Teresa Lawrence [00:00:00]:
What I would say to teachers is a little bit of creativity is better than no creativity. So if, as simply as asking students around a topic or a concept that they want to be learning, what might be all the things you’d like to learn about this, right? A little bit is better than nothing.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:20]:
Hello, everyone. My name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:23]:
And my name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:26]:
This is the fueling creativity in Education podcast.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:29]:
On this show, we’ll be talking about creativity topics and how they apply to the field of education.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:35]:
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 [00:00:46]:
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 [00:00:53]:
So let’s begin.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:56]:
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast. And in this episode, we are welcoming educator Teresa Lawrence, who is recognized as the subject matter expert on the integration of creative problem solving into project management. Theresa is a previous superintendent of schools and is currently full time faculty in the Graduate School of Education at the university at Buffalo. In 2016, Teresa established international Deliverables, which is a certified New York State Women business enterprise. Since 2017, over 80,000 individuals have been trained by Teresa or have participated in a session she has facilitated.

Cyndi Burnett [00:01:37]:
So, Teresa, welcome to the show.

Teresa Lawrence [00:01:38]:
Thank you. Thank you. It’s an honor to be here. I’m thrilled.

Cyndi Burnett [00:01:41]:
And Teresa, one of the things I’m really excited about is that you have the graduate certificate in creativity and change leadership from the center for Applied Imagination, and you have all of these experiences working in all these different facets of education. So we’d like to start with how have the school administrators you teach used creativity in their leadership roles? And what kind of creativity do you bring in a process, or do you focus on the creative individual? What do you do when you do this work with administrators?

Teresa Lawrence [00:02:11]:
Two things. Whenever I work with an organization, whether it’s a school building, folks that are coming through the graduate school of education and Leadership is, I have really become committed to foresight, allowing folks to understand their preference toward problem solving. And if you think about being a school building or central office or superintendent of schools, your work is just riddled with problems, right. And challenges. And so to be mindful of how you approach them and how those around you approach them, we can do really two things, three things. We can be more inclusive and in terms of cognitive diversity, right. We’re not wrestling with each other. We stay focused on wrestling with the problem.

Teresa Lawrence [00:02:57]:
So we level that seal in terms of equity, inclusion, diversity, and then the other thing that we’re able to do is teach a variety of the tools from each stages of creative problem solving and then begin to distribute that leadership. So if we’re teaching leaders tools for generating ideas or tools for making decisions about where to go next or tools to be making selections from among all possible pilots, what they end up having is a sense of everyone weighed in. Everyone had a voice. You might not be the decision maker, but you’re certainly going to say that you weighed in. In turn, teachers who are kind of wrestled with initiative overload have had the opportunity to say, of all the things that we could do, this would have greatest impact, or this is easiest for me to do. So when we turn around and say, these are the things that we’re focusing on this year in this building, they’ve allowed teachers to have voice in the selection of what and how that gets rolled out. And then the other thing that I’m able to do as a leader, when I have these tools and know the preferences of individuals, is that when they’re making choices and when they’re struggling, I can be of assistance and support. And here’s the best thing.

Teresa Lawrence [00:04:19]:
No matter what they’re doing, as long as they’re doing something, we’re moving forward on that initiative. The takeaway is we haven’t barreled them, rolled over, force fed. Right. We’ve made ample seats at the table to say, this is what we’re doing. This is our challenge. How might we go about implementing this? And at the end, we’re able to say, did everybody weigh in? Did everybody get a chance to kind of wait and vote in? And the answer is always yes. And the thing is, lastly, what I’ll add to that is, again, teachers, they do Yeoman’s work. We don’t all have to be at the faculty meeting, right? We don’t all have to be at all of the meetings all of the time.

Teresa Lawrence [00:04:59]:
If teachers are aware of a process that’s being used and they’ve seen its success, they’re more likely to let go of some of the control that they feel they need to have so they know what’s going on in their building. Right. We’ve all generated ideas. We’ve brainstormed. We’ve all been able to hit super. Now let’s cluster around some themes. I don’t need to be there for that. I trust you guys to do that.

Teresa Lawrence [00:05:24]:
Knowing what I say to administrators, take lots of pictures and always give visual follow ups so that people can go, yeah, there was my idea. Yeah. So my goal in really working with school leaders is to allow them to manage challenges better with intentional and active inclusion of all voices.

Cyndi Burnett [00:05:49]:
Now, you brought up the creative process, and I’m sure what you’re talking about is creative problem solving, which is not something we’ve talked a lot about on the show, quite frankly. So can you give a little overview of both creative problem solving and perhaps foresight, which you mentioned to our audience, because this is the first time it’s been brought up.

Teresa Lawrence [00:06:07]:
Certainly. So here’s the thing. The creative problem solving process, no matter where you are in life, shape, size, color, language, when faced with a challenge, you kind of go, what the heck is going on here? How did this happen? What’s the context? You’re going to clarify the problem. When you have some sense of understanding it, you’ll move to that next logical step. Wow. What may be all the ways I can address this? Make it go away, get from here to there. We generate ideas. Ideate.

Teresa Lawrence [00:06:41]:
Hopefully you have a couple of ideas that you’ve generated and you begin to develop them. You give them legs. What’s good about this idea? What would a critic say about this idea? How might we make it better and develop it there? We might want to have some criteria for making some selections from among those, right? Really developing them and making them better. And then lastly, we’ll land on one or two or three where we say, what’s the risk tolerance in this community? Right? How is this going to fly? And what do I need to do to get all people on board? And ultimately, how do I action it so that I can pull it off? Implementing. So again, regardless of where you are, even if you don’t have that jargon, you naturally make your way through stages of the creative problem solving process. Now here’s the amazing thing. Not only is there a process, but just like some people eat early in the morning versus they eat kind of lunch or they like to walk, but these ones prefer to run. You have a preference.

Teresa Lawrence [00:07:42]:
You have a preference. And the beautiful thing is of the creative problem solving process. It’s known. Research shows us this assessment, foresight, the leading assessment that reveals your preference toward the problem solving stages, lets us know exactly what you prefer. So here’s the thing. It’s not about ability. Teachers, administrators, leaders, we’re all capable and have ability. We have preference.

Teresa Lawrence [00:08:07]:
We have preference. Some people. Recently I worked with a superintendent and he is a very high clarifier, meaning he prefers to kind of be rooted in the space of what’s going on. How did this happen? So you can imagine when we’re opening up COVID again from opening up schools. Ambiguous, complex problem. He was really stuck kind of wrestling. What does the documents say? What can we do? What are parents going to think? How all of these questions. He was working with a school board president who was a very high implementer.

Teresa Lawrence [00:08:43]:
Right. Action oriented. Let’s get this plan out, let’s tell people what we’re doing. And what they ended up having was tension and friction between staying almost too long and clarifying and the sense of urgency. We have to get something out there. So as a result, they wrestled with each other around the problem as opposed to wrestling with the problem. Right. The clarifier could say to the implementer, yes, we have deadlines.

Teresa Lawrence [00:09:11]:
I appreciate your energy and passion about it. And the implementer, who is actively keen for movement, can say to the clarifier, you’re my headlights. You’re going to keep us out of problems. You’re going to keep us out of further trouble. So the thing about knowing the process, helping organizations, individuals understand where you are in the problem, and then depending on short term problem, a more complex problem, again, like line always is, not everybody has to be at the meeting, what type of problem and where are we in it? Let’s have the right people who have energy, nobody’s off the hook, but who have energy around that. Harvard has come out and said, the more that we have a heterogeneous team, a different built team, really tapping into cognitive diversity, people are included, we know more about the problem, we understand it, we dissect it, we implement it better, and our results and solutions are more efficiently come upon, the more effective to address it and it’s greater buy in. We don’t feel done to, we feel kind of done with.

Cyndi Burnett [00:10:16]:
And it sort of reminds me of a conversation we just had with Edward Clapp from Project Zero, who talked about participatory creativity and how we all participate with our diverse perspectives to help solve the problem.

Teresa Lawrence [00:10:28]:
Yeah, it’s fascinating work. And so, as much as I work with school building leaders and administrators, really kind of my intersection when I left Buff state was marrying the two things that I loved most, and that is creative problem solving and creativity novelty, that’s useful. And project management. Right. Seeing our work as it’s intended to be, unique deliverables bound by time. And so when we intersect those two, and this is my work with school leaders, is that we have substantially increased value, right. We don’t have a to do list. We have a project.

Teresa Lawrence [00:11:04]:
We just don’t have these wayward problems. We have a process. We have a mindset, and we intersect those. Stakeholder engagement, risk assessment, the efficiency with which we solve problems, including that stakeholders, the right ones, are at the table, just increases substantially.

Matthew Worwood [00:11:23]:
And I do want to kind of bring this back into the classroom because I’ve got some follow up questions about what you’ve shared in regard to working with teachers and administrators. But before I do that, I think just talking about process a little bit more, I sometimes work with my undergraduate students and share with them the different types of deliberate approaches we have when we go and engage in the creative process. So when we’re talking about deliberate, we’re talking about the fact that we usually have a problem. There’s been kind of like a disturbance in our environment to which we have to address. There are situations sometimes when we can ignore that disturbance, right. So we see that a little bit within teacher change theory, that sometimes teachers and administrators can kind of ignore the problem that is taking place in their environment. But when we choose to accept that problem, we typically do go on some type of journey, some type of creative process. And what we do know from research is that when you unpack this process, there are typically similar stages that we all go through, but those stages can look different based on the situation.

Matthew Worwood [00:12:26]:
And even when I look at with some of my students, with filmmaking, for example, you look at things like storyboards. There are times where the tool of a storyboard actually is about clarification. It’s about making sure that everyone’s on the same page. They know exactly what shot it is that they’re shooting. They know how to sequence the images in post production. And so what I would challenge every educator out there to do right now, whether you apply it to your students or to yourself, is to kind of just reflect on your process when you’ve got a problem or a challenge that you’re faced with, what’s step one? What do you typically do first? And then the other thing that I would bring in a little bit to what you’re talking about, Teresa, is the fact that we probably have different preferences. It might be that we love ideation. So we might skip through asking some very, very important questions that we need to ask.

Matthew Worwood [00:13:14]:
To that point, Teresa, if you’re an individual in your classroom trying to address a problem, what are some of the suggestions you have for those work?

Teresa Lawrence [00:13:23]:
In my work, while I intentionally teach creative problem solving process, what that process is, and to your point, Matthew, identifying, where are we? What I borrow from is my work in project management. We have these things, we call them tools and techniques, right? So the tool, the actual tool, brainstorming, the technique, how do you personalize that? How do you make it fit to where you are and what you need it to do? Right? So tools and techniques. The thing that I encourage folks to do is we have this sense that when we’re faced with a problem, unless we’re frantic, kind of screaming or just overwhelmed by the problem, it can’t be that good of a problem, right? So I always say to administrators and teachers, give yourself the gift of time, right? What did Albert Einstein say? If I had a problem, I’ll spend 55 minutes kind of assessing it in five minutes, doing it the same hour. And so, Matthew, to your point, regardless of your preference, right, it doesn’t let you off the hook to being a sophisticated problem solver, separating idea generation from idea evaluation number one. And number two, assessing where you are, time, energy, resources. We don’t have the luxury of redo, redo, redo, redo. But what I can give you, what I can give you is the luxury of if even just five minutes, right? What might be, all the things that are going on right here, divergent thinking, generating lots of things, what might be going on? Who might be impacted? How long has this occurred? Just so that they can kind of generate and get out this think ideas and challenges of what might be going on and then read through all of that and just kind of make a note about the ones that really stick with you about where you are. So at least they’ve given that some thought, some thought about what the problem is.

Teresa Lawrence [00:15:17]:
The other thing that I share with them, especially if folks have a sense of what their preference is, is use that to your strength. If you know, Matthew, as you said, that you’re high in jumping to ideas, right, it makes sense to go to the next classroom, to that teacher in the same grade level and say, hey, I’m really thinking about doing this and this and this and this, because I think this is what’s going on. Where they say, actually that’s not what I see is going on, right. So it’s not better than it’s different from. And when we can honor, again, going back to cognitive diversity, not tolerating but actively engaging those folks who have kind of this 6th sense, this heightened awareness and enjoyment around these different stages, we bring everybody in and we just kind of rest and trust this creative problem solving process, which if never had been researched, still existed, still existed so people can solve where they are. I also think giving lots and lots of examples. When I do trainings with school building leaders, teachers, school boards and whatnot, I also give just a ton of examples, right. Because as soon as we can personalize this and understand it, then it has meaning.

Teresa Lawrence [00:16:36]:
So, for example, our friends in the audience, one of the foresight profiles is driver, somebody who has real kind of, they sit up tall when they generate ideas and they really like then to make things happen. So if I can give an example of a teacher or a leader who reacted in that way, but then to subtly highlight, they didn’t really understand the problem, good ideas to the wrong problem, and then they implement that idea, but it had flaws. Had we had somebody else on the team, we might not have had to do a redo. And this all goes back to distributive leadership, right? When we can get buy in, we can build trust. And when we have trust, we have relationships. And when we have relationships, anything is possible.

Cyndi Burnett [00:17:26]:
Teresa? I love that. And I think that having trust and building relationship is the key to moving forward and solving problems. So tell us about how you use creativity and creative problem solving to get buy in to these school initiatives, because I’m sure there’s a lot of people out there listening saying, this is great. So how do I get buy in to school initiatives using creativity?

Teresa Lawrence [00:17:51]:
Thank you. I’ll give you a couple of recent examples. A couple of recent examples. I’m working with a local school district who is including the initiative of shared decision making, right? So everybody kind of gets to weigh in. So all of these administrators are wrestling with, how do I implement this? Right? How do I implement it? And how do I explain to people what it is? And so at a first faculty meeting, at a first faculty meeting, the district already also had a couple of goals and initiatives that they were working on. So keep in mind, right? So new initiatives, shared decision making, and they already have a whole bunch of things going on. So did a lot of training with those administrators, a lot of coaching, very, very talented principal. And so what she did is she was able to teach this thing called divergent thinking, right? To generate ideas, to for judgment, go for quantity, build on the ideas of others, and go for wild and crazy.

Teresa Lawrence [00:18:50]:
And she said, we have this shared decision making. So she was so savvy in this faculty meeting, shared decision making, wanting to teach that, and she’s trying to model what she’s learned, right? Because what happens? Teachers that spills over to their classrooms. So she did brainstorming around shared decision making. And said, these are the folks on our team. They will be our corner core group to roll out initiatives in the building. Here is one of the district initiatives, literacy. She was able to say to the group, we’re going to brainstorm what might be all the ways to infuse literacy in a child’s life. Right? Faculty of about 60 generated ideas.

Teresa Lawrence [00:19:31]:
Move around, move around, move around. Moved. Then to hitting convergent thinking. Everybody got a chance to hit. And so she was so proud to be able to say, look it, I’ll use my name as an example. And she picked on a student. She picked on a faculty member. Teresa didn’t dominate this whole conversation about what might be all the ways to infuse, and she did.

Teresa Lawrence [00:19:51]:
Did you have a chance? Did you have a chance? Wow. Teachers couldn’t believe that in minutes they had all of these ways to infuse. She talked about shared decision making, taking that lift off of them to be able to plan. Everybody hit, they left. Shared decision making team was able to make some themes around that and then bring it back to the faculty. These were the themes that we talked about, about how to infuse literacy in a child’s life. The feedback that she got from teachers was outstanding. Everybody had a voice.

Teresa Lawrence [00:20:23]:
Everybody weighed in. And here’s the thing. The people who didn’t want to be a part of the follow up meeting, they weren’t. But they knew the process and they knew the tool, so they had complete and utter trust and faith. Right? Get buy in, build trust. You have relationships. So now when that shared decision making team, first tool that they used, brainstorming to diverge, hit, cluster, restate, they’ve also started to use other tools, card sort, paired comparison criteria, matrices. And again, what they do is they teach all of these tools to the faculty, model them in faculty meetings.

Teresa Lawrence [00:21:00]:
And it’s really so sophisticated, right? They, this administrative team gets the information and the feedback that they need. Teachers have been able to weigh in, making decisions, so we don’t have initiative overload, and they have choice in what they’re doing. Oh, and here’s the most outstanding thing. What is the administrator doing? She’s modeling the tool to all of her faculty, which is her classroom. And now what is she starting to see? Teachers are using and practicing these tools in their classroom. And so what are teachers getting the other felt right. Students are involved. You can hear teachers saying, did everybody have a chance to.

Teresa Lawrence [00:21:38]:
Susie, did you weigh in? Johnny, you did? Oh, great. So just kind of leveling the playing field and this notion of distributive leadership. I don’t have to have all the answers. I have to make a lot of decisions on my own. But I want input. I need input. But what I don’t want is Malty Teresa taking over the hour faculty meeting. What I need is to hear from everyone.

Teresa Lawrence [00:22:01]:
So lots of tools. And again, to Matthew’s point is how do you know which to select? Well, if you’re teaching an organization, teacher leaders, the administrative group, the process and an awareness of their preferences and their faculty’s preferences, then when you’re going about the work of administrating, do it in a more inclusive manner where people have had voice, people have had choice. And in the end, if I’m the third grade teacher, fifth grade teacher, 9th grade teacher, I’ve had way in. And then when you ask these open ended questions, let’s assume that we have a goal and we know what we’re going to be working on, and I ask what might be all the ways you in. Right. An AP class could hit this and that and the other. You have a couple of ideas. Terrific.

Teresa Lawrence [00:22:50]:
Now, when I follow up with you as the building administrator, how’s that going? This week, when I follow up with your grade level team, your department team, what do you need? I can clear the path so that you can focus on it. Not everybody has to be working on the same thing, but they’ve had choice on what they’re working on. And how about this? The ship’s going forward. Everybody’s contributing to that initiative.

Matthew Worwood [00:23:13]:
I do want to just reference the modeling piece. I worked with a group of teachers around utilizing technology to address complex problems in the classroom environment. And what I found most fascinated, though, was the technologies that the teachers selected was actually the technologies that I modeled. And I was selective. Every single day I tried to bring in a new technology that was either kind of incorporated into the presentation or was a new way of kind of soliciting feedback. And the majority of teachers that are currently now implementing their idea are actually using the technologies that we explored over the summer months. So that modeling piece is really, really important, and I think it’s something that we can’t understate.

Teresa Lawrence [00:23:58]:
You’re absolutely right. And I think a couple of things happen. And when I’m coaching school administrators, central office superintendents, to use the words that we want teachers to be using for their children. Right. So if this building principal, if the central office person is saying, friends, you know how we have this new initiative where I want you to teach math in this way? Fill in the blanks, whatever they’re doing. Well, I’m working on my development as well to be of better use to you. So I’m working on this creative problem solving process, team engagement facilitation. Right.

Teresa Lawrence [00:24:32]:
Here’s the tool that I’m going to be using. And so I’m going to do almost what we call a think aloud. I’m going to use this in this meeting, but I’m going to be telling you what I’m doing right. I’m going to be saying, okay, make sure that I check in with everybody. Did everybody have a chance to be heard? I’m going to be praising the process, not the people. So they get to see all of this. And here’s what you’re doing right. You’re making yourself vulnerable.

Teresa Lawrence [00:24:57]:
And what happens when we do that? We’re back to what I said. You get buy in. You build trust. And when you have trust, you can have relationships. And when you have relationships, anything’s possible. Because you know what they said, matthew, about you and about this principle, she didn’t do it perfectly, but she tried it. She asked for feedback. I can see that she is doing what she’s asking us to do.

Teresa Lawrence [00:25:19]:
Oh, and by the way, it worked. Let me get some of that. And so always what I said as an administrator is model, be explicit, provide the training, and then praise like the Dickens when you see something that remotely resembles what you want.

Matthew Worwood [00:25:38]:
Do you ever run into teachers who participate in one of these sessions? And so they have an opportunity to share their voice, but they go away and they don’t necessarily feel that they were heard. So I know that you had referenced things like choice and making decisions, but you did say very early on that there are times when, of course, the administrator has to make the decision. And of course, sometimes within the professional development and teacher change literature, teachers who don’t feel heard right, that can sometimes have a negative impact on the school culture. So I was just wondering if you could be more explicit talking about that and those types of teachers, that even though they participate, they go away. What can we do to make sure that they feel that they were heard, even if the decision is not anything like the way they were hoping it was going to go?

Teresa Lawrence [00:26:28]:
What I always say to administrators as we’re training them, project management, creative problem solving, the process foresight is you need to be explicit about ownership. Who owns this problem versus are you weighing in? So to be able to say to. To I, Teresa Lawrence, the building principal, the central office, the superintendent, this rests on me. Let’s just think about if it was an interviewing committee that everybody can weigh in, but y’all aren’t making that decision. Let’s be very clear on that. So I find that person who might be a little bit more resistant stand office kind of still questioning. It is imperative that we let them know what it is that they’re contributing. Ideas, input.

Teresa Lawrence [00:27:15]:
You’re not a decision maker. That’s number one. Number two, how I have had success in my work and working with others is this notion of, and it’s not my line, I don’t even know kind of which fantastic colleague I had at Buff State. Here’s the thing. If we’re going to do something like brainstorming out loud, brain writing, a quiet brainstorming tool so that we level the playing field, right. We’re not talking. People have time to reflect. Wow.

Teresa Lawrence [00:27:42]:
If you do both, we’re going to really get to lots of adult learning styles and then transitioning to hitting. When we say things like, if you have selected this idea, it’s in play, it’ll be used. So I’m just making this up, right. If you’ve been given, like, the opportunity to hit five things and you hit. Right. Angry Teresa, who doesn’t feel heard about kids should walk in the straight line down the hallway with their hands in their pockets. Hit it. If I’ve done that, you can hit it once, you can hit it five times.

Teresa Lawrence [00:28:17]:
We’re going to take it into consideration. And the third thing that I would add to that, and I stressed this in the beginning, is a lot of teachers are auditory visual learners. They themselves are. So the more that we can visually be representing and then rerepresenting and sharing with teachers this visual process. So I have a lot of administrators work with colleagues in their district who are administrators, so that the administrator can be part of this tool. Right. I have this line, not mine. It’s hard to read the label from inside the jar.

Teresa Lawrence [00:28:54]:
So getting another administrator to facilitate. Right. Then we can be taking pictures. Remember when we did all this brainstorming? Yes. Remember when we did the hitting? Yes. Yes. Okay. Then you left and we did the following.

Teresa Lawrence [00:29:07]:
So visually it becomes very convincing. People can see their ideas, they can see their hits, they can visually see the process. And it’s been my experience that slowly, when the administrator can go back doing these little check ins, big group, small group, individually. Did you weigh in? Did you weigh in? And back to being tools and techniques. If we are clustering ideas, restating ideas. Right. The tool, the technique, how many ideas do we have? Are there really? All of these relating to a theme? Is there more than one theme? So it’s hard to give air to somebody who’s complaining and not participating. Right.

Teresa Lawrence [00:29:48]:
So come in. You know the process. Do you want to be a part of it? If not, you still know the process. If the idea is hit, it’s in play. And we can always leave some time for incubation in hallways and schools. Right. We always want kids work out. Why are we not showing the adults work? So leave it in the faculty room, leave it in hallways.

Teresa Lawrence [00:30:08]:
These are the things that you hit. This is how we clustered. This is kind of like what we think the essence of this is. Anybody have any insight about that? Did we miss something? So the whole thing that I love about creative problem solving and its infusion into things, people, industries, right. Teaching, learning and project management is that there is such heavy emphasis on soft skills. And so when you are good at those soft skills, Matthew, to your point, people do feel invited. They feel included.

Cyndi Burnett [00:30:43]:
Thanks, Teresa. And just to be clear, for those of you listening who aren’t familiar with creative problem solving, hits is a convergent thinking tool where you select an idea and you put a sticky dot or a star on, you’re actually, that’s what’s considered a hit. So just in case you heard that and you were curious why we’re hitting our ideas. So, Teresa, this has been so interesting and a very different topic than anything we’ve talked about. I really, we really appreciate your time and coming onto the show today. But before we leave, we ask all of our guests if they would be willing to share three tips they would give to educators to help bring creativity or creative problem solving into their classroom.

Teresa Lawrence [00:31:24]:
Yeah, I’m a big proponent of feng shui. Right, right. Placements of things for energy and for just being highly auspicious and connected with the world. And a feng shui master that I work with always says, a little bit of feng shui is better than no feng shui. And so what I would say to teachers is a little bit of creativity is better than no creativity. So if, as simply as asking students around a topic or a concept that they want to be learning, what might be all the things you’d like to learn about this, right. A little bit is better than nothing. So engaging them, I would say that’s a little bit in the other thing that I would encourage them to do.

Teresa Lawrence [00:32:08]:
Teachers, a tip for a teacher is to ask of their administrator, what are you working on to be better at your craft. Right. To kind of shift that and that’s not a hater mentality, that’s not being critical, but a little bit of leveling the playing field, right? What might be all the ways that you are improving your craft to be of assistance to us? And the third thing that I would say to teachers is ask their students, how am I doing? And that could be smiley faces, right? Neutral faces, frowny faces for younger children. That could be generating criteria with a high school student. But how am I doing? So number one, something is better than nothing. Healthily flip that coin as a tip to a teacher to their administrator. What are you working on? How might I help you? Where might I see that? What feedback can I give to you? And then thirdly, invite students into their learning to help you. How am I doing?

Matthew Worwood [00:33:06]:
Love it. Well, thank you so much, Teresa, for coming on the podcast. This is a show packed full of great techniques and tools, to your point, that I think can help administrators and teachers, and also just collaboration in a school building. So that concludes this episode of the fueling creativity in Education podcast. As always, if you have any questions about this episode, past episodes, or ideas for future episodes, please reach out to Cindy and myself using the email address. Questions@fuelingcreativitypodcast.com if you like this episode, have.

Cyndi Burnett [00:33:39]:
A listen to Calvin Atwell’s episode from season one. Calvin is a headmaster of a school in the UK and I think you will find a lot of enjoyment in his episode that connects with this one as an administrator. And that concludes this episode of the fueling Creativity and Education podcast. My name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood [00:33:59]:
And my name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:34:02]:
This podcast was produced by creativity and education and in partnership with dabsforcreativity.com. Our editor is Sina Isade.