Matthew Worwood: What if we’ve been asking the wrong

question? Maybe we don’t need revolution in schools. Maybe creativity isn’t missing at all. Maybe it’s already here. In this episode, we will explore the idea that the problem isn’t absence, it’s prioritization. We talk about how AI might help us reclaim time, not replace thinking, and why constructive dialogue.

Real conversation between people may be one of the most important drivers of creativity in our classrooms. Join us for our second debrief episode of season 12 as we reflect on these ideas and much more. Hello everyone. My name is Dr. Matthew Ward,

Cyndi Burnett: and my name is Dr. Cyndi Burnett.

Matthew Worwood: This is the Fueling Creativity in Education Podcast.

Cyndi Burnett: On this podcast, we’ll be talking about various creativity topics and how they relate to the fields 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 [00:01:00] 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 second debrief episode of Season nine of the Fueling Creativity in Education Podcast. We have three wonderful episodes that we’re gonna be debriefing today.

Cyndi, why don’t you remind us who we are debriefing.

Cyndi Burnett: Sure. So first we had James Taylor and we talked to James about creativity and AI in industry and how that might apply to the field of education. And then we spoke with Caroline Mel from the Constructive Dialogue Institute, and we talked to her about having constructive dialogues with students and how that relates to creativity.

And then finally we had creativity researcher, ACHI Ksky, and. We talked about creativity and education and the research behind it, and particularly around do school’s kill creativity. So that will be an [00:02:00] interesting conversation for us to debrief.

Matthew Worwood: Alright, it was really great.

Number one to think about creativity in education, relationship with ai, but actually starting that conversation from what I felt was a corporate perspective, and I dunno if you remember, but it’s been a while since we’ve brought somebody in that primarily is looking through the lens of business and the needs of industry.

And I think maybe it might even be Albert Schneider from ibm. Yes. Way back when. Yes. And in that episode we just. Primarily talking about creativity in industry and how, and why industry value creativity. In this particular episode, obviously we’re talking about the changes that we’re seeing happening in industry regarding ai, what skills industry’s primarily talking about, and then obviously having a conversation about what that means for creativity in education.

And I think as we were going through things, to me. I felt that James Taylor was primarily thinking about data and managing and organizing data and he was talking a lot about critical thinking. And for me, I felt that. James was primarily talking a lot from a data perspective. And the fact that we now have increased access to information and data and how we’re ultimately building on that additional access to information. And, from that constructivist perspective, ultimately, everything that we have access to is about information, and it’s up to us to construct knowledge from that information through the connections that we make.

And so I found myself wondering, yes, AI can assist us in obviously accessing more information, but that doesn’t necessarily ensure that we construct the knowledge needed to go on and increase our creativity. Even if we’re able to increase our productivity. So I was really seeing the two as two different things there.

And so, in James’ episode, I felt that there was quite a significant focus [00:04:00] on data, specifically the fact that we’ve got increasing access to information. And in many ways that’s what happened when the internet and the worldwide web came out. We suddenly have had more access to information. I found myself wondering.

All right, so there’s obviously a relationship with information and creativity because the more information we have access to, obviously the more ideas that we can generate. But at the same time, I also was thinking a little bit about the fact that access to information doesn’t necessarily guarantee that we’re going to construct the knowledge needed to apply that additional information to creative tasks.

And so I found myself getting back to something that I continue to think about is the difference between creativity and productivity. And so with increased access to information, teachers and learners might find that they can be more productive in class.

But we gotta be careful that just because we’re being more productive, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we are facilitating and promoting more creativity, if that makes sense.

Cyndi Burnett: Matt, what I really like about that is the difference between how we might use AI for creativity and how we might use it for productivity One of the things I love about AI is that it is helps us become more productive so that we have more time to be creative and to really think through those unique connections.

So I agree with you that we really need to be thinking about these different ways in which we can use ai, and one of the things that I always think about is how can we use AI to build more creative lessons? But then I also think. Teachers are so creative. But then I go back to, but teachers don’t have that much time.

So do I want them to be productive and creative in how they design their lessons, or do we use that as a springboard? So is it a combination? What do you think?

Matthew Worwood: Yeah and I think that idea of the springboard is important just to build on that. But then I’m gonna come back to say whether or not that actually will happen,  because I think that’s, you’re alluding to that in your question.

The springboard piece. As I go back to what I said at the beginning, okay, with increased access to information, we may acquire more knowledge that can then feed more ideas or assist us in being better at choosing the most appropriate answer. So from that perspective, yeah, it can be a springboard for, new opportunities for creativity in both teaching and learning.

Absolutely. But you said an important thing with the challenges around time constraints and whether or not we might begin to prioritize productivity. Over creativity because we do have these time constraints and so I do have a little bit of a concern about that and James spoke a lot about.

21st century skills, which to be fair we emphasized that, or at least alluded to it in our book that’s gonna come out in the summer, the fact that there is a continued case for 21st century skills. And we presented on that topic as well. And I think James at one point said that critical thinking.

Is gonna be important than creativity.

I think yes, because we’re gonna have to think critically about all of this information, but there’s still this need to be committed to creativity. Particularly as you referenced, the creativity is only coming from us. We are the ones have to.

Make connections to all of this information that we have now access to. And again, maybe AI can help us make those connections, but if we’re not gonna commit to making those connections, if we’re not gonna commit to trying to be more creative, producing more original outcomes in our classroom environments to assist in learning, then.

Then we might just fall back to just being more productive and more productive. Might be, us just going with whatever AI produces. And I have a little bit of concerns about that, and maybe that works for industry, right? That might be the focus. How can we be more productive?

Hey, this thing is working. We just need to be more efficient and productive in how we’re creating it. I don’t know if that works for me in education.

Cyndi Burnett: I don’t know. I think it can work because, all right, and I’ll give you an example and it actually builds on my insight from James Taylor’s, which I really appreciated his insight around getting feedback.

So if we look at using AI to give us feedback and giving students feedback on an assignment, right? And they’re able to see, oh, I missed this. I missed this. I’m now gonna improve that. That might be, what would you consider that productive?

Matthew Worwood: Yeah, you’re right. So I think that’s a really good you clarified that.

So that would, I think that’s a great example of that critical thinking. You’re thinking critically about how you can deploy AI in a way that, provides you perhaps with more time for creativity. So right.

Yeah,

Matthew Worwood: that makes sense.

Cyndi Burnett: It comes back and it says to you, here’s all the ways you can improve it.

And you go, okay, lemme try it a different way. Lemme try building on that. Lemme try building on this. It could be both creative and productive and it can improve it without it being, and this goes back into the conversation we had, which was automation versus augmentation.

So Matt, if we can use feedback for. Automatically getting that response to our student’s assignment. So our students put their [00:09:00] assignment in, they receive that automatic response, then they can augment it based on what they wanna do, both creatively, and it will help them be more productive because they will see where the deficit is, and then they can build upon that.

Matthew Worwood: I think that’s a great example of being. More productive. It’s a, we could say it’s being creative in terms of how you’re choosing to to deploy creativity. But then it might be that we start having more and more AI tools that are being able to conduct that feedback.

And if it provides us with more free time for creativity. That’s great. Right. I’m saying that don’t, we have to be committed to generating the ideas ourselves and be committed to bringing creativity into our practice with ai.

Otherwise, is there a danger that we may shift too much towards just productivity? And before we do it, before we know it, rather. And this might echo some of the conversation we had around with Punya. Micra is [00:10:00] that before you know it, we’re just. Doing what the tools and technologies are dictating as opposed to us engaging creativity and us generating ideas and determining what’s appropriate.

Does that make sense?

Cyndi Burnett: It does make sense. And it actually reminds me of the article that James Kaufman and Ron Bag gto, who we’ve had both on the show, that article on being Superman. Do you remember that article?

Matthew Worwood: Yeah. Yeah.

Cyndi Burnett: So essentially what they’re saying for our listeners is

most of the time we are Clark Kent, and we don’t need to be creative. But when we do need to be creative, we need to know when to put our Superman cape on. And I think that’s true also with AI is when do we need to spend our time really thinking through and spending time and generating new ideas, and when do we just need to be Clark Kent and use it for productivity to help us move through our tasks more efficiently so we have that time to be Superman.

Matthew Worwood: I love that. We can end it there with ai. No but that’s great. Right? Sometimes with a, when we’re interacting with ai, we’re interacting with Clark Kent,  and it might be, actually, we’re gonna find ourselves being Clark Kent for most of the time. But I think what is really important is to recognize that there are problems and challenges and menace.

In our classroom.

And let’s just make sure that we got the cape available or the telephone box we have to run into and quickly turn into Superman. Make sure we still prioritize that the world still needs Superman. Your classroom still sometimes needs Superman. You still sometimes needs to be Superman

or Superwoman.

Cyndi Burnett: So. Let’s talk about our next one. Let’s talk about Caroline Mel.

Matthew Worwood: What was your first takeaway with Caroline? Mel?

Cyndi Burnett: I think what’s interesting about Caroline, just as a reminder, she is the director of the Constructive Dialogue Institute, and what I found most interesting was the connections between constructive dialogue and quite frankly.

Actions in our upcoming book are related to constructive dialogue. So just to give you a sneak peek into our book that’s coming out, hopefully this summer. 10 actions to fuel the future creative, we have have discussions and be open and be curious and build relationships and be aware of emotions and face all.

Correspond with the. Around the constructive dialogue and what it takes to have constructive dialogue. So for me, when people ask me about the benefits of creativity, it’s not just about coming up with new and useful ideas. It’s really, it’s the conduit to so many of the challenges we face in the world.

So when we look at something like we can’t have these good conversations because there’s so much polarization, but we say if we are creative and doing that, and we are open and curious. Embrace those challenges and face the feelings, then all of [00:13:00] a sudden that is the conduit to having these constructive dialogues.

So I think that was my biggest insight and really quite exciting to see those direct connections.

Matthew Worwood: So my takeaway was very similar. And so in essence, when I’m building on what you said there I’m sharing my takeaway is I agree. I felt like not only was it amazing to see how many of those actions that we have in the book related or were referenced, right?

So I remember she referenced relationships, to your point, asked questions. All these different things kept being referenced. But I also felt that the whole premise around. The dialogue was around creative problem solving. This idea that we have to, at the very beginning, clarify the problem, what is it we’re talking about?

And we have to be very receptive, and I’m gonna use the word open again to understanding the different perspectives and lived experiences that exist in the room when engaging in this dialogue. And only through. [00:14:00] That dialogue, can we truly clarify what it is we’re talking about? And even if you think about, even on the show, if we’re having a conversation about someone who says you can’t teach creativity.

Oh yes, you can teach creativity. You first have to have a good understanding of what is creativity? Let’s make sure we have a shared understanding of what creativity is because only then can we make sure that we’re talking about the same thing. And so often we can find ourselves engaging on problems, engaging in a deliberate creative process without really doing that clarification piece.

Of course, people train in creative problem solving design thinking. They understand. The importance of going through that strategy, but just listening to the fact that dialogue is a big part of that I thought was wonderful as to a certain extent. I just found the episode a perfect example of creativity and action, how Caroline has gone about craft in this framework.

It was a creative act in itself.

Cyndi Burnett: I love that. And for those of you listening, if you haven’t listened to that episode, we strongly urge you to go back and [00:15:00] listen to it with a friend or colleague and ask them to listen to it with you and grab a cup of coffee and have a constructive dialogue together.

Matthew Worwood: I love it. I love it. You know what, there’s one thing I’m gonna quickly add. Is the importance of having enough knowledge to know what you’re talking about.

Cyndi Burnett: Yes.

Matthew Worwood: And that’s also that proceed creativity as well, right? Like you gotta have that level of expertise in order to go and reach that kind of, for the most part reach that proceed creativity in your field.

You have to know what. Hasn’t been done before. Yeah. What are the problems that really need to be solved? Yeah. And we spent some time talking about that at the end as well, that, sometimes we might find ourselves engaging in a conversation or maybe facilitating a conversation with our students and they just don’t have enough information and knowledge to really get to the place we want to be.

And I think that actually is a better takeaway for me at least, is that as an educator, I’ve gotta think about and say, all right, . I love the fact that facilitating dialogue in my classroom, but [00:16:00] I’ve gotta make sure they have that knowledge. And quite often I say, go read an article, but we know sometimes they may not read that article.

So is it worth me continuing to facilitate that conversation if not enough students in the class have read the article and therefore are probably gonna struggle to engage in the conversation, at least at the level that I want to. There’s a lot to dialogue, isn’t there?

Cyndi Burnett: There is. And I think that whole point where she was talking about, asking people like, how does the internet work and how does the fax machine work?

I don’t know. And there’s so much I think in, politically with the polarization that’s happening right now in our country in particular and really all over the world. But when you look at what’s happening with the polarization, a lot of people are making claims, but they really don’t have any background to be able to justify

those statements, and I think going in and making sure that you are well-informed

Matthew Worwood: now I wanna go and reconnect back to the James Taylor piece because that’s the whole challenge with more access to information, right? Yeah.

You are gonna go and interact with information that may actually [00:17:00] lead you in the wrong direction, but you don’t have the knowledge or experience needed to actually recognize you’re being led in the wrong direction. And maybe that’s another point to add around.

My concern about that productivity piece is that we might be being more productive, but we actually might be diminishing the outcomes that we’re trying to achieve. And maybe that’s why we need to make sure that we are we’re steering the ship, we’re making a commitment to, to not just.

Pursuing originality for originality sake. That may come from ai. We’re making sure that we’re the ones that are determining the value, the most appropriate ideas and whether or not it’s having the impact that we hoped it would in the classroom environment.

Cyndi Burnett: Alright, Matt, final one. Achi. Kaki, what was your insight?

Matthew Worwood: I think for the last few years of us doing the show.

I don’t think schools need a revolution. I think schools continue to evolve.

And for the most part, their evolution. I think has continued to provide opportunities for creativity, for all the things that we’ve just spoken about. We need to make sure that our students are going to school, interacting with the content and constructing the knowledge they need in order to go on and reach those high levels of creativity that we so often talk about.

So . Accountability assessment. These are all things to talk a lot about. But, it sounds to me that Margie, I felt the same way that, schools do reasonably well with creativity and it got me back to thinking that conversation we had with Selcuk Acar when we said, when schools teach well, they are teaching creativity.

Cyndi Burnett: I think that’s a beautiful statement, and I think it’s something that keeps coming up on the podcast. I wish sometimes that I could just go back in time and sit through my classrooms back in the, the eighties and nineties when I was sitting in middle school and high school to really see what was happening.

And I think as my big insight, which Achi talked about was, it’s so nuanced. So yeah, we might feel like we need. But there’s actually a lot of teachers doing great things, and we’ve had teachers on the podcast, who are showing us all the creative things they’re doing in their classrooms and administrators who are telling us about the things that are happening in their schools.

And so I think it’s so nuanced that to make a generalization, I feel like. You just can’t, you can’t say one or the other do you remember when we had Henry Smith and he said, we need to burn the whole system down, right. And then rebuild?

Matthew Worwood: Yes.

Cyndi Burnett: I don’t, I dunno if we need to burn down the whole system because there’s a lot of things in the system that are working the way in which I’m viewing this right now is we need to approach this with a growth mindset as educators to say, how might I be improving? How might I get feedback on what I’m currently doing? How might I talk with other teachers about the kinds of things that they’re facing? And going back to an episode we had our.

[00:20:00] Very first episode of the season, Carlos Moreno thinking about how do we build schools to fit the needs of the student body? And every student body is different, and then how do we find the students that fit into the right school system that makes it impactful for them? And so there’s just so many more questions.

Then do we need to overhaul the whole thing or do we just need to evolve? It’s so much more nuanced than that.

Matthew Worwood: And you know what? Tying all of this together, mindset, obviously was talking a. Creative agency and creative self-efficacy, and the capacity for a student to believe in essence, believe in their ability to go and engage in a creative process and produce an outcome that is something that they value and hopefully something that is valued by their community as well.

And I think that if we can be more maybe using AI to be more productive. In certain areas. And I will say that Margie also spoke a lot [00:21:00] about, or won’t say a lot, but we spoke some time around how AI can provide that feedback. It does look like the research is saying, look, AI might be very good for providing feedback for students if we can identify these areas where that, that AI is doing a good job.

And that goes back to an episode we had with David Cropley possibly in season three or four, where he said a lot of. Of the future of creativity is identifying what AI can do really well and what humans do better. Yep. We as teachers are in that challenge. It might take us a few years to get it, but if we can recognize that AI isn’t great at everything, but might be better than us in certain areas, then we might get back more time.

And of course that’s a big thing that people talk a lot about. If we can navigate this transition really well, then we as educators will have more time in the classroom. Now, where are you gonna direct that time? And if we can prioritize the creativity side of things if we’ve been more efficient and productive in using AI to, to improve those tests lead to, to improvement in test scores and therefore students knowing more things and be, and having more skills, then really now it,  it comes down to providing the opportunities, for students to apply those skills in creative ways.

And I think another challenge , that the system probably gets is when we’re trying to look at. Every student has the same, and that’s what you’re referencing with Carlos, is that alright? Yeah. If you look at, if you look at the system that everyone has to achieve the same level and the same type of outcomes, which goes also back to another episode with Jonathan Plucker.

He was talking about that. Yeah. Right. Like we’re so focused on everyone reaching the same level, the same benchmark, and then we I think you used the words, we declare victory there. Yeah. And we don’t always think about what’s beyond that line. Every student. In fact, I’m trying to connect everything now, but with the creative agency, every student probably has a benchmark that they can go beyond.

We wanna install that creative agency. So every student believes that in this particular space, in this particular context, they can go beyond that benchmark. And that’s a lot of work for us as teachers, but hopefully with AI we can have the time needed to [00:23:00] maybe prioritize that in schooling. And maybe that’s.

The human part, that’s what we are coming in. We are less on teaching and evaluating the content and giving feedback on whether or not they’ve met certain benchmarks. We’re now all about designing the learning experiences. For students to go and express their knowledge in highly creative ways and go about helping them make an impact for both themselves and also their community.

Cyndi Burnett: So thanks so much for joining us for this second debrief of the Fueling Creativity and Education Podcast. I encourage you to go back and listen to all the episodes if you haven’t already done so, and check out our collections on our Fueling Creativity Podcast website and see if you can have some.

Discuss, discuss some constructive dialogue with some colleagues about one of these topics. My name is Dr. Cyndi Burnett,

Matthew Worwood: and my name is Dr. Matthew Worwood.

Cyndi Burnett: This episode was produced by Cyndi Burnett and Matthew Worwood. Our podcast assistant is Anne Fernando, and our editor is Sheik Ahmed.