Tanya Knudsen [00:00:00]:
Part of teaching for creativity and being a creative teacher is you really want to stretch your students so that they start to sense like, oh, this is okay. Oh, this is fun. Oh, this is different. Oh, she’s interesting. Remember, I’m well over 10,000 miles away. I mean, I need to engage them. This is a two hour class and so I need to really keep bringing them back so that over and over again, they’re interested and they want to be there.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:26]:
Hello, everyone. My name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:29]:
And my name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:32]:
This is the fueling Creativity and education podcast.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:35]:
On this show, we’ll be talking about creativity topics and how they apply to the field of education.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:41]:
We’ll be speaking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and digging deeper into new and varying perspectives of creativity, all with the.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:52]:
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 [00:00:59]:
So let’s begin today. We welcome to the show Tanya Knudson. Tanya is an educator, world traveler, and PhD candidate for creative leadership. She teaches for creativity with an expanded and selfdesigned curriculum squarely rooted in the torrent’s incubation model for teaching and learning to combine creative thinking skills with subjects. Tanya’s first creative curriculum, creativity through the arts, received scholarly recognition in 2021. Tanya now teaches her second Tim based curriculum, creativity through English via Zoom, to students at Wings of Change, a vocational hospitality school and hotel society enterprise in Madagascar. Now, Tanya, it’s great to have you on the show.

Tanya Knudsen [00:01:44]:
Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Cyndi Burnett [00:01:46]:
So the three of us, Matt and Tanya and I, have been well versed in creative thinking skills and the Torrance incubation model. But for our listeners who are not familiar with this framework, can you please share a bit about how you learned these skills and how you began to integrate them into your classroom?

Tanya Knudsen [00:02:02]:
Thank you. I think just to kind of give a little bit of a snapshot on the Torrance incubation model for teaching and learning. I mean, there’s kind of two pieces in my mind. One is how courses or classes are structured, which is this very simple structure of heightening, deepening, and extending. So the heighten is to really build that curiosity and get the student ready to learn. The deepening part is the actual meat of the lesson, and then the extension is how they might apply it into their everyday life or into the real world. That structure is used along with each of the creative thinking skills, which are really ways and methods to process what is being taught? What is being learned? So there’s a structure and a set of cognitive skills that together go alongside what the subject might be for learning. In my instance right now, English is a second language.

Tanya Knudsen [00:02:59]:
So creative thinking alongside English as a second language.

Cyndi Burnett [00:03:02]:
So, Tanya, can you tell us exactly how you’ve integrated creative thinking skills into your curriculum?

Tanya Knudsen [00:03:10]:
So, actually, as I started out as a preschool teacher, I developed a program called Polyglots a number of years ago when my kids were small, which was really an immersive experience for young children to learn foreign language. So I keep finding myself back into curricula, and now with this model that I learned as a result of the master’s degree in creativity and change leadership at Buffalo State College, I came back to curricula simply because I guess it’s just natural to me, but I developed this actually during COVID I started that creativity through arts class because I was handed that opportunity to teach an arts segment since everyone was remote at that point and we couldn’t do art at school. And so I just started having students learn what it is to be creative by leaning into how art is made. And so we looked at masterworks and used creative thinking skills as we were understanding how particular art pieces were made. So, for example, looking at it, many alternatives, right? Was Andy Warhol great fit. So it was an easy way to get started on that.

Cyndi Burnett [00:04:23]:
I love that example. Can you give us a few other examples of how you integrated creative thinking skills in the arts?

Tanya Knudsen [00:04:29]:
Oh, sure. Well, I would always think of every artist, how might I apply each artist’s work to a creative thinking skill? So let me give you a couple of examples. Mondrian, highlight the essence, right. Look at it another way. Picasso. Right? Visualize richly and colorfully Monet, the gardens. So there was so many curiosity. Girl with a pearl earring.

Tanya Knudsen [00:04:59]:
Great piece of work. To discover what it is to be curious, because nobody actually knows what that painting is, truly who that woman is, right? So in leaning into it, I thought that it made sense because that’s where people naturally are going, that creativity has to do with art. So if we lean into what that might mean, we will discover that all artists have a process, and that’s really what we want to pull out in the creative thinking skills is what is your process for developing your understanding or ability to think through the information that you’re learning so that you can evaluate, sift, and formulate your own original thought.

Matthew Worwood [00:05:39]:
So, Tanya, you’re working with collaborators in Madagascar, which obviously involves you teaching remotely. So can you tell us a little bit about what that experience is like.

Tanya Knudsen [00:05:48]:
Yeah, I mean, it’s tolerating ambiguity. Right. And actually, now what I say is tolerate ambiguity. It works every time. So that’s kind of my new mantra. But I just want to set the stage so I can really paint to listeners really what’s going on here. This is a vocational hospitality school and a hotel social enterprise business model called Wings of Change. So the students are living on site, and they are taking full time classes in cuisine, it, language, hospitality, a whole suite of coursework.

Tanya Knudsen [00:06:24]:
My course is teaching ESL. Specifically, I focus on phrasal verbs, and I bring those creative thinking skills alongside that ESL aspect. So I have 50 students who are really sitting in what is a dining room of the hotel. Imagine these open air dining rooms with the thatched roof. Right. There’s one screen. I’m zooming into that on that screen, and there are 50 students in there. We do have two microphones, which are kind of roaming microphones.

Tanya Knudsen [00:06:53]:
That was my idea, to kind of think of it as a TV show. And we have a couple of lead teachers who are in the room, and then we have a lead student who is a bit of a moderator. But it’s a very ambiguous environment simply because there’s so many of them. I’m remote, and how can I teach them in a way that is interesting because it’s a two hour class. So what do I do? I have them move. I mean, I really, truly draw on my own teaching skills as a preschool teacher and teach using this sort of TPR concept, total physical response, teaching them in a way that they have to respond. As a language teacher, I know that works, but also improv skills. Having them make living pictures really helps them to resonate with what the concept is I’m trying to bring across.

Tanya Knudsen [00:07:43]:
And then I have them do group activities so that they engage with each other, and I’m just not the sage on the remote stage. And then I record live in mural as they’re feeding me back information. They come up to the microphone or to the screen. We have one computer, so they come forward to the laptop and I record then what they say. So it’s a little ambiguous and we’re finding our way through it.

Matthew Worwood [00:08:07]:
What I love about that story is when I’ve worked with teachers and we talk about creativity and how that applies to them as a teacher. In the classroom environment, most of the time, teachers usually land somewhere related to engagement, thinking creatively so that we can increase engagement from our students. And so just listening to you, it seems to me that you’ve had to go through a process of making sure you engage students through the screen. Could you talk a little bit about some of the discoveries that you made from when you first started teaching in this experience to now, perhaps routines that are commonplace within your practice but actually commonplace because you’ve had to kind of, like, through trial and error, work out how best to engage students at a distance.

Tanya Knudsen [00:08:55]:
Yeah, I mean, what I realized, I asked them at the end of the last cohort, number two. So each course is six months long. So the last cohort I asked them, what do you remember from class? As a bit of a wrap up, what I found was they were remembering all of the things that we physically did. And then what I realized was, oh, if I can hook the physical to the actual concept that I want to bring across, then I will get that resonance that will then pass into their subconscious so they know it. So, as an example, when I wanted them to tolerate ambiguity, the very first lesson, right, I had them make the gideon knot. Okay, now you know what I mean? What about an unclear situation? Right? How do you get out of an unclear, non directional situation? So I’m now leading with all of these physical activities to get that resonance across. Even if it’s not clear at the first, it will be by the end of the class because I revisit the concept over and over again. But I lead with physical action.

Cyndi Burnett [00:10:07]:
I love the physical aspect, Tanya, and it’s something that really resonates with me, because I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but I was a former dancer. I was a dancer my whole life. And so I’ve always felt if I could dance the curriculum, I would be able to know so much more from my k through twelve education. And most of the time, I remember just sitting in chairs the whole time. But I can hear the voices of the teachers listening to this and saying, okay, it’s great to do distance learning and have them doing something physical, but doesn’t that create a chaotic environment on the other side? Now, I know you have two teachers and an assistant on the other side, but how do you maintain control and not let things get out of hand? When you’re doing these sorts of physical.

Tanya Knudsen [00:10:49]:
Exercises, I always time it. We talk about constraints. I really want to bring that across to them. You have the constraint of time. You have the constraint of the request without any information. And so I ask them, how much time do you think you need? We usually work on seven minutes, and then I count them down. You have three. You have two.

Tanya Knudsen [00:11:12]:
And so I do that. And then I’m a great believer in singing in through to transitions. I sing them a song back. They go out to the courtyard from the dining room. They go to the courtyard. Me and the computer follows them outside. It’s pretty hilarious. They make their shape like we just made a web yesterday.

Tanya Knudsen [00:11:32]:
And then I say, okay, we have a song. Then as we transition back into the room, so it’s guided, so nothing is just completely open ended.

Cyndi Burnett [00:11:41]:
And how old are they?

Tanya Knudsen [00:11:42]:
They’re young adults. They’re 18 to 25.

Cyndi Burnett [00:11:45]:
And they’re okay with you singing?

Tanya Knudsen [00:11:47]:
Oh, sure. I mean, it helps them to realize I’m human. It’s fun. It’s okay. And I think this is a part of teaching for creativity, and being a creative teacher is you really want to stretch your students so that they start to sense like, oh, this is okay. Oh, this is fun. Oh, this is different. Oh, she’s interesting.

Tanya Knudsen [00:12:04]:
Remember, I’m well over 10,000 miles away. I mean, I need to engage them. This is a two hour class, and so I need to really keep bringing them back so that over and over again, they’re interested and they want to be there.

Matthew Worwood [00:12:19]:
You know what’s funny? And does anyone familiar with the website go noodle?

Cyndi Burnett [00:12:23]:
Yes.

Matthew Worwood [00:12:24]:
Right. So I’ve actually done go noodle with my undergraduate students. I only did it twice, and now it’s just a threat. But I do. I talk about them. The fact that, you know, it is important for us to kind of like, stay, stay physical. If we’re going to be sitting down and doing activities for a long time, we’re naturally going to probably feel a decrease in energy, especially if we haven’t eaten or something. So that idea of kind of like, making sure that there’s opportunities to move around, I think is really important.

Matthew Worwood [00:12:55]:
The fact that you’re then facilitating that at a distance is really cool.

Cyndi Burnett [00:13:01]:
And I love the thought of them carrying the computer around with you in it, singing. That just brings such a joyful response. I love it.

Tanya Knudsen [00:13:09]:
Well, that’s it. As they’re having fun, this is the most important part. I’m trying to teach them how important it is for them to think, to develop their creative potential, their imagination. And so I have to do that. I mean, it’s not enough to say it. You have to do it, you have to model it. And I think when students know that you’re human and that you’re fun, those aren’t the teachers that students remember.

Matthew Worwood [00:13:34]:
I think part of what you’re talking about modeling it and singing it. It is trying to establish an environment where we are more relaxed. And you had referenced that really early on in response to that last question. So could you talk a little bit about, as the semester unfolds, do you see students becoming more relaxed even at a distance, and therefore, do you feel you’re getting increased engagement and comfort as a consequence of them being more relaxed with you and then also just the environment?

Tanya Knudsen [00:14:03]:
I think so. I mean, one of the things that happens over the course of the course is that they need to present themselves more on camera directly to me. And so that is a big learning for them because these are students who are very financially challenged. Women don’t have really generally a voice. And so for them to have to learn to be silly and then learn to be serious and learn to think for themselves and learn to present themselves even for just 30 seconds or a minute on camera directly is a challenge. And they, I think, by the end of it, build confidence to do that. And also a number of the activities that I do are confidence building. One of the skills that I bring across to students is the trust fall and a number of other activities that really, truly, really push them in ways that they have to become either self reliant or rely on each other’s.

Tanya Knudsen [00:15:02]:
And that’s a big message I’m also trying to bring across is teamwork. Right. You cannot run a hotel by yourself, nor should you. So how might we collaborate to get an activity done? Because that is reflected also in how we run a hotel.

Cyndi Burnett [00:15:18]:
Now, Tanya, one of the things we’ve been talking a lot on the podcast, and I know you’ve listened to many of our episodes, is sociocultural theory. And looking at the context. So obviously, working with students in Madagascar is much different than working with your preschool students in Seattle. So how did you get up to speed in terms of how to make something work in the context of that curriculum?

Tanya Knudsen [00:15:41]:
Well, I had the experience of that creativity through arts. So I did that first and like I said, got some scholarly recognition and feedback from that. So that was a big uplift for me. And then I just thought it would make sense again. Really what I was wanting to do was to test this Torrance incubation model. So I just thought, why don’t I try putting the creative thinking skills alongside learning English and continually tying it back to hospitality? So just as an example, we just finished looking at it another way, and I realized in doing that, that’s an empathy building skill as well. And so we did the pizza perspective, and I broke the class up into groups, and each group had to pretend that there was a convention being held at the hotel for a particular group. So one was a soccer group, one was a grandma group, one was businessmen.

Tanya Knudsen [00:16:38]:
And then I asked them, what would grandmas need come to find out they wanted bingo for the grandmas. I had no idea. Right. So then we realized, gee, if business people come to the hotel versus grandmas, they are going to want completely different things. So I’m able to tie it back to the environment that they will be in, which is hospitality, the hotel business. And I really tie then the lesson ultimately back to how it could relate in the real world, which would be their internship and their work in hospitality.

Matthew Worwood [00:17:08]:
I’m loving every aspect of your story, Tanya, because you’re here. You’re an ela teacher. You obviously have learning objectives with this course, but you’re talking so much about your own creativity as an instructor as you go about packaging these lessons, identifying problems, solving problems, asking questions to make sure that you’re able to monitor the impact of the ideas that you’re coming up with. So to that end, other ELA teachers that are listening to this right now, what advice do you have for them when it comes to trying to think more creatively within their environment?

Tanya Knudsen [00:17:48]:
Yeah, I mean, I really would have to come back to this kinesthetic teaching. I mean, as a language teacher, right. I started my own language business for preschoolers. When you teach in a way which is using this total physical response, when you teach in a way that the student has to respond, then you make a connection that is deeper, that resonates, that is the AhA that will be then permanent, and then you can move on and build more from there. That’s what I found in learning language, foreign language. That’s what I found in teaching language, and that’s what I find in teaching creativity. Because the thing with language is it has to be a subconscious skill ultimately. So how can I pass the concepts into subconscious most quickly? And I believe that to be through physical, because that’s how it will resonate.

Cyndi Burnett [00:18:42]:
Now, speaking of language, Tanya, you’ve spoken to me about the language of creativity. Can you explain that to our audience?

Tanya Knudsen [00:18:49]:
Every creative thinking skill has not only the concept itself, but tools that go with it and then hooks language to instigate that type of thinking. And so I think it’s really important to bring that across. We talked in just class the other day. What’s the difference between why? And I wonder why?

Matthew Worwood [00:19:09]:
Right?

Tanya Knudsen [00:19:09]:
There’s a big difference. Why is looking for one particular answer, but I wonder why is a much more open ended question. So it depends on what kind of answer you want, what situation you’re in that you elicit a different kind of response. And this is really, really critical and something really important to bring across to the learner to realize what I say matters. And if I want to develop my creativity, I need to speak the lingo of creativity.

Cyndi Burnett [00:19:36]:
So are you just saying the lingo of, say, creative thinking skills? Are you talking about creative problem solving? I mean, what examples would you give to educators who say, yeah, I want to bring the language of creativity into my classroom? Where do you think they should start?

Tanya Knudsen [00:19:49]:
We know that there’s language that goes with creativity and creative thinking skills. I mean, if a teacher does not know where to start, start where you are, start with one thing and focus on that and build from there. That’s what I would say. I mean, you could build a lesson around what if, what if this, what if that, and really get that into the students. I mean, I taught a micro classes during COVID 15 minutes a week I taught to an elementary school, and it was astounding. The feedback that I received was that the students really, really loved the class. Specifically, a student said, I was so happy that we got to draw something and do what we wanted rather than work on a graphic organizer.

Cyndi Burnett [00:20:30]:
So that brings us to this question of value. And what kind of value do you think creativity is bringing to the students that you’re working with, and what kind of examples can you share with us?

Tanya Knudsen [00:20:40]:
So I think the real value is that they’re having fun and not realizing that the learning is already happening. Remember, this is a two hour class, so that fun factor is really important, so that they engage. I think the value ultimately is that they’re developing a capacity to think for themselves. Right. That’s ultimately where I want them to go. I mean, I keep telling them some things you have to do sequentially, like how do you fold towels in a hotel room? How do you clean the room? But then you will be in situations that are unclear, ambiguous or spontaneous. So how might you think for yourself? And so I really aim at engaging their thinking rather than having them just ingest information as the sage on the stage. And I think that for them, specifically phrasal verbs, a visual way to draw and to learn and physically to figure out how are phrasal verbs tangled and have processes to untangle them, is really a very important and value for foreign language learners.

Tanya Knudsen [00:21:42]:
Phrasal verbs are a nightmare for people who are learning English.

Matthew Worwood [00:21:46]:
So for our final question, we ask all of our guests to share three tips that they would give to educators to help bring creativity into their classroom.

Tanya Knudsen [00:21:55]:
So the first one I would offer is really try stew it, just do it, whatever it is. And you think you want to try it this way, go for it, because everything leads to something else. The second thing I would offer is ask questions. I mean, when I ask questions of my students, that’s how I learn. That’s where I might get some information as to where they are, and I realize how I might teach more effectively. So it’s really important to ask questions. And I always ask creative questions. I always ask, what else? What else, what else? And bring in a lot of divergent thinking when I’m asking them for information.

Tanya Knudsen [00:22:34]:
And then the third thing I would offer is really, truly have fun. I mean, we know that kids are bored at school. The research tells us so we see it. I have teens myself. They’re already complaining, unfortunately. So it’s really important to have fun through learning. Humans at the neural level seek and play. So if we’re not seeking, we want to play and vice versa.

Tanya Knudsen [00:22:56]:
So where are we playing? I mean, we’re playing on social media for sure. We play sports and the rest of it, but the playfulness in learning is kind of missing, and it’s really important to bring that back. I mean, I remember when I was at the french american school teaching this creativity through arts, and these were fourth graders. That was one of the reasons I was so excited to work with them was because, okay, these are the creative ones, right? And I remember when I started, they said, oh, this creativity stuff, this is just for art stuff. They really kind of discarded it by the end of the course. Man, were they into it. Because the final piece was for them to write their own creative story using the creative thinking skills and some of the things that we brought across in the coursework. And they were really well engaged.

Tanya Knudsen [00:23:44]:
And so that too was a big eye opener. What they initially discarded because it was creative, they ended up really enjoying. So, yeah, it’s very important to bring that playfulness in, even in fourth grade.

Cyndi Burnett [00:24:00]:
Tanya, when you said try, and he’s told the educators to try, where should they even start? So imagine a teacher who knows nothing about creativity, but they want to try. They’re inspired by your story. They want to try one thing. Where do they start?

Tanya Knudsen [00:24:16]:
Well, I think there’s two aspects, right? One is to be a creative teacher. So to be playful, to be interesting, to be different. I mean, one of the things I do when I teach at wings of change is I just wear, like, a pilot hat. When we talk about where do I live versus where do they live and how might I get to them. And I’m teaching them a little bit about geography. I just put on a pilot hat and a tie and my husband’s jacket. That in and of itself just was a jaw dropper for them. So I think it’s important as a teacher, as a human, to be creative, to be playful, to be fun, but then to teach for creativity, it’s really important for teachers to do a little bit of research and just look up creative thinking skills.

Tanya Knudsen [00:24:53]:
Go to your website and there’s plenty of examples in there, and draw up a little lesson plan, knowing that it may or may not work and then continue to develop from there.

Cyndi Burnett [00:25:04]:
Well, thank you so much, Tanya. And I should also add that Tanya is a contributor in both of my books, sweeping creativity into every strand of your curriculum and 20 lessons to weave creativity into your classroom. And if you want to hear more from Tanya, she has just started her own podcast called the idea Gym on creative thinking skills, and you can find that podcast on Podbean, and we’ll put the link in your show notes.

Matthew Worwood [00:25:28]:
That concludes this episode of the fueling creativity in Education podcast, and we have a request for you. If you enjoyed this episode, or perhaps past episodes, please share it with a friend who you think will benefit from the information that has been shared in one of the episodes on this podcast. My name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:25:46]:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett. This podcast was produced by creativity and education and in partnership with dabsforcreativity.com. Our editor is Sina Yusefzade.