Todd Lubart [00:00:00]:
Now, if in a classroom you say, let’s do creative thinking, everybody do whatever you want, it’s open ended. That might seem nice, but in fact, it’s very difficult for measuring anything. And so when you give all the kids a certain task, you really can see much easier the individual differences. Who’s got more ideas? Who’s got less? Who’s got more original thinking?

Matthew Worwood [00:00:32]:
Hello, everyone. My name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:35]:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:37]:
This is the fueling Creativity in Education podcast.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:41]:
On this podcast, we’ll be talking about various creativity topics and how they relate to the fields of education.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:47]:
We’ll be talking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and exploring new perspectives of creativity.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:55]:
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 [00:01:07]:
So let’s begin. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast. And if you’re interested in ways to measure creativity in education and potentially discussions about the future of creativity, then this is the episode for you. Because today we have a very special double espresso with Dr. Tod Lubard. Now, just as a reminder for some of our guests who might not be familiar with the concept of a double espresso, it is when we split a long interview into two episodes.

Matthew Worwood [00:01:39]:
Today, our special guest is creativity researcher Dr. Tod Lubart. Dr. Lubart is a professor of psychology at the University of Parasite. He was the director of an applied psychology research laboratory and coordinator of several grants and contracts. He has many, many publications spanning 35 years of research, including the epoch battery to measure creative potential in children and adolescents. His research focuses on the construction of creativity assessments, creativity development, and environmental support for creativity. He received the Berlin Award from the American Psychological association, the Torrance Award from NAGC, and was a member of the Institute Universiter de France.

Matthew Worwood [00:02:27]:
Tod is head of the research chair homocritubus and the founding president of the International Society for the Study of Creativity and Innovation.

Matthew Worwood [00:02:36]:
So in our first episode with Todd, we will feature a conversation on creative potential and measuring creative potential. And in our second episode, we will explore the future of creativity and education. Todd, welcome to the show.

Todd Lubart [00:02:49]:
Hi. Happy to be here with you.

Matthew Worwood [00:02:52]:
So we want to start with creative potential, which you have written extensively about. So can you define creative potential for our listeners?

Todd Lubart [00:03:01]:
Sure. Creativity, first of all, in our approach, refers to the ability to produce new work which is original, at least original for yourself and probably original for your social setting and work that is also meaningful in its context. So this kind of original, meaningful work that we call creative, if you’re able to produce it, you have shown the ability, you have an accomplishment. But when we talk about creative potential, we’re interested in what you may be able to produce. So it’s a latent state of what could be. For example, if I have an acorn in my hand and I plant it, it could become a tree. However, if I don’t plant it, it becomes a souvenir of my walk in the woods, or it becomes a piece of a toy I could build with many acorns or a piece of a game I might play. So the acorn has multiple potential things it could become.

Todd Lubart [00:04:17]:
And in terms of human creativity, based on your ingredients, based on your profile, your developmental experiences, at a certain moment, you have more or less potential to show creativity.

Matthew Worwood [00:04:33]:
And just to follow up on that tod, could you talk a little bit about the environment factors that may influence that? Because it sounds to me just something you said toward the end, that those environmental conditions might influence whether or not you actually do go on to enact that creative potential. Shall I say?

Todd Lubart [00:04:52]:
Yes. Well, of course, environmental conditions are possibly stimulating and helping the potential express itself or inhibiting the potential. Just like our acorn. If you plant it and it doesn’t rain or the soil is no good, it doesn’t develop into much of a tree, for example. So when we talk about creative potential, it’s always one of the ingredients is the environment, in terms of what that environment is providing as a base in which you’re able to deploy the other aspects of these ingredients for potential. So, for example, some studies have suggested that if you live in a place that is culturally very active, with museums, with different, let’s say, stimulation from different cultural centers where you can be exposed, this may be a very positive setting in which your potential could be expressed more than if you live in some isolated place, for example. So there’s also lots of studies in which they suggest that at schools, if teachers show that they value creativity, children may express more their potential than if they show they value other things, like getting the right answer.

Matthew Worwood [00:06:27]:
That makes a lot of sense, Todd. And I think it’s really interesting to think about how much we can give our students in terms of nurturing that potential inside the classroom. And I’m curious about measurement of creativity because you’ve spent a lot of time measuring this creative potential. Can you tell us how you came up with this epoch measure on measuring creative potential and how it can be used and the benefits it brings.

Todd Lubart [00:06:55]:
Sure. We have developed over the years a battery of measurement tools that we call epuC, which means evaluation of potential creativity. And in this battery, which we developed together with my collaborators, Maud Bezon son and Baptiste Barbeau, we ask children, adolescents to engage in creative activities, to create, to produce ideas in different domains. For example, in the graphic domain, they produce many drawings using a stimulus we give, like a photo of an object, and they produce one big drawing using a set of object photos that we give, that they need to put into their big drawing. We call the first part divergent exploratory production. And the second part we call it convergent integrative production, which is like creative synthesis. And we consider the two modes, are the two bases of producing creative ideas. Why do we call it a measure of creative potential? Is because the kids who are going to do these activities are not doing them spontaneously in their real life for any reason.

Todd Lubart [00:08:20]:
They are being asked to show us what they can do. So if I come to you and I say, show me, how fast can you run 100 meters? You said, well, okay, I’ll do it for you, I’ll show you what I can do, but you’re not really in any real competition or reason to run. And so this is what we call put you in the airplane simulator type of situation. We say, let’s see if you can fly the plane. It’s a simulator. And so the participants, the kids, they produce, let’s say, a certain number of drawings based on the object we gave. And since we have benchmarked it against a population of kids at different ages in a country like France or another country, we can see if the number of ideas that a kid produces is normal for their age, or more than typical, or less than typical. And so we can see in the graphic domain, what is their divergent thinking potential at the moment.

Todd Lubart [00:09:33]:
Now, we have also benchmarks for the convergent, integrative, big drawing, in which they use different objects together and make a big picture, one picture with some elaboration. Now, in the battery, there are this kind of measure, divergent, exploratory, convergent, integrative, also in the verbal, literary domain, creating stories in the mathematical domain, in the social problem solving domain, in the scientific thinking domain. And we are currently working on the musical and the body movement domain. And so this allows us to see the potential of a kid or an adolescent in different sectors of activities, because most people have more, let’s say, potential in one sector and less in another. So unless you got the so called Leonardo da Vinci’s type case, in which there may be superb in everything. Now, some people are not so creative. Finally. Why? Because they might have a strength in divergent and a weakness in convergent.

Todd Lubart [00:10:51]:
But since these are the two modes that work together for the full process, the thing falls apart at some moment. So this is the basic idea. How did we get to this idea? Through essentially two strands of research. One strand was that we did a lot of work with kids in schools, observing their creative thinking and development of creativity. And over those years, around 20 years of basic research, we tried out different tasks and different things to do, and we found that some of them were more rich in terms of observing individual differences. In the other strand of research, psychometrics of testing, we looked at different tests that exist. For example, the Torrance test of creativity, the urban angelin test of creative drawing, and other tasks like that. And we noticed that in the past there had been either quite an emphasis on divergent thinking and some emphasis in some tests on, we’ll call it creative synthesis, but never really combined half and half in a full battery by domain.

Todd Lubart [00:12:14]:
So we thought this was an opportunity to reinforce the measurement side. Why do we care to measure, you might say? Well, in fact, measurement has a lot of value. First of all, when you measure things in educational context, it brings value because it makes it more precise and it makes it more tangible, and it helps us to understand what it is. Then, if you want to see the impact of an educational program, it would be good to have a pre and post measure. Also, if you want to see children’s profiles individually, what is their strengths and weaknesses? What domain? What kind of processing to give them, some activities or exercises to help each kid based on their profile. It’s good to have a measure because you can’t just look at someone and see what’s their strengths and weaknesses like that. Now, if in a classroom you say, let’s do creative thinking, everybody do whatever you want, it’s open ended. That might seem nice, but in fact, it’s very difficult for measuring anything.

Todd Lubart [00:13:34]:
And so when you give all the kids a certain task, you really can see much easier the individual differences. Who’s got more ideas? Who’s got less? Who’s got more original thinking? So that’s some of the considerations that go into that line of work.

Matthew Worwood [00:14:01]:
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Cyndi Burnett [00:14:09]:
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Matthew Worwood [00:14:20]:
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Cyndi Burnett [00:14:35]:
To learn more, check out curiositytocreate.org or check out the links in the show notes for this episode and I wanted.

Matthew Worwood [00:14:44]:
To kind of follow up a little bit on what you started to talk about at the end. Todd, how I’ve interpreted your test is it seems like a test that we actually could administer in a classroom environment. I understand that there is some training associated with that to the people administering the test, but again, my limited understanding of that is that that training doesn’t seem to be overly complicated and I think it’s something that teachers and schools could adopt within their professional development. So my question to you is what are some of the barriers that are preventing this type of measurement finding its way into a classroom environment? Because the idea of teachers and educators and students being able to identify the creative potential in their students, potentially before they go to high school or at the very minimum before they go and select their college degree, I think there’s something hugely valuable in that and a missed opportunity knowing that it actually is something we might be able to do.

Todd Lubart [00:15:47]:
Yes, thanks a lot for your comment or question, because in fact, the test is designed that teachers or psychologists or educational researchers in general could use it directly by reading the manual and doing some small practice activities, perhaps to get familiar with it. So it is not supposed to be something too complicated to use. And the scoring itself is explained in detail in the materials of the battery so that you can score compared to benchmarks that we have established as what’s worth more or less points. So it’s totally feasible. And by the way, to test a domain, because you don’t have to test all the domains in kids, if you decide to test the drawing domain, we suggest having kids or adolescents work for about 25 minutes today and 25 minutes in about a week, and then you’ve done the battery for drawing. Each domain is approximately that. So you could choose drawing domain, the graphic domain, you could choose the verbal literary domain. If you’re interested in people’s orientation towards social problem solving, managerial type tasks, you could choose the social problem solving domain, et cetera.

Todd Lubart [00:17:24]:
And in terms of scoring, either you use some kind of local scoring where you compare people to each other in the classroom or in the high school or in the county, or you use more national norm scoring, they’re both feasible. So yeah, there’s really an opportunity. Why have schools and teachers not adopted it too much? Well, first, I think like most somewhat new things, although I’d say it’s not totally new because the first french version came out in 2011, and most of our international versions in other languages came out around 2015. So it’s about ten years available in English and some other languages, for example, we have it in several languages available, but I think there takes some time for diffusion. There need for opportunities for people in the educational world to hear about it. So this is a great opportunity with your podcast, obviously, and it did get used already. One of the main uses recently was with OECD, which did a study in about ten countries in which teachers were asked to try to stimulate creative thinking in their students in classrooms using activities each teacher could develop. And there were some control classrooms and some experimental classrooms where teachers tried.

Todd Lubart [00:19:12]:
And Epoch was used as one of the main tools pre and post in those ten countries. So it was used in that way. And there’s a report from OACD. The first main author of that project is Stefan Vassalabon Kra. It’s available at the OECD bookstore.

Matthew Worwood [00:19:38]:
One of the things I really appreciate about Epoch is the fact that it looks at convergent thinking, which people typically think of creativity as just in the divergent thinking phase. But Matt, you and I have talked a lot about creativity living in the convergent phase as well. So I think that’s a really interesting aspect, and I really enjoyed looking through the research that you’ve done around this. And I will put some links in the notes if you want to dig deeper into this particular measure. So, Todd, my next question for you is, when you have identified a student with the measure that is high potential, then what would a teacher do? What would you recommend?

Todd Lubart [00:20:18]:
Well, that’s the whole thing. When you identify, you create a desire to do something. So if you have nothing to do or to teach to help people develop their creative potential in a way, you’d prefer not to raise the issue and identify anyone. So now, once you identify people who have more or less potential in a domain or a few domains, either you’re in a mode where you’re looking for some special high potential group, sometimes called the gifted and so forth, and you want to give them an enrichment opportunity to help them boost even more that domain of high potential, or you want a more general approach for all the students in the class. And then each student has, let’s say, their points of strength and weakness and the domain where they’re more engaged in creative thinking, like graphic domain or verbal or scientific. If you look into activity books about teaching creativity, and there’s quite a lot of resources, in fact, you’ll see there’s a lot of activities out there that could be used. And when you use the epoch style approach, you’ll see that some of these activities are clearly easily identified as more divergent thinking, stimulation or creative synthesis, convergent stimulation. And you’ll see they are by domain, like graphic, verbal, musical, et cetera.

Todd Lubart [00:22:04]:
So it becomes an easy way to go find activities that different students could have in their basket to do based on their profile and what is relatively weaker in their profile. So it’s a relatively short step from the testing to the profile. You get to the educational deployment of activities in a somewhat individualized way.

Matthew Worwood [00:22:37]:
Well, this is so exciting. I mean, I think about this, and if we could evaluate students, what’s the earliest stage you could use this assessment?

Todd Lubart [00:22:45]:
We use it starting from what we call the end of kindergarten, knowing that in the french system, they have kindergarten for three years. They have the early, the middle, and the late kindergarten, and then they go to first grade. And so we have successfully used these kind of tools starting from the late kindergarten, the year before first grade, which is about five years old. Kids. Wow.

Matthew Worwood [00:23:14]:
Okay, so Matt has a seven year old. Imagine Matt’s seven year old understanding that he has creative potential in a specific area and being able to amplify that from an early age. What that means as a parent. I think that’s just really so exciting. I am just in awe of this work.

Matthew Worwood [00:23:35]:
One of the things that, and maybe we can talk about this in a debrief, but I’m also thinking about those environmental factors again, because. Yes, okay, you’ve identified creative potential in dance, for example, or creative potential in. I thought that was a great example with seeing how fast someone can run. But there’s environmental factors that got to determine whether or not that child has an opportunity to compete in track. And I suppose my question is, what is the responsibility of schools to try and identify this creative potential and then help the students realize that potential? Let me say I feel somewhat, I love it, but I see potentially overwhelmed in how the system might accommodate all these different types of potential. I don’t know. I love it. I want to be clear.

Matthew Worwood [00:24:30]:
I love it.

Todd Lubart [00:24:33]:
Well, obviously, there’s not so many schools that can help kids develop every different kind of potential that’s out there. So, for example, if you’re in a context where your family, they play musical instruments, your school has a music teacher. You have access to lessons about music after school. If you have some musical potential, that’s a good place to be. Okay, if you have dance potential and to be creative in choreography and dancing and movement. But your family doesn’t know anything about dance. There’s no dance school nearby. Your school does not think about dance in its program at all.

Todd Lubart [00:25:25]:
Your potential may remain latent. No one will even notice it. And if someone noticed it, they can’t help you much anyway because there’s nothing around to help you where you live. So this is part of the chance factor, which is we could say we’d like to help everyone develop maximally all their potentialities. But that’s theoretically nice, but not practically possible. And if you have opportunities that are more or less there, also, if you choose to develop one kind of potential, your time is not unlimited. So you can’t develop all potentials at the same time because you have 24 hours day and you have what we call opportunity cost. If I choose to work on this kind of potential, I can’t also spend all my afternoons working on the other kind, too.

Todd Lubart [00:26:29]:
So, yeah, in the ideal world, we develop everyone’s potential a maximum, and that would be great. But in the real world, there’s a bit of chance.

Matthew Worwood [00:26:43]:
Well, that was an amazing first episode to our double espresso with Todd Lubart. And as a reminder, this is a double espresso, which means that there is a second episode immediately after this one. And in the second part, we will be looking at the future of creativity. My name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:26:59]:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett. This episode was produced by Matthew Warwick and Cindy Burnett. Our podcast sponsor is curiosity to create, and our editor is Sam Atkinson.