Dr. Matthew Warwood:
What does it really mean to prepare students for the future of work? In a world where creativity, collaboration, and even AI partnerships are becoming essential skills, how can educators help students learn to define problems, ask better questions about the challenges they face? Hello, everyone. My name is Dr. Matthew Worwood.

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

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
This is the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast.

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

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

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

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
So let’s begin.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
Today we welcome to the show Dr. Ronnie Reiter Palman, who is the John Holland Distinguished professor of Industrial Organizational Psychology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Her research focuses on creativity and innovation in the workplace at the individual and team level, cognitive and social processes, creativity Measurement, Creativity in AI in Teams, and Creativity Skill Development. She has over 200 publications in leading journals and book chapters and has been in the field for almost 40 years. She is currently editing the APA Handbook on the Psychology of Creativity and has received the Arnheim Lifetime Achievement award from Division 10 of APA in 2024, where she is now the current president. So, Rani, welcome to the show.

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
So, so much of your research has focused on creativity and innovation within organizations. So today we’d love to explore how those insights might translate to the class, specifically what educators might do to prepare their students for the future of work in creative and collaborative organizations. So I want to start with an area you are very familiar with, which is problem identification and construction for educators who may not be familiar with this concept. Can you explain what this is and why developing the skill is so important for students who will one day be in these creative workplaces that you have been researching?

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
Sure thing. So when we talk about problem identification construction, we really are talking about that phase that precedes the idea generation. So a lot of people think about idea generation as sort of that core of creative problem solving. And it is, and it’s important. But how we frame the problem, what we think about, whether we even see a problem at all, is really critical for then providing a path toward a solution. And a great example I like to use in my presentations actually stole it from John Baer, so giving props to him. The problem is there are mice in my Basement. Well, I could think about the problem as how do I catch the mice? And that leads me to the path of a mousetrap.

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
But that doesn’t solve the problem of the mice that are coming into the basement from outside. So how can I seal my basement? Now I’m thinking about, okay, what do I need to do to cover all the cracks and so on. You could see how framing the question leads me in a different direction. And if I only use one frame or the other, my solution is not complete. This is an example of a problem that is very simple and the ideas are not original. Right. So it’s not creative, but it tells you something about how to frame a problem and the importance it has on coming up with solutions.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
I think that’s a great example because it also speaks to the creativity in the problem identification process. Because it might be that you say, okay, well, what other things have I ever considered? Making money from a mice circus, right? How might I better accommodate these mice so they benefit me from a financial perspective. I doubt anyone right now listening wants to do that. But it is still potentially an idea that has yet to be explored. And so sometimes just identifying a new unique perspective of existing problems is also part of that creative process. But also in the classroom environment, this is why having open ended questions versus not open ended questions are so important. So that problem identification process isn’t necessarily always going to be there in every classroom is, or at least the opportunities for that.

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
Yes, that is correct. And the other thing that we find is that people tend to not focus on this process, they tend to engage in it very automatically. So, oh, I’ve seen this problem before, this is how I solve it. So it’s not that the process doesn’t happen. We don’t realize it’s happening and we’re right into solution right at that point. So we don’t even take the time to think about what this problem means. Can I think about it from different perspectives? And sometimes all you need is just a five minute pause. Let me think about how I can think about this problem from different perspectives before I proceed to solutions.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
And one of the areas you’ve written about building on that is around empathy and empathy and problem solving and problem identification. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
Sure. So again, when you think about, oh, let me think about the problem from multiple perspectives, that right there tells you that taking these perspectives and thinking about them in an empathetic way, right, where we can put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes. So if we take an organizational Problem. I may be thinking about it from my perspective of working on this particular product, but I need to think about, okay, this product needs to be marketed. So what would a marketing professional think? Actually, I need to go to the plant and make it. What are the logistics of getting the product to market? And so on. So we all have our own perspectives based on our role, our job, based on our past education. But thinking about the problem from multiple perspectives is not just this, okay, let me think about kind of tried and true.

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
Oh, I need to think like a marketing person. But really putting ourselves in their shoes makes for a much more coherent whole view of the problem.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
And it makes me think about the classroom. So, Matt, I’m gonna put you on the spot. Can you come up with a challenge a teacher might have in the classroom?

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
I mean, you’re putting me on the spot a lot this season, just so you know. But I like it, I like it. Gotta deal with the discomfort. I would say at the moment I’m thinking about a writing assignment. I simply go about and ask my students to identify any digital media artifact that they want and task them with going and forming a critical perspective about that digital media artifact. And my hope is that they create an essay that is not one of my examples. And it’s unique to them and speaks to their world and how they’re seeing the problem.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
And I also wonder, Matt, if it would be interesting to see it going back to the different perspective piece, because I love this and I use a tool called Portable Think Tank where you think about it from the perspective of just 10 random people. So an alien, the president, a small child, big bird, that sort of thing. So I wonder, Matt, if you gave them that and you said, look at this problem from different perspectives, what it might look like.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
Well, I think what’s fascinating with that question, Cindy, first of all, it could be that we’re thinking about a problem from the perspective of me as an educator in the classroom. So an instructional problem. And sometimes they’re open ended, because I think we’re primarily talking about open ended questions where we’re talking about going through this problem identification process and going through a process of empathy. Not every single problem, particularly defined problems, are necessarily going to be conducive for that type of thinking.

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
This is not how I typically think. But by asking them to form a critical perspective, you’re forcing them to take different perspectives. Right? They can’t just say, oh, I’m doing this and this is so great, and that’s the end of the writing. They have to Think about it from different perspectives. I love it. But also potentially, here’s some criticism, here’s some issues, and that is where I think also creativity and critical thinking sort of intersect, right? Because if you don’t have the critical thinking, you’re not gonna get the creativity.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
That’s really interesting that you just positioned it with. If you don’t have the critical thinking, you don’t have the creativity. So let’s talk about that. Cause I always like to see creative thinking first and then critical thinking, but you just position it more like critical thinking and then creative thinking.

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
I think this comes from my organizational background. Because if you think about how creativity is important for organizations, we go back to Amabale’s definition of novelty and usefulness. And if the usefulness is not there, it doesn’t matter how novel it is. And that may or may not hold another context, but in a business environment, the usefulness needs to be there and the critical thinking plays into that.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
I love it. And I think that’s that judgment piece. This is what I find so fascinating when we have conversations about creativity and context, because you have to think critically about your context and understand different skill sets or approaches within the creative process that are actually conducive for that type of environment. And I have really, since we started this podcast, seen creativity as one thing and creative thinking as something else. Don’t think you can have creativity without critical thinking. And I don’t think it’s necessarily one comes before the after. I think they are so intertwined. And I think that Sel Shouk, actually, who we had on the show a couple of weeks ago, referenced that we’re always doing critical thinking when we’re kind of like evaluating the problem, when we’re evaluating ideas, when even the mousetrap, right.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
Like we’re having to think somewhat critically in order for us to identify what problem it is that we want to solve. And we might go about and engage creative thinking, which is what I said in that example. Oh, hold on. I’m going to pause on my critical thinking and I’m going to open it up and challenge myself to think about all the different things that I could do with mice in my basement. And then I’m going to go and generate lots of different ideas. I’m going to apply all these different things, but I’ve also got to think critically about the situation. Does that require creative thinking in that moment or that divergent thinking piece? Or do I have to go and deploy my existing knowledge, work out which information is most relevant, sort through it and then kind of like arrive at some conclusions or at least identify that problem. And I think a lot of that is critical thinking as well as creative thinking.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
But I know it’s been described to me that divergent thinking is creative thinking and convergent thinking is critical thinking. And we always say creativity is a combination of divergent and convergent thinking.

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
Yeah, I don’t think that divergent thinking is creative thinking necessarily. Because if our definition of creative thinking is novelty and usefulness. Right. You could have a lot of ideas and they’re really, really bad and not useful and not very original. If you think about the your typical divergent thinking test of uses for a brick, I could give you a list of 20 ideas that are fairly repetitive. Build a building, build a house, build a factory, build a hospital, build a school. I’ve seen those. There’s nothing novel there.

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
And so it’s not necessarily creative. And then you can ask people to generate ideas for solutions to a problem and generate a lot of them. And they’re going to come up with things that are very original but not feasible. Right. So a typical problem is there’s no parking on campus. Show me a campus that does have enough parking. Right. And at one point we got a student to say we should build parking structures on the moon.

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
Well, really original, but I’m not sure it’s technologically feasible. So you really need to have both. You need the divergent. But then the convergent piece comes in with, can we really do this? Is this feasible? We also see it just in the process of problem construction, because the typical manipulation that we do in research is asking people to restate the problem in as many different ways as they can. And in one of her studies, we then asked them to select the most important ones. The subgroup that selected the most important ones also performed better and was more creative than the group that just generated.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
And speaking of measurement of creativity, you mentioned the BRIC test, but you’ve also done some work around measuring creativity and using AI. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
So let me go back one step. So I really don’t like the BRIC task because as somebody that studies what comes out before and after idea generation. So I look at problem construction that happens before an idea evaluation and idea selection that comes after. That divergent thinking task just focuses on ideation, on idea generation. You don’t get the before and you don’t get the after. So what I have been doing throughout my career is using everyday types of problems. The reason I selected everyday types of problems is because one of the things that we do know about creativity is that in order to be creative, you have to have something, some degree of knowledge about the problem. Right.

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
If you’re going to give me a physics problem, I’m not going to be able to solve it, period, let alone be creative about it. So every types of problems that people have between friends and relationships and so on, work related problems that are very basic that most people have experienced either themselves or through friends, those are the kinds of problems that we typically use. And then we score the solutions that we get for how effective and feasible the solution is and how original it is. Right. So we have human raters do this evaluation using Imabile’s consensual assessment technique, which has been considered sort of the gold standard for years. It’s incredibly time consuming having people read through all these solutions. They’re usually not very long, they’re a paragraph. But still, you know, you have a study of 300 people, it’s, it takes time.

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
You need to train your raters, you need to calibrate the ratings. And over the last few years with AI, it started actually with AI scoring for divergent thinking tests like the uses, which is widely available now. And we’ve decided to look at whether that’s possible to do not with, you know, short sentences, but rather with a paragraph long solution. So we have trained AI using data we already have. So, you know, after close to 40 years of data collection, I have a lot of solutions to different kinds of problems, a variety of them that are already scored. And we found that AI can actually come up with a model that would score these solutions and provide a good approximation of what our human readers would do in seconds.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
That must make you very happy.

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
It does. We’re still working on it and refining it. It’s not as good as we would like, but we’re getting there. And it’s like all the work that I’ve done as a graduate student and work that my graduate students are doing, and a lot of my undergraduates are getting experience with that. All of that is not going to be needed in the relatively near future. And when I get calls from organizations and they go, we want to evaluate people before we hire them, we want to hire creative people. We need a measure. Well, none of the measures that we currently have are really effective from an organizational perspective.

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
Right. So you can ask them. There are measures of, if you ask for uses for a brick, again, it just focuses on ideation, not necessarily whether these are good ideas or not. We have measures of participation in different creative activities. If I’m hiring you as an engineer, do I really care if you write poetry? Not really. So none of the measures that we currently have are really great. Developing these sorts of questions that could be tailored for a specific organization or a specific occupation is really what organizations want. It’s also more legally defensible.

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
And that’s the aim at the end. So if we could have help in developing these ideas which we’re getting from AI, plus help in scoring them now, we could actually evaluate candidates for positions for creativity that is more meaningful to the organization.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
Just speaking to that a little bit. I think in the, in the best of times my questions are always overloaded and I think this one is going to be even more overload than the normally overloaded because I’m gonna have to kind of like share my thinking out loud. But I feel like there’s some domain specific type discussion happening around creativity. Right. If you’re going to be creative, you have to be really good at that domain. But with the use of AI, we’re also in that scenario where the other connection you’re making about like it’s got to have some value, it’s got to have some useful and come all the ideas we want. When that AI tool, as we know, generates those ideas which we, we’re seeing some research, talking about the homogeneous challenge and all the ideas sounding very similar, you’ve got to be an expert in that field to recognize that. Right.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
And if you don’t have that level of expertise, you might think it’s highly creative, but actually in your field it’s not. And one of the things that I’m getting a bit concerned about now is that that level of expertise that you’re going to have to have in order for you to use AI and really plot one of these ideas, even in the idea verification process. And right back to that, that defining the problem, you gotta know your field so well now to pull from that thread that you get from AI in order for you to start off with a problem that nobody else has covered before. I’m not even sure if AI can get us there. And so I’m really worried about our capacity to continue to produce that level of expertise that’s gonna be needed for the future.

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
Absolutely. So let me parse it out a little bit. So there are a couple of things. One is, you’re absolutely right. What we’re finding with AI and creativity is that it looks creative, but it isn’t necessarily creative. Right. We have a lot of homogeneity as you mentioned. So solutions are more similar to each other rather than different.

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
If we compare AI solutions to human generated solutions, we’re not getting the awful ones that we sometimes get from humans, but we’re not getting the brilliant ones either. They’re sort of all in the middle. If you think about how AI was developed, it’s a predictive tool, right? It’s. What is the next word that’s most logical? Well, by definition, that is going to constrain you to what is typical. A lot of our creative ideas come from seeing something that is atypical and asking questions, right? Think about penicillin, right? A phenomenon that many people said, oh, this is an error. Things are not growing in my petri dish, let me throw it away. And somebody said, wait a minute, here’s a question. Why is this happening? And we got penicillin out of it.

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
And AI can make a lot of connections between things if you ask the right questions, but then you need to sift through it and figure out which ones are worth following up. But a lot of the basic stuff that AI gives us is mediocre. I tell my students, if you want a good cp, AI will do it. Anything beyond that right now is not likely possible. The other piece, and that is the part that really worries me, is that we know learning is not an easy task when you’re learning new material. My advisor used to say, learning is painful. There’s truth to that. When you’re learning new material, when you’re a novice, it’s not fun.

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
You get eventually to that point, but you need to work at it. And right now, what a lot of students are doing is skipping that stage by using AI, so they will never get to that expertise level. And that worries me greatly. And then there’s some evidence, most recently in MIT Science study that found that not only does AI not help you develop expertise, it actually diminishes your critical thinking skills because you’re not practicing them. So it’s a double whammy. And would AI in the future be able to do all this stuff that humans could do? Right now? Maybe, maybe not. But right now it’s not capable of it. And you do have to check the information it provides.

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
It’s not particularly creative. It can help you. It can help you summarize papers, right? It can help you with existing knowledge, but right now it doesn’t move you to the next level. So I don’t know if I answered your question or if you had one in there, but.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
Well, no, you did, you did. And what you actually did is you set up what I was referencing to. So I’ll just come out and say my biggest concern. We’re going out and saying, let’s teach our students to use AI to help us identify topics, help us to think divergently, get us to evaluate convergent thinking. I’m sitting there and I’m like, to what extent are we offloading all of this creative and critical thinking? And even though, to your point, we have moved to middle of the road, so you’ve got some students that maybe now can have middle of the road ideas. I’m really concerned about all those students that typically have above middle of the road ideas suddenly now produce middle of the road ideas as well. But no one ever knows that they’re doing it because we get so dependent on all of these ideas. And so here’s where I’m sitting.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
You reference it. I don’t get how we get to that expertise because it’s not just the creative and critical thinking that’s happening. I’m not making a commitment to constructing knowledge, to making all these connections between the material and how I’m seeing the problem and how it connects to my experience and how it connects to what I want to do. All of that is how I construct my knowledge that takes me forward. I’m worried that everything’s going to be middle of the road in the future and we as educators. So that’s why I’ll go back to that very beginning question, that problem finding and how important that is. If we’re going to go and get students, for example, to craft a paper, I see a lot of teachers go on and say, well, I get the AI to create the outline. I tried that one month after OpenAI released ChatGPT, and I realized how much that was harming the creativity of my students.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
If you’re a teacher listening right now and you’re suddenly finding the fact that all of your assignments are coming in and they’re all sounding the same and similar. That’s really the challenge. That’s really the problem. Cindy we now need to think about constructing our assignments or at least doing something where we better facilitate the problem finding process so we can get our students starting off on problems that are actually truly creative and original takes to this assignment. And I think that problem finding, now we’ve got to spend a lot of time in our classes making sure that there’s some struggle and suffering as students try and work out what is it I have to do the pain piece.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
That you mentioned, Ronnie.

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
Yeah. Well, in going Back to that issue. We have to recognize that having a knowledge base is important. We can’t always Google our way out of it. Right. It’s just not going to work. So you have to have some basic knowledge and if you want to have that Pro C, you have to have expert level knowledge and it has to be in your brain, not in your computer.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
I’m going to shift now because I have a big question for you and only you can answer it, Ronnie, because you are the President of the APA Division 10. And for those of you who are listening that aren’t aware of what that is, it’s the Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts. And a quick plug, they’re having A conference, the APA Division 10 conference on March 12th through the 14th. And where is it? Where’s the conference?

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
It’s actually in Omaha, so.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
In Omaha?

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
Yeah, I’m helping organize. Oh, wonderful.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
And so we’ll link that conference in the show notes below. And so what I want to know from you is you’ve been in the field almost 40 years. You’re president of the American Psychological Association, Division 10. I don’t know if there’s anyone that has a better pulse on what’s happening in the field of creativity right now. So I would love to know from you, aside from AI, which we did just talk about, what is the biggest trend or something that you’re seeing in the field that’s emerging in 2025?

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
So there are a number of things. Team creativity is one. For many years we have not looked at it. It’s becoming more and more important, particularly for organizations where any cutting edge for the work that we do is done in teams and not by individuals. And typically teams with people with different backgrounds that complement each other. Creativity and education is a big, big topic. How do we teach creativity? How do we encourage students to be creative and so on. And creativity with constraints.

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
So interestingly, there are fields where constraints are really important, like engineering. Right. There’s a limit to how creative you could be when you’re building a bridge because it has to hold. It can’t be so creative that it falls apart. The military is interested in creativity, but again, there are constraints with the hierarchical structure of the military and rules of engagement and so forth. But this notion that unfortunately the wars of the future are not going to look like the wars that we fought before. So how do we manage creativity? With constraints, which is actually a very typical organizational issue as well. Creativity and medicine, same sort of thing.

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
Right. We need to come up with New drugs and new ways of treating people with certain diseases. But we have certain constraints. Right? Medications can’t kill you. So how do we manage creativity when we have those constraints is really important.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
All right, Rani. Well, our time is up, but we have really enjoyed this conversation with you, and we ask all of our guests, what was your most creative educational experience, either formal or informal, and why? And can you tell us a few of the details of this experience?

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
Yeah. You warned me this was coming, and I’m still not quite sure. I don’t know if it was creative per se, but it definitely gave me a different perspective. I’m going to go all the way back to high school to my teacher that taught me basically English. And he had a way of just talking about the writing and the different pieces and analyzing it that was really interesting. But what I remember is him coming in one day, and I can’t remember what the reason was, but it was one of those days where you really didn’t want to study. There. There was something happening.

Dr. Roni Reiter Palmon:
And instead of insisting that we needed to cover whatever it was that we read for that day, he basically had us all singing. I don’t know why it was singing, but, okay, we were. We were singing, but this ability to kind of shift and go, okay, I’m not going to be able to cover the topic. I’m not going to be able to teach the way I normally do. Let’s do something else completely different. It made him more human to me, and I really, you know, I don’t know. There was something about it that then made the class more meaningful as well.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
Love that human piece. Thank you.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
Well, Ronnie, it’s been a pleasure talking to you today, and I hope that you were able to put up with all of the different tangents that I went on, but I think some of the things that you share are really important, and you’re raising important questions that we have to continue to keep thinking about as we, as educators, bring AI into the classroom. We want to make sure it’s supporting and facilitating creative and critical thinking in our students and not undermining the development of those two really important skill sets associated with creativity. If you’ve enjoyed this conversation and want to dive deeper into topics around creativity research, visit our Science of creativity page@foldingcreativitypodcast.com for more inspiring episodes, resources and insights. And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast and sign up for our Extra Fuel newsletter to keep fueling your own creative teaching journey. My name is Dr. Matthew Werwood, and.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
My name is Dr. Cindy Burnett. This episode was produced by Cindy Bur Burnett and Matthew Warwood. Our podcast assistant is Anne Fernando and our editor is Sheikh Ah.