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

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy 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 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 need to infuse creativity into teaching and learning.

Matthew Worwood:
So let’s begin. Hello, and welcome back to another debrief episode of season 10 of the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast. But this is kind of like our final debrief, which we introduced last year, which is a debrief of the entire season. And it’s not a debrief with Cindy or myself. It’s a debrief from our resident scholar, Jimmy Wilson. Jimmy, welcome back to the show. It’s great to have you again.

Jimmy Wilson:
Hey, it’s great to be on Matt and Sydney. Thanks for having me. It’s been crazy year with the PhD doing a new NSF fellowship on education neuroscience, and working really hard on my degree in creativity and education at UConn. But I’m so happy to listen into this season and connect it back to some of my research throughout the year.

Cyndi Burnett:
So, Jimmy, let’s start with that. What were some of your key insights that you had as you listened back to all of the episodes and relating it back to what you’ve been learning in your doctoral program?

Jimmy Wilson:
Yeah, this season was a little bit challenging, I’m not gonna lie. But in the best way. You had a lot of different guests on, from Jopp Hartson, the inventor of Bluetooth, to the social psychology legend Teresa Amabile. It was a huge breadth of creativity and education. There was a director of Brazilian creative programs, an Astro Bio Futurist gifted education mini season session, and then even more guests. So I was mulling over this while I had my 16 pages of notes on the season, and A quote from Dr. Leo Bird flew into my brain. He said, there’s a difference between democratizing technology or access to technology.

Jimmy Wilson:
And let’s just imagine that’s creativity as well. There’s a difference between democratizing creativity and access and using creativity for democratization. One thing has to do with providing children and people with access to new types of tools or creativity. The other thing is empowering them to use those tools or creativity in ways that will lead them to a better life, not just for themselves, but also for Their communities. So Leo Bird distinguishes between these three different levels. There’s the first level of access. How do we have access to these tools, to creativity, to an environment that. That is conducive to that.

Jimmy Wilson:
The second thing is literacy. Are we able to understand what’s going on? Our own creative process? Are we able to metacognitively monitor that like Joe Bowler and Jeb Puryear talk about? And are we able to have productive struggle and be able to see little bits of progress? But that’s not the end goal. Dr. Bird talked about fluency and being able to critically use those tools in meaningful, personal and community centered ways. And I feel like that really gets at a lot of our gifted special and looking at creativity and equity through that lens. The work of Miriam Scott and creative visionings, Leo Bird himself and Jonathan Guerra. And I feel so bad because I’m leaving out so many great moments of the season, but this is the frame that we’re going to kind of move along with throughout this episode.

Matthew Worwood:
Hey, that was a. When you were going through those guests. I mean, I agree it was an incredible season given the diversity of topics that we covered during the show. So I do appreciate the way you set that up. It made us sound even cooler than we. You. We make ourselves sound.

Jimmy Wilson:
Yeah, it was. It was an interesting experiencing listening to them one by one. And then as I was preparing for this kind of going through them all back to back and being like, whoa. This was really varied and interesting throughout. So my first section of research is pandering to you, Matt, a little bit. It’s called who Needs Sleep? Sleep and Creativity. So during a debrief with Austina Demonte, as well as Jonathan Guerra, there is a lot of talk about sleep. I love sleep.

Jimmy Wilson:
I’m about to have a little baby and have no sleep this summer. So I’m keenly interested in this topic. And I found a couple of different studies. One from 2004 by Wagner and colleagues, looking at problem solving, creative problem solving and REM sleep. And what they did is they had groups of people look at sequences of numbers and all they had to do is, there’s like eight numbers. Are they the same sequence or are they different? They go through and measure their response time. Then they had them have a good night of sleep and come back and do it again. And they tried to see if they could figure out there was a hidden pattern in the numbers.

Jimmy Wilson:
So when they were looking if they’re same or different, there was a hidden pattern that said every second or every third number was Different. And those who got a good night of sleep were double the likelihood, had double the likelihood of discovering that hidden pattern, which is really cool. They have. Other researchers, too, have found that cognitive flexibility and perseverance can be aided by sleep. A newer study from 2023 with Celia Laco even replicated that study and showed that even just twilight sleep. And I love the way they did this because I could see myself just doing this at the office. They had their participants come in and sit down and lean back and close their eyes, and they had a little bottle in their hand, and they started to fall asleep. And as they fell asleep, they dropped that bottle and woke themselves back again.

Jimmy Wilson:
So they kind of like rattle them out of their twilight sleep. And just that minute or three minutes of being in between sleep and awakefulness, it tripled their likelihood of discovering the same hidden pattern that Wagner found 20 years prior. All of these things can be really useful ways to think about not only how good sleep is for our health, but. But even for a creative cognition and problem solving.

Cyndi Burnett:
Jimmy, that makes so much sense, because, let’s face it, you know, when you don’t have a good night’s sleep. And I just. I last night had a bad night of sleep, and I was thinking, how am I gonna get through this, this discussion today when I haven’t had a good night of sleep? Because I know my brain is just not as quick to function. So what I’m curious about, when you just talked about that study in the twilight and holding something, is it the moment that you’re sort of dozing off, or is it the moment that you jolt up and you go, oh, I’ve got this insight now. You know, I dropped this, and I’m. I’m quickly awoken. Awaken. Awoke.

Cyndi Burnett:
What is it? What is the word I’m looking for?

Jimmy Wilson:
Awokenness. Yeah. I don’t know. Startled.

Matthew Worwood:
Startled. Startled. I think. I think the words, based on your question, is it about being relaxed and falling asleep, or is it about being startled that perhaps gets the response they saw?

Cyndi Burnett:
That’s exactly what I was thinking. Because I would think that, you know, those moments as you’re going off to sleep that we all have, right? You know, they say, like, keep a notebook next to your bed, because as you’re dozing off, like, all of those ideas are like, hello, it’s me. I’ve got your next big idea right here. Wait, don’t go to sleep. Okay? You’re going to sleep. You’re going to sleep. Ah. You know, and then you don’t Want to go to sleep and then you get up and then you have to go find a notebook or whatever.

Cyndi Burnett:
So I could see that being a really creative space in your sleep, but I could also see like your head is clear, you’re laying in bed. Instead of reaching, you know, the sunlight’s coming into your bedroom. Instead of reaching for your phone, you say, I’m just going to lay here, lie here and imagine, you know, what the day brings. And all of a sudden you have that insight. So where do you think the creativity really happens?

Jimmy Wilson:
Yeah, you know, I think there probably will be need to be more studies to pinpoint if it’s that startling part or if it’s the in between twilight sleep beforehand. But you bring up an interesting point that you need to have. You need to. You need to. Have to. Wow. You need to.

Matthew Worwood:
We’re lacking sleep at the end of the semester.

Cyndi Burnett:
Clearly, clearly I couldn’t. Awoke or awake today or need to have to.

Jimmy Wilson:
Awoke or awake. Yes, you need to be working on a problem. Right. They were activating their brains, looking at these patterns of numbers that were complex first and thinking about them as they went to sleep, whether it was full night or just that little twilight sleep. And then that hidden pattern was able to manifest itself in quicker reaction times with identification afterwards. And you know, Austina DeBonte talked about how like a lot of time, this lack of sleep will manifest as mistaken identification of ADHD and other sort of exceptionalities in learners. Jonathan Guerra, the season was talking about how many kids that he taught that he thought, man, this kid may be going through some traumatic experience in their life. I’m going to try these trauma informed techniques and digging deeper and learning more about them.

Jimmy Wilson:
He realized they’re just not sleeping and there’s just so much to distract and to know that just a little bit of sleep can help your creativity, but it can also inhibit a lot of things and get in the way of learning. Was a really keen insight in this season for me.

Matthew Worwood:
And also, I mean, you know, just through everyone’s experience, either as a parent or as an educator, particularly an educator of young children, we see, you know, more heightened emotions, more heightened frustrations. When people are lacking sleep, both in adults and also children, though, we express them differently. So it, it kind of stands to reason that the ability to persevere is likely to be better if you’ve got more sleep. I’m not surprised about all of this. And I think, I think for me, and I’m really glad you brought it up, is, is the fact that you Know, we, we live in a world where probably so many of our students, you know, the system, you know, there’s still so much. We have a lot of demands on young people. We certainly have a lot of demands of undergraduate students. You think about all of the extracurricular activities that people have.

Matthew Worwood:
So now they’re physically tired. For example, if they’re doing sports, you think about how much screen time that sometimes taking place, particularly with teenagers. And we may have potentially a recipe of all these different components in the life we’ve created, particularly in the Western world, where some of the challenges that we might have spoken about on this show could actually be part harshly addressed, at least by just saying, let’s get everyone to sleep. And I will say, just to throw it out there, I can’t tell you I’ve made a difference. But I, as an educator are demanding that no students submit work after 9pm and it’s weird because I’m having some recent email exchanges where students are telling me, well, I don’t finish work till 8:30. And I say to them, don’t worry, I’d prefer that you wake up and if you can do the work in the morning and get it to me, then I’m going to have the deadline of 9pm But I want you to know that I would prefer that you prioritize getting into bed at a reasonable hour and finding time to do the homework in the morning if you can. So I’m trying to incorporate some of that in. And it’s all because of the conversations we had through season 10.

Matthew Worwood:
So thank you for bringing that up, Jimmy, and connecting it to the research.

Jimmy Wilson:
Yeah, no, that’s fantastic, Matt and I feel like also thinking about these biological processes that are informing creativity in our classrooms. Teresa Mobile brought up, of course, her pivotal research on social and environmental factors that help creativity in the classroom, like intrinsic awards and the desire to create for your own joy. And that was something that brings me into the next part, which is a little bit about literacy, not of technology, like Dr. Leo Bird said, but of our own creativity. Are we understanding our process? And Joe Bowler talked really insightfully about metacognition. Not as the classic definition. We always hear about thinking of our thinking, but thinking of our learning process and how we’re learning what’s motivating us. One of the things I loved about the guests this season is that a lot of them talked about metacognition and productive struggle and creativity.

Jimmy Wilson:
Santosh Zachariah came on and said, how do we have a school with no grades? What is the motivating factor, then if we don’t have grades there, he said, we have to give the students a metacognitive skill of thinking. I’m not judging your product. I’m trying to give you skills to reflect on it and be curious about what happened on what stage that led to that outcome. Similarly, Jeb Puryear also talked about some creative research from Ron Bighetto and James Kaufman about creative metacognition and the ability to judge when something should be put out into the classroom environment or when they should hold onto that. Kind of like Superman and Clark, Kentucky. And there’s a lot of researchers out there, including Labuda and Benedict in 2023, who are defining creative metacognition as that monitoring and control of creative processes, knowing when to generate, when to evaluate, and how to adopt. I just really loved all of the guests and how they’re addressing creative metacognition. One of the things that Amabile said in your recent episode was what you need is the equivalent of celebrating failure.

Jimmy Wilson:
What can we learn from our mistakes? And I really love that. If we’re taking it away from, like Santos Zachariah said, if we’re taking it away from just a number and a product and grade, and we’re focusing on process and failure and creation, what does that look like in our classroom?

Matthew Worwood:
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Cyndi Burnett:
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Matthew Worwood:
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Cyndi Burnett:
To learn more, check out curiositytocrereate.org or check out the links in the show notes for this episode. You know what I find really interesting about that, Jimmy? First of all, I really like that definition you pulled around creative metacognition. And I remember saying to Matt once we finished all the interviews, because we recorded most of these interviews at the start of 2025, is the fact that most people were talking about metacognition. And the interesting thing is it was certainly a theme, as you mentioned, that emerged from this season that hadn’t emerged in the previous nine seasons. And the reason I think this is telling is because of the onset of artificial intelligence and what’s happening, because everyone is questioning, you know, what is the Role of AI and what is the role of education? And I think a big part of it is going to be metacognition, creative metacognition, understanding our learning process, understand how we learn as individuals in the most effective and meaningful ways for us, how we can help our students learn in those ways. And that this is going to be an emerging trend. It is an emerging trend in my opinion, just based on these conversations we’ve been having, if we were going to look at that as a data set. But really something that’s emerging because students can get access to information so easily.

Cyndi Burnett:
So it’s not just about knowledge acquisition. It’s also about how students are processing that information or how they, you know, as, as Joe Bowler talked about. I loved her episode around, you know, talking through solving math equations so that others can hear your process and others can see how you’re thinking about things. And it’s going to become much more about the thinking than it is about the knowledge acquisition. At least that’s, in my opinion, the direction we need to be going in.

Jimmy Wilson:
Yeah, and I want to just interject, add on to that that this creative metacognition coming up, especially in the wave of AI, but it’s also supported by neuroscience. So that same researcher, Benedict, collaborated with Rominger, or rather the other way around. Rominger was the lead scientist and Benedict was a collaborator. They actually use EEGs to measure the brain frequencies of people evaluating their creative work through alternate uses tasks, which is taking something like a book or a carrot. We mentioned a lot on the show and coming up with different uses for it. And they found that the patterns of their brains seem to suggest that the less internal attention or the less memory mode, the less metacognition and increased sensory processing are associated with more effective and accurate monitoring of the creative process. So this is a real thing that we’re seeing changes in the brain through these EEG monitors while you’re. You’re doing it.

Jimmy Wilson:
It’s not simply like a theoretical or useful heuristic to think about education and learning like we see in the classroom.

Matthew Worwood:
I do want to. It’s funny because I was presenting at the SOU conference on Sunday and I, I’m gonna say Meredith. Meredith, Melissa. And I really hope I’ve done them justice because one of them brought that up and was talking a lot about that and they listened to the show and I just wanted to point out that they were really interested in how neuroscience is informing that creative process and what’s happening in the brain. And I’d reference. We’ve got Anna Abraham coming on the show during the summer series, which we’re not going to talk too much about now, but perhaps I’m seeing another opportunity to talk a lot that. But connecting that to metacognition and why perhaps we’re talking a little bit more about it is is helpful. I certainly agree with Cindy as well.

Matthew Worwood:
I think it’s, it’s a skill set that we got to continue to have to think about. The creative metacognition I think aligns really well when we’re thinking about, you know, what’s our relationship with these AI tools and how they can assist us. But just to throw a question back at you, Jimmy, when you was talking, I was finding myself thinking a little bit about feedback. Right. And information. Because, you know, as we are developing the skill set of metacognition, we likewise want to provide enough information in our learning environment for the students to go away and actually reflect. Right. I don’t know if you’ve got any thoughts about that, but as teachers, how might we provide that feedback and see as information to which the students can actually use to support their development of metacognition, but also their application of metacognition as they look at learning from failure or correcting mistakes?

Jimmy Wilson:
Yeah, no, I think that’s such an important question. And I will defer to the inventor of Bluetooth, Jopp Hartson, on your show. And I really love their idea when they’re talking about, sorry, not just him, but also Jamie Sellatoshi. And I’m sorry if I’m butchering that name, but they were talking about the incremental level of looking at creative improvement and using as models what has been done, doing deep research on what is working right now and making those incremental improvements. And I think that teachers can really help students anchor so they’re not just thinking of producing ideas whole cloth, but going back and iterating and elaborating. And then when you have a base, teachers can better say, oh, I see that you elaborated in such and such and such a way. Tell me about your process. Right.

Jimmy Wilson:
Because you kind of have that home base to hold on to. And I think similarly Jop talked about we can’t just give creativity skills as an empty shell. We have to build that knowledge so that students feel competent in using the tools that we’re giving to them. I think both of those things, making sure that they have a strong foundation and then giving them models like here are four or five things that we’re going to iterate on can really help Focus that creative feedback for students.

Matthew Worwood:
And I think that also builds on what Cindy was saying with AI though as well, because, you know, I’ve just started to do this recently with my students. It’s not about calling them out, it’s not about policing. It’s simply saying, how did you use AI during your learning process? You know, if I feel like perhaps it’s, it’s potentially being overused, or I feel like I’m interacting with something that feels not very original, doesn’t have a lot of depth, I simply now say, can you, can you send me an email with a little summary of your learning process and how you utilized AI? But that might be something that we could do more of as well, is those of us who are wrestling with AI, it’s less about policing it for a while. It might be less about necessarily saying what we can and can’t do about it as we go on this journey with our students, identifying, you know, where it can support our creative process, where it can support our learning, and likewise what we think it might hinder it. I think a good thing is to just say, can you talk us through your process? And these are all things that I think maybe we could help further develop those, that creative metacognition in our students, particularly when they’re interacting with these AI tools.

Jimmy Wilson:
And that I think that perfectly dovetails with the second part of the process or the literacy, understanding our creativity, which is productive struggle. You know, it’s a popular term in education. It’s been around for a long time since John Dewey just talking about persevering through and Vygotsky and being on that edge of our understanding. And I just loved Amabile’s distillation of her research when she said small wins, small wins. Drive, motivation and creativity setbacks are okay as long as we help students see progress. And so if we give them AI, I think like Bickerstaff said on the show, like if they’re just using that to do everything, then that’s going to be replicable, right in their job, right? That’s not actually using their brain and getting something new. But if we can push them forward to struggle through and make those little gains in their own self efficacy, then that can yield really amazing dividends. And just a little bit of research I’m going to add in here.

Jimmy Wilson:
Akpur in 2023, he talked about productive cognitive conflict and coupling that with some reflection, he found that that really significantly improved creative and critical thinking. And just to segue into the last section that I wanted to Wrap up the season. Dr. Leo Bird from the MIT Media Lab talked a lot about, okay, we can understand our process, we can understand technology, we can have access to it, but what is the use if we don’t have something that we care about, that we’re passionate about and that is purpose driven to drive that? And I think that’s a huge part of a challenge for teachers in the age of AI is can we ignite that motivation for students so that they want to learn the skill themselves and they want to invest in the project for their communities? That third section is about fluency and creativity, and not just do we understand it, but how do we use it towards community. And not only did Leo Bird talk about it, but also came up in Miriam Scott and Jonathan Guerra. And then, of course, the guests from last season, Dr. Robert Sternberg and his transformational creativity. I was wondering, is that something that you guys saw with guests as well throughout this focus on purpose?

Cyndi Burnett:
Well, it’s really funny that you mentioned that, Jimmy, because just yesterday we recorded the part four debrief of season 10, and we talked about the relationship between purpose and passion. And then Matt posted on LinkedIn yesterday about, you know, how are purpose and passion connected and how do we help students find their purpose, particularly now when they can find their answers through generative AI asking the computer, doing a search, how do we help them find what matters to them? By looking around at the world and saying, you know, here are the problems that I see and here’s what I want to do to solve them. And, you know, I love the fact that you referenced Robert Sternberg because of course, he talked about transformational theory and that he believes that people aren’t creative unless they’re doing something for the betterment of mankind. So I think we really need to spend more time not only giving them the content, because sometimes people say, oh, you teach creativity. You probably don’t think that we need content. I’m like, oh, no, we still need content. We need to teach the students the skills. But in these spaces where we now have AI to assist us, can we now propel our students to move forward more rapidly in terms of being able to look around, solve problems? Because it’s almost like they have their own little assistant in solving those problems, right? But that Purpose and Passion piece, I think, and this is what Matt and I talked about, which will be posted last week on our debrief, which is, I feel like it’s lacking in this next generation and it could be just the students I’m around, but I’m seeing just a lot of parents who are coming to me saying my child just doesn’t have something yet that they feel really purposeful about or find, like, real meaning in things.

Cyndi Burnett:
And I wonder how much of that is pandemic related, how much of that is, you know, device related? I’m not, I’m not quite sure about the research around that, but it would be interesting to look at that for future seasons.

Jimmy Wilson:
No, definitely I am. Vlad Glavanu writes about transformational creativity and talks about how students feel their creativity contributes to something bigger and has purpose, are just more likely to persist in the face of challenge. And so I think sometimes when you don’t have that passion and purpose, it can compound and make things more difficult. You’re going to quit easier, more easily, or be tempted to run things through regenerative AI just so you can check the task off as opposed to connecting it to larger parts of the community. And I think that’s where Leo Bird and Miriam Scott and then also Jonathan Guerra, again, we’re talking about how important it is to have peers and have community building and relationships and authentic spaces to display that work. Miriam Scott said, I’m going to quote here, they realized they could make something that mattered to others. Once they saw their work on display in the library or heard that a community member used their suggestion, it changed how they saw themselves. So I think that’s a great challenge.

Jimmy Wilson:
It’s always a challenge for educators to find authentic places to display these things and to have students feel good about themselves. But it is a challenge that pays so many dividends when you invest, because making that connection helps make lifelong learners who are willing to persist and, you know, have caught that spark of purpose with their creativity.

Cyndi Burnett:
All right, Jimmy, well, thank you so much for coming back and reporting to us as our emerging scholar. We really appreciate it and we just want to mention that Jimmy is about to have his first baby and we are very excited for him, Matt and I. And when we were talking with Jimmy before this, Jimmy said you should do a special Listen and Learn series on creativity and parenting, which you might know that Matt and I have both written books about creativity and parenting in our own journey. So if you’re interested in those, we’ll put the links to those two books in our show notes and maybe an upcoming special version of the podcast. We will have an episode on that and we’ll bring Jimmy back and he can ask us all the questions about freedom parenting. But we’ll probably do that after Jimmy has had some sleep. So if you have a favorite episode from season 10. Think about who you might share it with that might enjoy it as much as you did.

Cyndi Burnett:
Thanks so much for joining us today. My name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood:
And my name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
You’ve been listening to the Feeling Creativity and education podcast hosted by Matthew Warwood and Cindy Burnett. Our creative producer is Catherine Fu. And this episode was made possible thanks to our sponsor, Curiosity to create.