John Cabra:
Not only developing these skills within your respective classroom, but these are skills they can transfer into other classes, their personal lives, and their professional lives as well. Like thinking of many options, right alternatives. How empowering is that for an individual that when they’re faced with a challenge to have much more from what you can choose from the menu as opposed to a short list of ideas that are true and tried and familiar. I’ve seen them before and not invigorating it at all.

Matthew Worwood:
Hello everyone. My name is Doctor Matthew Worwood.

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

Matthew Worwood:
So let’s begin. Hello and welcome to a special episode of the fuelling Creativity in Education podcast. And I say special because we finished our regular season and now moving into one off episodes which focus on a particular topic. And in this topic we will be looking at higher education. And I will be interviewing two special guests. Now, one of these special guests you already know, and that is my co host, Cindy Burnett. But her colleague, who she’s recently worked with on a new book, is Doctor John Kabra. John is a professor emeritus at the State University of New York and Buffalo State University’s center for Applied Imagination.

Matthew Worwood:
He also served as a visiting professor at two universities in Colombia. His work includes founding a non profit, supporting education reform in Myanmar and reshaping UNAB’s culture as a Fulbright scholar. He’s recognized for his teaching excellence and expertise in fostering interdisciplinary discussions with SUNY Chancellor’s award in teaching excellence. He’s the co author of organizational Creativity and the co author of infusing Creative Thinking into Higher Education, which is what we will be talking about a little bit on the show. And John also co authored infusing Creative Thinking into higher education with my co host, Cindy Burnett, who, as many of you know, is already the author of two other books focused on weaving creativity in the curriculum. So Cindy will actually not be my co host today. Instead, she will be a guest and I get to ask her all the questions. John, Cindy, welcome to the show.

Matthew Worwood:
So obviously, as I said at the very beginning, people are familiar with Cindy. She’s been serving as the co host of the podcast for a few years. But John, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background in creativity and how you found yourself teaching creativity specifically in the business context.

John Cabra:
So it was actually serendipitous that just happened to run into a guest speaker at a music history class. And I was just in awe and very intrigued by what he had to say with regard to the science of creativity. And so the way he presented himself was very dynamic and very engaging and very interactive. And I saw that and I said, this is different from what I’m accustomed to seeing in terms of how teachers present and teach their courses. And I said, I really want to know more, not only from a teaching perspective cause I was fascinating at the style and the approach, but the content was also fascinating to me. And so I was encouraged to pursue a minor degree in creative studies to complement my major in business studies. And so it was learning more about not only the science, but how these instructors taught the creativity in the classroom for creativity led me to make a shift in my direction for a career. And I saw opportunities with instruction.

John Cabra:
And so my first job after I graduated with my undergraduate degree was with Fisher Price choice as a bilingual specialist in teaching supervisors and managers for their operations in Mexico, but also for Quaker oats and also for people at headquarters. And I just wanted more of it. And so I did that for a handful of organizations and also for universities, for government.

Matthew Worwood:
Great. And im going to ask you a question before we kind of transition into the book, because you were talking a little bit about not only teaching creativity, but also using creativity. I think what you were alluding to in a more effective way as an instructional practice as well. And I certainly can say that two of my most favorite graduate courses were taught by one course was you, John. We was learning about creative problem solving, and you were teaching that in the virtual world. And it was just kind of like really fun to be playing around with this new technology and playing around with all these different activities while also learning about creative problem solving. And Cindy, the other class that I had was with you, and it was another wonderful class where you obviously infused a lot of creativity into that curriculum. So these two courses, I actually remember the content, but more importantly, I’ve got a really fond memory of them because they were just fun classes.

Matthew Worwood:
But not every university class is fun. I think there sometimes is a stereotype that it’s not fun. I think some instructors listening to this might, even if they’re honest, can sometimes struggle with engagement, sometimes struggle with students coming to class during really tough times of the year. And so I just wanted to spend some time talking a little bit about that. And so, John, given your background going in and working with organizations, could you talk a little bit about some of the challenges that you see when it comes to teaching within higher education?

John Cabra:
Yeah. So when I started in this field working for industry, there were workshops that were still delivered in the same way that you see with courses at a university and college level. Right. You have rows of desks, you have one way communication, and there’s very little interaction among the students. So the focus is really about disseminating information. And I just found that to be an unfortunate thing because there’s so much more you can extract from the students. Right. That can lead to better recall and much more interest and excitement around the topic area.

John Cabra:
And so, of course, having gone through courses involving greater problem solving at Buffalo State College as an undergraduate, I learned a lot about how things could be done differently. And so you mentioned about fun. Well, what I found, for example, is something as simple as bringing Lego as a way of getting people to take what they have understand in their heads, like the mental models that are created from what they read and converting that into a physical model they don’t even realize they’re playing. It’s just what they’re doing is trying to create metaphors and analogies to help make sense of the content that they actually got from a book or from a lesson. And so one of the things that I found fascinating, too, is that you will get much more or better recall when people start to integrate these types of activity that are deliberate in getting people to be much more creative as it relates to their learning.

Matthew Worwood:
Trey. And to build on that and also transition a little bit into the book that is about increasing engagement and perhaps using methods for creativity to improve instruction. But also, theres also opportunities to teach for creativity. Now, obviously, a lot of our listeners kind of understand some of the concepts that we quite often talk about. But I want you to imagine, Cindy or John, that Im new. Im in higher education. What do we mean by teaching creative thinking? And to me right now, lets make the assumption that I feel like its just an extra add on and ive got all this content that I have to teach and I dont want to do too much work. So could you kind of, like address some of that as well?

John Cabra:
The way that I approach it sometimes is that I get colleagues or teachers to tell me about their experience with teaching certain courses. You know, do you get a lot of excitement and enjoyment from teaching that topic area. And what I get sometimes is they don’t because either the students are not engaged, they’re not interactive, and so it’s like pulling teeth to get anything from students. And so I use that as an opportunity to say, look, here is a way that you might consider changing things up without putting into jeopardy. What is your learning objective? What’s your aim? Right. We’re just using, for example, a creativity skill to support that learning objective. And so once I’ve created some curiosity in terms of getting them to see that, hey, you can fall in love again with teaching and you can get students to be engaged in such a way that your hour or 2 hours with them is going to fly. Would that be something of interest to you just to augment what you already do? So that’s kind of like the approach that I take.

John Cabra:
I get them to share their stories with me in terms of teaching, but I also have it where they share their stories and they connect it to the affect. What’s the emotion that’s attached to how you feel about when you teach?

Cyndi Burnett:
So I’m going to build on that. Absolutely. We need to connect them to the emotion and the engagement. And what I would frame for educators in higher ed is that we need to look at what your learning objectives are because that’s first and foremost, we always want to make sure we’re meeting the learning objectives, but then what we’re going to do, and this is sort of the premise of the book, is we’re going to infuse a creative thinking skill, and I’ll talk about that in a minute, a creative thinking skill into the lesson so that it’s not going to add any more time. But instead we’re going to teach for creativity. So we’re going to teach students how to be more creative and we’re going to teach more creatively so that it’s more fun and engaging. So the process is sort of twofold. And let me give you an example.

Cyndi Burnett:
So we use a set of 20 creative thinking skills, and many of them come from the work of E. Paul Torrance, and these skills are known as the beyonder skills and they came from his research on people who went beyond in their fields. So I use a set of those skills as well as another subset of skills that are from the contemporary literature, tolerating ambiguity and mindfulness and embracing challenges and curiosity. And you take one of those skills. So let’s just take curiosity. How can you infuse curiosity into that lesson you’re teaching? So, Matt, let’s just take you through it really quickly. Can you give us a lesson that you don’t enjoy teaching?

Matthew Worwood:
Does it have to be a particular lesson? Because a lot of my work centers around projects. Of course I scaffold those. So there are lessons in between. I tell you what why research is important in order to inform the outline for a paper. I would say that I don’t enjoy that because I perceive that there is a resistance from students to go and engage in research to inform and outline. They just want to get going making their paper. They just want to get it over and done with. So that’s probably a sequence of lessons that I work toward.

Matthew Worwood:
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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 [00:12:13]:
To learn more, check out curiositytocreate.org or check out the links in the show notes for this episode. So let’s take one of the creativity skills. Let’s take curiosity. How can you get your students curious about the research before they even go and embark on it? Do you have any ideas?

Matthew Worwood:
What I try to do, and I don’t know if it’s effective, but I typically expose them to different topics. There’s different websites and resources they can go on that kind of provide you with different kind of critical perspectives to which you can take when you’re evaluating or critiquing a digital media object, for example. And then I also try and introduce some kind of divergent thinking tactics. More recently, I’ve also started playing around with generative AI to try and get them to pose questions of possible topics to which they might go and research. So these are some of the tactics that I’ve tried. And obviously my goal is to go and get them to identify a topic that they are curious about, that they’re passionate about. I quite often say that if you don’t find a topic that you’re passionate about, it’s going to be a difficult semester for you.

Cyndi Burnett:
So you’re already, and this is part of the book is a lot of these ideas came from other instructors, and what you’re describing is really producing. Consider many alternatives with the divergent thinking. So how do you get students to come up with lots of ideas. So what if to heighten that or to amplify your infusion of creativity, you were to get them to do a curiosity exercise right at the start. So generate as many questions you can about a pair of scissors, and they generate a list of questions. Okay, you just came up with. You just came up with 30 questions about a pair of scissors. You’ve been playing with scissors since you were in kindergarten.

Cyndi Burnett:
Now we’re going to pick a topic area. That topic area is artificial intelligence and the future of performing arts. How many questions can you and your group come up with about that topic area? And you get them generating on post its, and then you have them playing around with ideas and really getting them fully invested in both curiosity and in the process of research. Right. So then when you go, okay, now it’s time next week, I want you to incubate. I want you to bring ten post its with you to generate more questions you have. And when we come back, we’re going to start there.

John Cabra:
There’s a couple of things that when we are reflecting on the nature of how the class went. Right. I think you have to stay with that struggle to identify what is it about that course that didn’t quite sit with me? Why didn’t I reach that kind of flow state? Or how come it didn’t work the way I wished it had? And so you got to stay with it, because as you start to struggle with that, what starts to merge are clues that will align for what kind of creativity skill you can weave into it. For example, this happened just last week. I was, we’re looking for ways in which we can have students learn a certain topic. My colleagues who are teaching this course also want to utilize that opportunity to get feedback from the students as they start to improve this course. I introduced a tool called brainwriting, which is a silent way of generating the ideas. And people just keep exchanging ideas and building off those ideas.

John Cabra:
But what I kept hearing with this colleague, and this is like three times in two weeks that I kept hearing, is, we got to make it kinetic. We got to get them out of their seats because there’s a problem here. I hear the word kinetic and it comes like a pattern. I’ve heard it three times now. I’m thinking, what’s the creativity scope? Make it swing, make it ring, which is one of the creativity skills that you can weave into it. So what we did was we modified. Rather than have them sit and doing brainwriting and exchanging the sheets, why don’t we put the sheets up on a wall, like on a whiteboard, and have people exchange and go to the one station where there’s nobody standing in front of a sheet, and then you can do it that way. So that’s me thinking about pay attention to what’s the nag for the person, the struggle.

John Cabra:
And then that leads me to identify the creativity skill that I can weave to support his learning objective, if that makes sense. So what you share with me, that example is perfect because that’s what happens with a lot of teachers in terms of the struggle and the challenges.

Matthew Worwood:
And you know what I’m hearing in both of these responses, and obviously, I’m bringing in my knowledge of Torrence and the skill producing, consider many alternatives. But there probably is somewhat of an assumption when I go about my lesson that students already have that creative thinking skill. They already have the capacity to produce and consider many alternatives. But I certainly know that I’m not the only educator that sometimes expresses frustration when there is a lack of original ideas in the room and when. And when. Typically, students are always going by default to the first topic that comes to their minds. And then, of course, we wonder why we then struggle with motivation further down the line. And, in fact, that’s the reason why I got into creativity.

Matthew Worwood:
But that’s a creative thinking skill that I’m hearing. I could weave in that I’m going to go and target and actually try and develop in my students this specific skill, because if they have that skill, they will be better at actually generating all of the different questions that they could explore for their paper. But in addition to that, the idea of weaving in this creative thinking skill, what I’m also hearing when you’re talking, John, is actually a strategy, an instructional strategy. So it’s almost like there’s two different things happening here, right? Oh, my students aren’t engaged, or I want them to get up and move around a little bit. And so I was wondering if we can kind of separate these two. I mean, is it a case of, in your example, make it swing, make it ring, which is one of the skills I’m less familiar with, is that actually you’re going to develop that skill in students or in that example that you shared, is that the instructional strategy? Because that’s really fascinating here, that we’re potentially, obviously killing two birds with 1.

John Cabra:
St. And I’ve had this conversation with Cindy that what I’m doing for myself is extending what else I can draw from the goodness of weaving creativity into higher education. So it is. It is a strategy but it also uses a way of building curriculum or activities to actually augment it in terms of what I’m looking to meet as an end in mind.

Cyndi Burnett:
And I think it goes back to that notion of teaching creatively, which is a strategy and teaching for creativity. And I think what you said, Matt, is spot on in terms of looking at these things and thinking about how they are going to build these skills in our students. Because if we look at our k through twelve education and well, we’ve got eight seasons now to back us up in terms of in k through twelve, we’re not hitting the spot, the target of what we need to do in terms of teaching our students how to think creatively, critically, collaboratively. And so what we’re really trying to do is build those skills on top of those domain skills that we’re teaching them as part of our class.

John Cabra:
Yeah, and I would add to what Cindy said, that not only developing these skills within your respective classroom, but these are skills that can transfer into other classes, their personal lives and their professional lives as well. Like thinking of many options. Right. Alternative alternatives. How empowering is that for an individual that when they’re faced with a challenge, it’s to have much more from what you can choose from the menu as opposed to a short list of ideas that are true and tried and familiar. I’ve seen them before and not invigorating it at all. And so that transferring is happening and.

Matthew Worwood:
Just building on that idea that what you just said there, John, about like the transferring, whether it’s a competency or whether it’s a skill set, we in higher education typically reference the same life skills that we want to develop in our students as k through twelve does. You know, we talk about communication and we typically provide specific examples. We want our students to know how to write emails. We want our students to know how to stand up and communicate ideas effectively. We want them to have presentation skills, we want them to have interview skills, which will fall under the kind of like, you know, I put as communication. We want them to collaborate in groups, but probably what I don’t hear as much of is we also want them to think creatively. But we’ve got to remember, within higher education, we are still part of the system. The system doesn’t stop per se.

Matthew Worwood:
Right? So you have k through twelve, then you go into these two years or four year colleges going into the workplace. We’ve got to keep the momentum going and making sure that we are cultivating creative thinking skills. So here’s a question for you in regard to these skills. Again, I don’t know anything about this. I’m sitting around all these general education classes. You know, I’m thinking about lectures. I was talking to somebody at the university the other day, and I was asking about their classes. They told me they had 250 students that they teach.

Matthew Worwood:
Is there a certain context to which we can apply what it is that you’re promoting in your book, or are they more context specific where it’s more effective?

Cyndi Burnett:
So I have certainly worked with college professors that have hacked large groups, and you can absolutely integrate some of these skills in. Now, is it as easy to have them generating lots of ideas in small groups? Well, that takes additional facilitation, but there are certain things that you can certainly do with your students, playfulness and humor and practicing mindfulness and getting glimpses of the future and helping them put ideas into context, which are all part of the creativity skill set that you can integrate into large classroom sizes. So we do give examples on how to not only bring them into your regular classes, your virtual classes and your small size classes, your graduate classes, your research methods. We actually have 33 contributors. And, Matt, thank you for being one of our contributors from all different disciplines, sharing their examples across the board from all different disciplines and all different levels of higher education. So, you know, undergraduate community college, we have Clayton Rhodes, who’s one of our contributors, who teaches a class at the undergraduate level, and he talks about how he’s framed creativity into it. We’ve also had a group of professors from UNAB, which is a university that John works with, because the book’s going to be translated into Spanish. And John, you might want to just mention a few of them and some of the contributions they’ve made in the disciplines they’ve come from.

John Cabra:
Absolutely. And so UNAB is to give you some context around the La unercial de Bucaramanda, which is a university up in the north part of Colombia. They went through a, it was a five year project trying to change the culture to make UNab like the second creativity creative campus around the world. The first one, I believe, is in Sheridan, Sheridan College in Canada. And in the beginning, it was a challenging journey because you want to get, you’re asking people to change the way they teach and sometimes design, you know, in terms of their activities and their courses. But to cities place. What’s beautiful about, if you look at the number of contributors to the book, a lot of them are from. And so what that suggests to us is that they’ve seen the transformation that happens not only in the classroom, but also in themselves as teachers.

John Cabra:
These are doctors that teach their teaching professors. We have lawyers, we have people in business, we have people in education all across the discipline, because they made it as a priority bringing in the Toyota and canvation model as the pedagogy of choice for teachers in terms of their design and the delivery of courses. And so to the question that you raised earlier, Matthew, it doesn’t matter the demographics nor the size of the class. They were able to pull it off in all those kinds of contexts. I don’t know. I’m proud to say that the university, over that course of those five years, they improved in their ranking as one of the top innovative universities in the country of Columbia. And they attribute the work that they did, and not only they changed the system, you have to see it holistically in terms of changing the culture, but the torrent incubation model and being deliberate in weaving creativity skills into activities and into curriculum. They attribute that as the huge intervention to help move the needle on that dial in terms of innovation and it being innovative universities.

Matthew Worwood:
And I think some of the stuff we’ve just shared is very important to emphasize. We’re using the word deliberate. So this is a book that is going to teach higher education professors and instructors on how to be more deliberate in weaving creativity in the curriculum, both in terms of how they teach creatively, but also developing creative skills in their students. And we’ve spoken about why creativity obviously is an important skill that every single instructor wants to promote within their discipline. The other thing that I’ve heard both of you reference is the interdisciplinary aspect. So within all of these different contributors, they’re coming from different fields. And so it’s not the creativity. This is a type of book for faculty that might teach in the school of fine Arts.

Matthew Worwood:
For example, this is a book, as you referenced, John. You’ve got attorneys, you have people from the medical profession as well as educators that are utilizing these creative thinking skills. And so there’s not really a reason why anyone, if they’re not interested in, I mean, what I’m sitting at a, you might be interested in promoting more creative thinking in your students, right. And maybe you’re dealing with some of the problems that I sometimes see. Alternatively, you might be dealing with some instructional challenges around engagement, but through creativity and weaving creative thinking skills, as shared in this book, this provides you with a deliberate action to which you can do in order to address either of those two problems.

John Cabra:
Yeah. And I want to belabor this point, because in working with Cindy, I’ve learned a lot about myself, that as an instructor, there needs to be a sense of humility, meaning that I have to also go through an interpersonal challenge to get over any kind of blocks that get in the way of my own creativity. And so that also suggests that not only am I teaching students creativity skills, I, as an instructor, need to apply them myself when it comes down to building activities in curriculum as well. So there’s an interpersonal aspect of it. And then I’ve taken a huge takeaway for me has been the interpersonal journey of becoming a much better teacher so I can get out of the way of myself.

Matthew Worwood:
Okay, well, we’re getting very close to the end of the show. I do want to just touch very briefly that you’ve also integrated a little bit of generative AI into the book as well. And the reason why I referenced that is because we are going through a period of change right now. And even if I’m interested in. Okay, you know, I know a lot of faculty, for example, are concerned about generative AI or curious about how generative AI might inform how they go about instruction in the classroom. Talk a little bit about generative AI, the pieces that have, you know, found their way into the book.

John Cabra:
Yeah. So this is something that, in a conversation about developing a stronger book, Cindy had mentioned, we should really add something with regard to AI, artificial intelligence, to your point about this is something that’s not going to go away anytime soon. And so this is a reality. And I think that instructors need to also take consideration with regard to what they do in the classroom. And so one of the things that we recognize is that, hey, let’s start giving folks some ideas with regard to how to integrate that in the classroom. But I also believe with regard to how one can use it for engaging, like, creative thinking, creative problem solving. For example, I find myself using chat GBT, for example, let’s say I’m building a workshop design involving appreciable inquiry, which is a change methodology that looks at studying what works well. The creativity doesn’t go away on my part when I start training this AI on what I’m looking for it to generate.

John Cabra:
But where the creativity comes in is that I have to do a lot of editing and move things around to get it to where I need. I need it to be in terms of what I expect for design. And so I almost see AI as being a personal assistant. What it gives me as an output, it immediately starts prompting in me all these creative juices on how I can strengthen it even further for whatever workshop design or classroom design that makes sense.

Cyndi Burnett:
We also have in the book, Matt, a section for each of the skills that talks about infusing that skill using generative AI and how it might help support the process in the classroom.

Matthew Worwood [00:28:54]:
Fantastic. Well, we are getting a little bit tight for time. Cindy, you’re not allowed to answer this question. I think there’s a conflict of interest with this piece, you being our co host. So, John, I’m going to invite you to share with us three tips that our listeners can go away with thinking about when it comes to infusing creativity into the classroom.

John Cabra:
Sure. So I alluded to this point about staying with the struggle. Right. So whether the struggle involves trying to find a new way of doing an activity with students, I think being deliberate in staying the struggle allows the brain to start engaging what’s called an associative process, to make connections. And all of a sudden that leads to an aha moment. People tend to, unfortunately, some people tend to just give up that fight and give up that struggle and not give the brain the time to do its magic. That leads to the AHA moment. I think the other thing, too, is encourage students to be better risk takers.

John Cabra:
So look for ways in which you can take away what might be perceived, the negative consequences if they don’t do things right the first time, but get them to reflect on what are the opportunities that lay or lie behind. What if it doesn’t work out because there’s a lot of goodness there if you get them to think about what are the opportunities and the serendipity overcomes from not doing things we had expected. I think we live in a time where there’s so much information, there’s such a deluge of information. And I encourage people to use mind maps as a way of helping to make sense of things, because things are complex. When you use a tool like mind map, it helps people to make things much more manageable, and it tends to reduce the tension that comes from being overwhelmed with so much information. So those are my three things.

Matthew Worwood:
Now, before we go, I’m assuming that this book is available from all of the favorite online bookstores, particularly Amazon, is that right? Any other additional information to share about the book and how to access it?

Cyndi Burnett:
Yes, we will link it in the show notes, but you can pick it up on Amazon.

Matthew Worwood:
Well, I’ve really enjoyed this show. I’ve enjoyed having you, Cindy, as a guest, and of course, I’ve enjoyed having you, John. As I said, both of you were incredible instructors when I was taking your course. On these topics of teaching and infusing creativity into the curriculum. If you are in higher education and you’ve got a colleague who you think is interested or might benefit from learning more about how they a can teach more creatively by utilizing these skills, or potentially interested in cultivating these skills in students, please share it this episode with a colleague as well. Cindy, before we go, can I make the assumption that we can give one or two of these books away in the listen and learn series?

Cyndi Burnett:
Sure. Oh, that’s a great idea.

Matthew Worwood:
Thanks so much, John and Cindy. And I’m signing off. Doctor Matthew Worwood and Doctor Cindy Burnett.

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.