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

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood:
This is the Fuelling Creativity in Education podcast.

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

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

Cyndi Burnett:
All with a goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers, administrators, and emerging scholars with the information they need to infuse creativity into teaching and learning.

Matthew Worwood:
So let’s begin. Hello and welcome to our winter 2025 listen and learn series, which is a short collection of episodes designed to support professional learning in between our regular season.

Cyndi Burnett:
Our goal in this series is to provide a quote from a creativity researcher or educator that we interviewed way back in season one of the Fueling Creativity and Education podcast. We would like to play this quote and then provide you with questions to with your professional learning community as a point of discussion. And if you don’t have a plc, come and join ours at Curiosity to Connect Network, which we will put in the show notes.

Matthew Worwood:
Now, within these episodes, we’ll be making a connection to our 10 actions for fueling creativity in Education. And as Cindy said, we will be providing you with some useful prompts to facilitate that conversation at your school. So to get us started, we’re actually going to go all the way back to our very first ever episode of the Fueling Creativity and Education podcast. And I’ll turn it over to you, Cindy, because this was your clip.

Cyndi Burnett:
So our first clip is from Dr. Susan Keller Mathers, who is an associate professor at the center for Applied Imagination at SUNY Buffalo State. And the reason why sue was our very first episode is because she is a close friend and colleague of mine from the center for Applied Imagination. And sue has a very rich background in teaching, particularly within gifted education, and she has worked extensively on using the Torrance Incubation model for creative teaching and learning. Now, Matt, I don’t know if you recall this quote, but she’s going to talk about the joy of creative teaching and learning and finding that joy. So let’s take a listen. So that’s one part, but the first part is the teacher as a creative individual, both personally and professionally. So creative teaching is about your craft.

Susan Keller-Mathers:
It is about you as a teacher becoming more creative. And what that looks like is you are bringing more joy, more motivating activities, more curiosity to your own thinking about your lessons. It can lead a teacher on the path to burnout, to rejuvenating who they are and why they came into the profession. Because it is the joy of teaching. If you have joy in your teaching, that’s creative, you are a creative teacher. Okay, so now what we’d like to do is we’re going to take you through a series of questions based on that quote that you can facilitate with your professional learning community. And I’m going to ask Matt all these questions just so you can get a little practice in. I can get a little practice in.

Cyndi Burnett:
And if you’d like to download these quotes, you can download them in our show notes. And I would like to focus in on the fact that this quote focuses on one of our 10 strategies for fueling creativity in the classroom, which is to have fun. And so, Matt, we’re going to start with joy. So can you tell us about a time when you had joy in your classroom or you felt joy in your classroom?

Matthew Worwood:
I don’t know if I can come up with a specific time, but I regularly experience joy when I see growth in my students. And that’s probably learning, but, you know, it might be a student who struggles to present in front of the class, but by the end of the season, there’s an opportunity for me to see them present and they’re not struggling as much. And I see that growth, and that’s the joy that I get. Obviously, I get joy when I’ve been successful in facilitating those experiences as well, because sometimes I facilitate with a hope that I’m going to experience that and I don’t. And then there’s other times where I’ve tried to facilitate a situation and I do get to see that, and I’m like, oh, I absolutely love that. So you know, that that would be how I respond to that joy in student learning and seeing. Be able to see and see what it looks like and feel like in the classroom.

Cyndi Burnett:
So, Matt, what do you see as the relationship between joy and being a creative educator?

Matthew Worwood:
That’s a really good question. I would say that in terms of just thinking from a teaching perspective, then when we have accomplished something that we deem successful and as a consequence of our actions, then I would say that we get joy from that. Connecting back to my first response. If our actions have led to student growth and we can observe that growth, we can see it, then I would say that part of being a creative teacher is trying to facilitate, as I referenced earlier, trying to facilitate opportunities for students to showcase their growth.

Cyndi Burnett:
What do you think stops you from being joyful in your classroom? What are the things when you feel.

Matthew Worwood:
Not joyful I think probably every educator listening can probably relate to time constraints. So a classic example, if, if you’ve created an activity where students are engaging in some type of mini challenge that’s structured 45 minutes with 15 minutes to present at the end. And as I just referenced, I get joy from them expressing their ideas, and I do. If we get squeezed for time and we only have 6, 7 minutes left to deliver the presentation, then obviously my opportunities to see, to observe the outcomes of that process is limited. So the pressures of time are very difficult. And sometimes time can get squeezed as a consequence of things that you haven’t planned for and you can’t prevent.

Cyndi Burnett:
So, Matt, I want you to think to a time when your joy in the classroom was squashed or you felt it burnout, you felt that spark of joy burnout. How do you rekindle it?

Matthew Worwood:
Well, I think when I feel that something’s not working right, I lose joy for a moment. And one probable example, and it seems small, but it kind of goes to these types of challenges you haven’t, you know, planned for. I’m in a different classroom environment that’s not responding in the way I want. And that might be the fact that the tables and chairs aren’t set up to facilitate the type of learning experience that I’m hoping to create in that environment. So now I’m spending time goes back to time constraints. Now I’m spending time trying to deal with arranging the space, but then knowing that I’ve also got to turn the space back to how it was within a 5 minute transition or 10 minute transition before the next class comes in, I mean, that might be more relevant to, you know, my teaching environment in higher education. But that that’s something that can kind of kill it. And I think another thing that seems small is that if I’ve designed a learning experience for, let’s say, 20 students, and quite often a lot of my classes can be project based, I do teach larger classes.

Matthew Worwood:
I’m going to be teaching a class of 70 students in the fall. But if I’m designing a learning experience for 20 and it’s going to be project based, you know, it’s designed in a very specific way, so it might seem small. But if I suddenly end up with 25 students in the class, going back to what I just said about time constraints, I’ve now got an issue because I’ve got less time for student presentations. I’ve got larger groups which I know can impact group dynamics. And the difficulty that I have in that moment is that I feel the stress and now to kind of have to change and modify. And I don’t necessarily get to a point where I feel like I’m successful because I. I haven’t planned and I don’t have sufficient time now to kind of blow everything up. So I’m trying to do something that I’ve planned to do, but it’s not quite working.

Matthew Worwood:
But I don’t really have the time needed to really do justice to the redesign during the middle of the semester. And so when I’m in those experiences, I definitely can feel that I’m just, I’m just constantly problem solving. I’m always problem solving, and I love, I love problem solving, but not when there’s pressure of time constraints and not when I’m constantly failing and the failing is negatively impacting the stud learning. So I get no joy from that. You can see me. Actually, I’m getting quite fired up about that right now. 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:
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:
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:
To learn more, check out curiositytocreate.org or check out the links in the show notes for this episode. So, one final question, Matt. What might be all the ways that you could bring more fun and joy into your classroom in the next?

Matthew Worwood:
Well, it’s a really good question. I could probably take a break. I could admit failure and say this is crashing and burning and whatever I try next week is not going to lead to a learning outcome. Therefore, I’m going to take a timeout and I’m going to go and design a learning experience that I know I can implement and I know it can be successful. And I know I’m going to enjoy it and I hope that the students are going to enjoy it. And maybe I’ll just take out a fun day. I suppose just create a fun day in the middle of the semester. That’s probably what I could do.

Matthew Worwood:
Whether or not I would do it, I can’t necessarily answer that right now, but I think that’s what I probably would do. If I. If the objective was to have fun and bring joy in the classroom, that would probably be something that would come to mind.

Cyndi Burnett:
So, Matt, what it sounds like is you are burned out in the middle of the semester because things aren’t going as planned. And that’s a very standard kind of thing that happens to educators, is they get burned out and they’re tired and they can’t concentrate anymore and they’re and.

Matthew Worwood:
Be to be add but that the capacity to be creative becomes limited at that time as well. Like, you know, it’s the energy and enthusiasm and motivation to go and try new things out become very limited when you’re feeling that sense of burnout.

Cyndi Burnett:
So I think your point in terms of taking a pause and really thinking through things and thinking about how you can bring that joy back into the classroom can really be a great starting point. But make sure that you have these conversations with your colleagues. And this is one of the reasons why we wanted to create this Listen and Learn series is to provide questions that you can bring to your professional learning community, whether it be your department, your whole school, a couple of colleagues that you talk with to listen to these episodes and really dig deep into these questions. And we will put a link to all these questions inside of our show notes and you can go in and you can even add additional questions to that. So, Matt, anything you want to add?

Matthew Worwood:
I want to say that I actually, even though I didn’t have any knowledge of these questions coming, and it was challenging me a little bit to kind of think, especially now that I’m out of the semester, but I think I might have a go at introducing a I’m designing the curriculum right now for spring 2025. So I think I’m going to try and maybe build in because one of the things that comes to mind is that some teach say, but I don’t have time for that now. I understand that that’s part of a continued conversation, so I’ll let you continue to play that out. But I think I’m going to look at how I might design the flexibility during busy times of the semester where if I have to quickly throw in a fun day, I’ve got the means of throwing in the fun day. So I would say that just this mini conversation right now is probably going to lead to some change in my my practice next semester. So thank you, Cindy.

Cyndi Burnett:
You’re welcome. And we hope that this will provide some information and questions for you and your community of educators. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Matthew Worwood:
I’m Dr. Cindy Burnett and my name’s Dr. Matthew Worwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
This episode was produced by Matthew Worwood and Cindy Burnett. Our podcast sponsor is Curiosity to Create, and our editor is Sam Atkinson.