notes, then work together to create a presentation on water.

Anne Rizza [00:12:19]:
And then from there, maybe we’re going to do a study on Tim Burton and mise en scene, and they would each have one of those areas, like so, staging, costuming, setting, and then they would look at that. So I started to change how we were working on that. So it did require me to change my practice, but also giving them more practice within that. So more presentations and immediate feedback after.

Cyndi Burnett [00:12:45]:
So I just want to tease this out a little bit, because you’re showing us a great example of how you applied your creative problem solving in this. But I want to understand a little bit more about the process, and I’m going to ask, actually ask Matt a question. So, Matt, I know we talk a lot, you and I, offline, about teacher creativity and what you see as teacher creativity, as being teachers who solve problems inside their classroom. Is that correct?

Matthew Worwood: [00:13:12]:
Yes and no. I think if we talk about creativity, it doesn’t always have a context. I do think that the social environment, as we know, if we look at definitions of creativity, that the social environment is such a significant factor on how we engage in creativity and evaluate creativity. So typically, when I reference teacher creativity, I’m thinking about it specifically from the perspective of a classroom environment and how teachers are going about their everyday practice now. Yes, I think when it comes to a process and creative problem solving design thinking, it typically centers around a problem or an ill defined problem, a challenge. And I think that’s a framework to which it’s somewhat easy for us to take on. But I also don’t think that the overall idea of teachers being creative within their environment. Teacher creativity is always exclusive to deliberate problem solving per se and to bring it back on to Ann.

Matthew Worwood: [00:14:03]:
It’s so fascinating to listen to all of these different intricacies that goes into designing the solution at a 10,000 foot view. If we listen to this conversation, you could go around and say, oh, you know, this is someone talking about canva. But if you unpack it, you can hear all of the different ways Ann perceived canva and trying to see how the different tools within canva represented the challenges that she faced in her classroom environment. Just listening, Ann, there was so much packed into your response in terms of how you’re thinking. And in some ways, it’s really hard to track all of the different creative. And I will say, given the fact we just discussed this in our recent debrief, the critical thinking that is going on in terms of teacher creativity, it’s not just about a deliberate process here.

Cyndi Burnett [00:14:48]:
And so here’s my bridge to that, which is, I want to hear how your creativity has progressed in your teaching since you participated in the program.

Anne Rizza [00:14:58]:
I’m continuously looking for different solutions. You know, I can just speak, you know, example. You know, we have, like a club activity page on our high school website that was, you know, just started years ago, that it does need to be updated. We just updated as a district, all of our web pages, and we were looking at it. So I bring it to someone and I was like, you know, this should have a dropdown for clubs and activities and one for honor societies and all this. And as I talk to other people, I’m like, oh, I’m constantly trying to solve, you know, it’s like little solutions to problems that I see that aren’t, you know, as when I talked to Matt when we were trying to talk about and separate problems that we can definitely solve or problems that are too big, like they’re sort of beyond us. I’m always looking at things that I know I can solve that are easy for me to solve. And I sort of talk to people now about the things that are, like, almost like I always say, like, within my classroom or within my realm of being able to handle an attack, because I think that that’s where we need to start versus the things that might be at the district level or beyond us, that they’re not unsolvable.

Anne Rizza [00:16:08]:
But I need to be able to attack them with, whether it’s canva or something else that’s at my disposal now. That really is what we need to be able to do. So if I need to write a grant to get something that I need, then that is what I need to be able to do now to help the students. Or if I want to write a PTSA grant to get some different types of furniture in my room, then I can do that. But I think that is something that the whole experience has taught me about creativity, that there are different solutions out there to really specific problems. Trey.

Matthew Worwood: [00:16:43]:
And just to build on that, Anne, because in your bio, you talk a lot about your commitment to professional growth and your energy enthusiasm throughout the program was very clear to that in the field. There’s things around teacher agency. We talk about the importance of teacher agency in creativity. There’s things like creative self efficacy. It seems to me that. That what you’ve got out of the program, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that you feel perhaps a little bit more empowered to work within the constraints of your classroom. Okay. I can’t solve this problem.

Matthew Worwood: [00:17:14]:
Okay. So maybe that’s not for me to take on, but there is a whole bunch of problems that I can address. So I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit more about that, particularly in terms of how it served your continued professional growth, because that’s so important to you.

Anne Rizza [00:17:29]:
I do believe that one of the things that I’ve taken out of this is something I talk about often, is this empowerment that I feel. I know. I was just talking to my husband the other day about that. And when he’s like, well, what is the one thing that you think you really got out of this? And I was like, I feel empowered that I could go out and apply this in other areas or help other teachers do that. And I do feel that I presented with a lot of issues in different ways because I oversee, whether it’s the senior class or our shades club or national honor society. And people present me with these problems. I feel like I can have the more creative solution to that problem, no matter what it is. And it doesn’t have to be canva related or technology related, but they’re coming to me.

Anne Rizza [00:18:21]:
So as an advisor to the senior class, my co advisor, and myself, the students are coming to us and they want to have an event word like, okay, well, we need to create a solution to whatever it might be. Now, it empowers us to sit there and not just empower the students, you know, and I don’t even need a specific example, but we’re sitting there and we talk to them about it, like, what can we control? You know, what are the things that we can, we can solve? What are the things that we cannot? And that’s how I always talk to students and student leaders. What are the things in our power? What can we do? And what are the things that we cannot do? Because let’s talk about things that we can. And that’s usually a good starting point because then we know the people we can go to, the things that we can’t control. And that’s the same thing with our shades club. What are the things that we know we can do, do here? And what are the things that we know that we would need someone’s help beyond. And I’ve talked that way to students for a long time, but I think that now I’m sort of looking at myself a little bit differently as a educator going through the program. You know, what are the things, you know, that I can focus on more in the classroom for myself? And now, okay, the bigger things that I want to attack, how can I go about doing that? And I think that gives me a little bit more of empowerment as an educator to help my students, because ultimately it’s about the students and going back to them.

Anne Rizza [00:19:43]:
It’s a little bit about me, but it’s mostly about them.

Matthew Worwood: [00:19:50]:
Do you want to bring more creative and critical thinking into your school? Look no further than our podcast sponsor, curiosity to create.

Cyndi Burnett [00:19:58]:
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: [00:20:10]:
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 [00:20:25]:
To learn more, check out curiositytocreate.org, comma, or check out the links in the show notes for this episode. So, Anne, it’s been about a year since Chat GPT first came out. What is your take on it as a high school english teacher based on everything you just shared with us about professional growth?

Anne Rizza [00:20:44]:
It’s complicated. I think that we’re dealing with two issues. One, that chat GPT and some similar generative AI is new and it can make things much easier for students. However, I don’t think that we know enough to, or we’re not training students enough to really help them understand it so they can use it properly. And my really reinforcement with students about chat GPT and other AI is that if they want to use it, if they’re using it, that anything that they would want to incorporate should be treated like any other source, that it needs to be cited. And they can’t really cite full papers, obviously, because that’s plagiarism. So I do want them to use it responsibly. You know, I think if they were using it to come up with some sort of tournament rotation, you know, that’s different than if they want to look for an answer.

Anne Rizza [00:21:44]:
I think what they really need to pay attention to is the bias that could be in it or, you know, anything that’s incorrect. You know, I think those are a lot of our concerns about AI. So as english teachers, we will often put our questions into it and see the responses that it gives us. And then we give those to the students and say, these are AI generated responses to these questions. What are your opinions on this? And have them work with those responses, because I think their opinions, when they’re like, no, that’s not right. That’s not the interpretation. For them to actually work with it and for them to point out some of the inaccuracies in AI, I think we do need, and we have a responsibility to really teach them to interact with it properly because we don’t know what’s going to happen with Aih. And as high school teachers with students in grades nine through twelve in particular, and then they go off to college, I think that policies are coming out now saying it’s a good tool, it should be used, but you need to cite your sources.

Anne Rizza [00:22:49]:
I don’t think that’s enough to really support them.

Cyndi Burnett [00:22:52]:
Well, Ann, it’s been great having you on the show, and I really enjoy hearing about how you’ve been applying the teachers innovation studio work you’ve been doing with Matt to the work you’re doing in the high school English classroom. But we do have to wrap up and we wrap up every episode with three tips you would give to educators to bring creativity into their classrooms. So what are your three tips?

Anne Rizza [00:23:15]:
Be yourself. It would always be my first one. I think that if it’s not coming from a genuine place with something that you really are interested in and you believe in, then the students aren’t going to really buy into what you’re doing. And the students know for me how much I care about it. So therefore they really enjoy it and they also take part in it. The next thing I would say is that you have to reflect and reflect on that practice because if you are going to be a part of that creativity process, it requires a lot of reflection and then a lot of revision. You can’t just all of a sudden be creative and add that creative process into your classroom without reflecting. I think they come hand in hand.

Anne Rizza [00:24:01]:
And I think the third thing I would say is continue to learn. I didn’t just embrace canva. I’ve had to continue to learn about it and continue to learn different ways to use it. I would say that would be my third thing. Just keep learning about what you’re doing and how to apply it in different ways.

Matthew Worwood: [00:24:18]:
Well, Anne, thank you so much for those tips. I think you also gave some great strategies on how to use chat GPT in the classroom as well to wrap this up because we are running out of time. We’re going to give away some mugs. And what you have to do to get our fueling creativity and education mugs.

Cyndi Burnett [00:24:32]:
Is all you have to do to get one of our free fueling creativity mugs is to go and write us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Screenshot it and send it to us@questionsuelingcreativitypodcast.com. we’d also like to hear what your favorite episode was that you’ve heard and send that to us and we will send you a free mug. My name is Doctor Cindy Burnett, and.

Matthew Worwood: [00:24:57]:
My name is Doctor Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:25:00]:
This podcast was produced by Matthew Warwood and Cindy Burnett. The episode was sponsored by Curiosity to create.