Matthew Worwood: We don’t talk enough on the show about reading and creativity, particularly at a time when so much attention is being given to the science of reading and structured approaches to literacy. That’s why we invited Greg McClure onto the show, who is a third-grade teacher who didn’t want to choose between the science of reading and the teaching of creativity, so he figured out how to do both. 


Matthew Worwood: And that’s where we’re gonna start in this episode, exploring what the science of reading looks like in Greg’s classroom, and importantly, where creativity fits within a structured literacy block. And this connects nicely to Be Deliberate, one of the ten actions we explore in our new book, The Future Creative: 10 Actions for Fueling Creativity in Education, which is now available on Amazon and other book retailers. 

Matthew Worwood: Now, in the second part of our interview, Greg then shifts gears and shares activities he’s developed to build creative thinking more broadly in his classroom. And one of these activities he ran live with Cindy and me when we were recording this episode, and it was an activity to teach students about the importance of clarifying a problem before jumping to solutions. 


Matthew Worwood: So here’s our episode with Greg McClure 


Matthew Worwood: Greg McClure is a third grade teacher who didn’t want to choose between the science of reading and the art of teaching creativity, so he figured out how to do both. We start there, what creativity actually looks like inside a structured literacy block. Then in the second part of our interview, Greg shifts gears and shares activities he’s developed to build creative thinking more broadly in his classroom, one of which he ran live with Cyndi and me on how to properly clarify a problem before jumping to solutions. 


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


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


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


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


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

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


Matthew Worwood: So let’s begin. 


Cyndi Burnett: Today we welcome to the show Greg McClure. Greg is an elementary educator and literacy specialist with a master’s in creativity and change leadership from SUNY Buffalo State University. 


Cyndi Burnett: For the past decade, he has taught first grade at Buffalo Academy of Science Charter School. He has led his school’s shift from balanced to the science of reading, and now serves as literacy specialist and gifted education coordinator for grades K through four. That reading work sparked a bigger question for Greg. 


Cyndi Burnett: Could creativity be taught with the same intentionality, explicitly modeled and woven into everyday instruction rather than treated as an add-on? Today, Greg is focused on turning creativity research into practical, joyful classroom practice across the entire school day. So Greg, welcome to the show. 


Greg McClure: Hi, Matthew, Cyndi, thank you so much for having me. 


Greg McClure: It’s a real joy to be here. As I said before, I am a massive fan of this podcast. It is on in my classroom, in my car, and it is something that I, I lean into to get a lot of spark for the work that I do in creativity in the classroom. So thank you for having me. 


Matthew Worwood: First of all, that’s awesome to hear. 


Matthew Worwood: Thank you so much, Greg. Mm-hmm. And, when Cyndi and I first started the podcast, we really kind of put our heads from where teachers are most likely to interact with it, and the car was one of them. 


Matthew Worwood: Put it this way, a lot of thought went into that when we was putting together the podcast. 


Greg McClure: I really appreciate that format, and it works great ’cause I have about a 20-minute drive to work. 


Greg McClure: So keep it going for me. 


Cyndi Burnett: So as you know because you’ve been listening to the podcast, we are really at Season 13 looking for- Mm … new conversations. Yeah. And one of the conversations we wanna have with you today is around reading because you have a background in the science of reading, and we wanna talk a little bit about the science of reading paired with creativity, but before we do that, can you tell us a little bit about- Mm 


Cyndi Burnett: what is the science of reading? 


Greg McClure: The balanced literacy and whole language literacy and then the science of reading are two different approaches to the same thing, which is to create liter- literacy in our students, right? Good readers, critical thinkers with great comprehension skills, and that is the goal of reading. 


Greg McClure: You learn how to read until you are reading to learn. So that’s a really important step in, in our schools, and it’s ob- obviously high priority, and there is no shortage of opinions when it comes to which approach is more effective. So the science of reading, if you will, is a, an approach to breaking down everything into a skill-based approach to literacy. 


Greg McClure: When I started teaching, we were more of a whole language balanced literacy approach. These are programs like Fountas and Pinnell, and these people were l- literally rock stars in literacy. When they would go to, speak, people would be lined up around stadiums to watch them and listen to them speak. 


Greg McClure: And so obviously with that sort of fandom, there’s a lot of people who just feel loyal to those programs and will stand by them till the day they retire. And then a new approach, and I say new, I should say that with an asterisk, because we’re talking about really an old approach coming back again, which is a phonics-based approach. 


Greg McClure: And that is to say that when we assume that the product of reading books was just giving children rich literature and they would become great readers, we sort of miss the fact that there was these invisible functions happening while they were interacting with the words of the books and sentences and the stories at whole. 


Greg McClure: So those things are like decoding, uh, orthographic mapping morphology, uh, understanding what a grapheme is versus a phoneme. I was charged at my school with leading the change from a balanced literacy to a science of reading, and I wanna be really honest about that. I met that with a little bit of resistance because I was having a lot of success in my classroom with growth and literacy. 


Greg McClure: And so I felt, “Well, why are you making me, change my approach if it’s working so well?” But when you zoomed out of my classroom and you looked at, the, the conversation at whole, statistically it was leaving a lot of students behind. Your good readers who were gonna be good readers were responding well to the balanced literacy, but your students who might be struggling with developmental delays dyslexia or any other type of phonemic issues were really struggling with this approach. 


Greg McClure: So we started to approach it with the science, right? Here is the first thing you’re gonna see. First you need to know what is the name of a letter. Then you can learn what sound does it make, right? Then you need to know how to put three letters together, CVC words, a consonant, a vowel, and a consonant. 


Greg McClure: And by the way, let’s learn what those are called, right? Let’s talk about what are vowels versus consonants, because that’s gonna matter later on when you learn that vowels have special rules, right? So all of these things start to build on each other, and we’re building, if you will, this pyramid, this triangle of competency when it comes to interacting with new challenging words. 


Greg McClure: Giving things language, giving words language, giving sounds language, giving rules language, naming them changed fundamentally my approach to teaching reading in the classroom. Suddenly my students were saying “Well, I know that’s a digraph but this, that digraph has an R at the end. What do we call that?” 


Greg McClure: Oh, that’s a trigraph. Right? Or that’s a triblend. And so great question. You noticed that. And so- … they became more interested in, in wanting to know more about language, know more about reading skills, and that was at the same time that I was in the program for creativity at Buffalo State, and I just could not help but see the connection between the two We have this, , future ahead of us, this challenge that is so worth our time of teaching creativity and giving our students time to learn about their own creativity. 


Greg McClure: And I could see very easily in early elementary struggling with the same thing in creativity, a balanced approach to creativity versus the science of creativity and getting lost in the nuances between the two of them. 

Matthew Worwood: So Greg, just to kind of go back a little bit, because I know this is something that I’ve heard teachers talk a little bit about, and I’m trying to connect the creativity piece here. 


Matthew Worwood: Am I right in thinking that our approach to reading best practices typically change? And am I right in thinking it kind of goes back and forth a little bit, and so teachers, to a certain extent, are constantly having to adapt their instruction in response to these changes? And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. 


Matthew Worwood: And, within that book, The Future Creative, one of our, our opening chapters, be deliberate. So I’m thinking about whether or not, are you, when these changes occur, are you going and seeing new opportunities to teach creativity in different ways because of those changes? Or you do, do you kind of like keep the same approach to teaching creativity with these changes occurring? 


Greg McClure: Every teacher is going to have a unique answer to this question, and that’s gonna depend on the district that they’re in. That’s gonna depend on their personal approach to the classroom. I don’t think it would be hard to find a teacher that says, “Well, I’ve been teaching literacy the same way for 30 years.” 


Greg McClure: But you will also find a lot of teachers who say, “I will never approach it the same from year to year to year,” constantly making changes and tweaks. The conversation that I’m sort of interested in is that a lot of people seem to pick a side. It’s a this or that conversation. Is it balanced literacy or is it the science of reading? 


Greg McClure: And they will sit in a room and go back and forth with which works better and why. They’ll also stand by literacy programs as if there’s just one that’s gonna save the world and create readers out of everybody. In my experience, none of that has ever been true. The answer has always been in the middle, and the answer has always been to figure out what’s working in balanced literacy and what’s working in the science of reading, and finding your own marriage between these skills based on your students in front of you, and what are they responding well to, and what skills are they needing, and which skills are working well for them. 


Greg McClure: So yes, Matt, that is the experience I’ve had that’s fundamentally changed me as a teacher when I think about teaching creativity if we think about whole language, right? As a creative aspect we’re talking about schools who say, “A school project. Let’s do a cool project out of this to show your learning.” 


Greg McClure: Or a teacher that says, “It’s okay, color outside the lines,” right? Like, yeah, like, I love that you colored like this wild and it’s abstract, and that’s cool. And that’s wonderful, but , on the other side of that we’re talking about teaching children about their own experience and divergent thinking and convergent thinking and giving tools a name like PPCO, right? 


Greg McClure: The positive po- potentials, challenges, and overcoming challenges. Literally naming that tool and that experience has changed the way that my students interact with creativity, problem-solving, and it’s something I’ve immediately seen them use. Not, it’s not theory, it is im- children are so curious and they’re so, enamored with new ideas, and they can’t wait to use them. 


Greg McClure: So I’ll give you an example. I had a group of third graders, and we did a little activity together through PPCO. I created a story called The Lemonade Stand, and in the story, a kid is having problems not selling any lemonade, setting up, failing. And so, , my group of students, we all ran through the positives. 


Greg McClure: What’s going well what are the good things happening? What are the potentials of this lemonade stand? What are the challenges that our character is facing, and how are we gonna overcome them? And it was awesome. I mean, just the conversation that we had f- so far surpassed what I thought third graders were capable of. 


Greg McClure: I was mind blown, literally thinking to myself, “I don’t know if my friends and I could have this productive of a conversation.” And the very next day two of those students ran up to me and couldn’t wait to share that they had used PPCO at recess that day. One of them was like, “Oh, well, I wanna play, I wanna do this outside.” 

Greg McClure: And the other said, “Well, I wanna go and do this outside.” And so th- they decided in this disagreement they were gonna run it through PPCO, and when they got to the potentials, they realized they both just wanted to spend time together, and they were, like, laughing hysterically. “We didn’t even need to get to the challenges because we just solved it at, for the potentials.” 


Greg McClure: And I think that’s, like, an incredible anecdotal story of how the science of creativity, giving something a name, giving it a strategy, can be immediately become a part of their life in how they are existing and, and performing i- in personal relationships as well as, I’m sure, in the educational aspects of their, schooling. 


Cyndi Burnett: Thank you for that example. And it sounds like you’re talking about a yes and. Mm-hmm. So it’s, yes, give them p- a project where they can lead independently or let them color the, the bird purple, and also give them the language around creativity. And Matt it reminds me of a conversation we had with another graduate from the creative studies program, Tonya Knudsen, who talked about using the language and giving students that language of creativity, which really they don’t often have. 


Cyndi Burnett: And even teachers aren’t given that language in, in teacher professional development programs, the, the language of creativity, even something as basic as divergent and convergent thinking. So what does that look like, aside from naming it? 


Greg McClure: Yeah, so that’s a tricky one and because y- you can’t get too lost in the weeds of teaching the science of creativity, let’s call it that, when you’re teaching literacy. So what we’re doing is we’re just introducing concepts of creativity into reading. So a great example might even just be pointing to reading a story and running our characters through PPCO, right? 


Greg McClure: And the amount of comprehension check-in you’re gonna get from that in your classroom alone is worth the activity. The students were gonna have to basically say, if we’re talking about, you know, Bloom’s Taxonomy, and they have to remember and understand and apply the students have to be able to remember, understand, and apply the characters, the settings, the problem, and po- potential resolutions to the story. 


Greg McClure: So if you’re looking for, like, more creative ways of engaging in checking for understanding, creativity might be the answer. It might be the most engaging answer to that problem or that question. An example of that might be, I was in a fourth-grade classroom pushing in. They were reading the book Hatchet. 


Greg McClure: And, , a wonderful teacher, had the students, all on the edge of their seats, but she paused, and she asked, checking for understanding “What can you guys tell me about Brian?” The main character, Brian. And there’s kind of like this lull in the room. That’s sort of a back pocket question, kind of a basic, ordinary question, and kind of the ones that we tend to fall on. 


Greg McClure: The quickest, it’s the easiest, it’s right there for you. So we use them. And a kid answers, raised their hands, “Well, I know this about him,” and a fact, a literal fact, a literal fact. And then I said, “I have a question. If Brian were to walk into this classroom right now, which… You know, you know everybody in the room. 


Greg McClure: Who do you think he’d really hit it off with? And tell me why.” . And you saw everybody kind of do the leaning forward to the leaning back motion, a natural little debate conversation sparked up. “Oh, well, we think he’d… Well, he’s, he’s kind of sarcastic. And he- we think he’d get along with Yasin, ’cause Yasin’s really funny. 


Greg McClure: And Yasin has a great sense of humor, and really curious. Oh, also, Yasin knows a lot about geog- geography, and he’s stuck in the wilderness, so they’d be able to talk about that.” Mm. So all of the sudden, this question started from “What can you tell me about Brian?” We’re really struggling to, to give you the answer that you want, to, “Here, answer this question that’s got no good answer except for whatever you’re thinking, and tell me what you know about Brian now.” 


Greg McClure: So those creative questions are really important in literacy. I think it was, Csikszentmihalyi, I remember reading a piece where they said, “The, the product of our solutions rarely exceeds the quality of our questions.” Mm. So meaning If you’re asking mediocre questions, please only expect mediocre answers, and do not put the onus of excellence on your students to go far andbo- above and beyond the question you just asked. 


Greg McClure: Because that’s a lot of weight to carry in a classroom for students who are mostly looking to just answer the correct way. And so when you a- ask great creative questions, you will get great creative, uh, answers, and they will probably check the boxes you need along the way. 


Matthew Worwood: Just going back a little bit to the reference to Bloom’s, and this idea of kind of understand and remember, and then you begin to apply and evaluate and eventually make your way up to create. 


Matthew Worwood: And it reminds us how creative the learning process really is. Mm. And to tie it back to reading, and, and I’ve written a chapter on this, is that when we’re engaging in reading, we’ve got that creative metacognition. And so all of these kind of new, unique connections that we’re making, that maybe nobody else is making, is a creative act. 


Matthew Worwood: And you know, and it falls within that bucket of, of mini C. And so when you ask, “Hey, if this character came into the room, who would they get on with and why?” That, that’s an example of creativity. Because if you were to get 11 of the same responses, I would argue in that moment- You may not be reaching the limits of creativity in your classroom environment. 


Matthew Worwood: Yeah. But if you can find a way of getting students to make unique connections as to why they say that this character will get on with Samantha as opposed to Brian, and you have 11 completely different responses- … that’s a great example of- Mm … mini-C creativity, perhaps- Mm … moving towards little-C creativity, while also at the same time demonstrating that comprehension, right? 


Matthew Worwood: That understanding of the material that they then applied to that question. So that strategy just then, I think is just a perfect example of that kind of be deliberate of teaching creativity, while within your domain teaching the science of reading. So I just wanna say- That’s amazing … kudos to that and- No. 


Matthew Worwood: Yeah … make those, those connections. 


Greg McClure: Yeah. Thank you. I, I couldn’t agree more. I also think to add on to that, we’re… When we talk about literacy a- we have to remember that teachers are beholden to curriculum, right? So the curriculum is seen to many as the gold standard. I gave a PD this last year about building more meaningful comprehension, experiences for our classrooms, and in that I challenged our teachers to think of curriculum as the safety net, not the gold standard. 


Greg McClure: Right? If you can’t do more, at least do this, what you see in this curriculum. But if you are capable of it, look at this curriculum and ask yourself- 


Cyndi Burnett: Mm … 


Greg McClure: how much higher can we go, and h- and how much more in- enjoyable can we make this? And creativity is a, largely the answer for me. If I could, also build on something I got from this podcast, another, anecdotal story. 


Greg McClure: I listened to the podcast about biomimicry, and I’m just, like, so enamored with this concept, uh, of th- making connections. I love forced connections. It gives me a lot of joy. 


Greg McClure: So I’m already forcing a connection between, okay, how can I use biomimicry in literacy education? And so again, this was around the same time I was in the classroom. We were on chapter five, right in the middle of that story, Hatchet. Brian crashes his plane, has a real rough 24, 48 hour, spoiler alert to anyone that hasn’t read Hatchet 


Greg McClure: And so, he plashes- he crashes the plane in the Canadian wilderness, and I ask the question “Knowing what we know about rivers what might a river teach Brian about solving his problem right now?” And so there was a pause, as you would expect. These are fourth graders, and they’re like, “Wait, what? 


Greg McClure: What do you mean a river?” And I’m like, “Think about a river. What do you know a river does?” And so a few kids start saying, “Oh, well, a river is constantly flowing. Brian ha- needs to get up and keep moving. He needs to, he needs to keep moving. He can’t, he can’t afford to slow down.” Another student said, “Well, rivers bend, and they curve, and they split up, so maybe if he tries one thing, he can go back and try another.” 


Greg McClure: And an answer I wouldn’t have thought of, that was not on my mind, and so I’m like, “Yes, great.” You know, like, writing this down, like, ooh, good one. And then another s- kid was, like, very literal. “I think he should go fishing.” And you’re like, “Okay, yeah.” Like, that’s literally what he ended up doing, by the way. 


Greg McClure: He ended up fishing. And so I was instantly reminded that when it comes to, like, talking about literature, talking about literacy comprehension, You can be ambiguous with your questions, and you can ask wild… I mean, we talk about seeking wild ideas. Seek wild questions. Seek wild concepts, and connect them to the classroom, and see how much more fun it is to play in that space than it is to just extract information and then move on. 


Cyndi Burnett: That is so much fun, and I wanna give a shout-out because you mentioned the biomimicry episode. For those of you listening, if you haven’t heard that episode, it’s with Billie Almond, who’s an astrobiofuturist. 


Cyndi Burnett: So Greg, I know you mentioned to me that you have been building some classroom games and activities for creativity, and these are online? 


Greg McClure: Yeah. So I, I have a website breakoutbrains.com. Mm-hmm. Which started as a master’s thesis and project, has continued on to be, like, a huge source of motivation and, and joy for me. 


Greg McClure: And what I’ve done is, actually, there’s tools for teachers. Speaking of creative questions, I have a creative question lab- Mm … where you can insert things like fiction, nonfiction, the name of the book, the chapter that you’re on, the type of comprehension element that you wanna check in on. You can toggle them. 


Greg McClure: You can toggle which of Bloom’s you’re looking to, are we in the basic understanding- Mm … or are we retelling or are we applying and creating? And then it will generate as many questions as you want that are ordinary, and based on a, a ton of data that I have, uh, been just inputting in, creative questions when they come to me, it will adapt that ordinary question into a creative question. 


Cyndi Burnett: Thanks so much, Greg, and we will make sure we link that in the show notes. Now, Matt and I really like to participate in creative activities- Mm-hmm … and I think you have one planned for us. Is that correct? 


Greg McClure: Yes, I do. We’re going to play a little game today, okay? So this will be fun. Uh, the game is all about clarifying or asking for clarity. 


Greg McClure: And to do that, , we call the game Quest for Clarity. What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna give you a vague problem, a misleading problem, because that tends to be how we hear about problems, is someone, a emotional explanation of what’s going on in their life. 


Greg McClure: And then we find out, of course, by asking great clarifying questions, we can gather more data, and then we can understand what is the real problem. So here is our problem. Students are going to lunch, and they are saying, “Ugh, lunch is gross.” I would like you to ask me questions about lunch, about the gross lunch, until you have gathered enough data to maybe take a guess at what the real problem is. 


Cyndi Burnett: You have healthy foods at lunch? 


Greg McClure: Yeah, the foods are pretty healthy. 


Matthew Worwood: You tend to have the same menu repeating again and again? 


Greg McClure: Uh, be a little… Could you be a little more specific, Matthew, about that? 


Matthew Worwood: Um, so do we always have pizza on a Monday, and then burgers on a Tuesday, and then a sandwich on a Wednesday, grilled cheese on a Wednesday? 


Greg McClure: That’s great. No, they do change things up. However, I love the direction of your questioning on that question. 


Cyndi Burnett: Are there desserts at lunch? 


Greg McClure: G- ordinary desserts that you might find, but you’ve gotta eat your lunch first before you can have your dessert, of course. 


Matthew Worwood: And out of curiosity, how long does lunch take, and is it typically part of recess? 


Greg McClure: Ooh, that’s a good question. Lunch is standard at this school, 20 minutes to eat your lunch and 25 minutes for recess. 


Matthew Worwood: What happens if I take longer than 20 minutes to eat my lunch? 


Greg McClure: That’s a good question. I suppose it would depend on the teacher in the classroom. Maybe they’ll give you more time or maybe they’ll ask you to finish up quickly. 


Cyndi Burnett: Is the food made fresh? 


Greg McClure: The food is made fresh by actually very talented lunch staff And if I could bring you back to your question, Matthew, I really like the question you asked me about whether or not the food tends to be the same every single week 


Matthew Worwood: Do I get a choice of what food I get to eat on those days? 


Greg McClure: Good question. You don’t get a choice. You just get to eat whatever they serve you. 


Matthew Worwood: Do I also get a choice on who I sit with? 


Greg McClure: You do have a choice of who you sit with, yes 


Cyndi Burnett: You have a choice of how much you get 


Greg McClure: Uh, just a standard portion from the lunch room 


Cyndi Burnett: What if I don’t like what I get? 


Greg McClure: Oh, unfortunately you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit, as we say in elementary school 


Cyndi Burnett: Ah, Pinkalicious 


Matthew Worwood: And then obviously if I’m, if I just had pizza on the Sunday, I’ve gotta have it again on the Monday even if the pizza’s not as good as my grandmother’s 


Greg McClure: That’s correct, yeah 


Cyndi Burnett: So I, I would… 


Cyndi Burnett: Can I guess what the problem is? 


Greg McClure: You sure can 


Cyndi Burnett: That there’s no choice 


Greg McClure: Choice is a, is a problem, but it’s not our primary main problem 


Cyndi Burnett: Okay 


Matthew Worwood: Um, is the, does the food stay warm throughout, or is it the ones that get the latter tend to get colder food? 


Greg McClure: Another great question. It’s served warm every day. 


Greg McClure: Would you like to hear of some of the types of food that they h- they serve? 


Cyndi Burnett: Sure. Is it all carbohydrates and starchy? 


Greg McClure: Ooh, it is actually very carby, yes, and starchy, for sure. Lunch- Okay, so there’s no 


Cyndi Burnett: variation. 


Greg McClure: That’s correct. Students- That’s 


Matthew Worwood: gross. 


Greg McClure: Yeah. Food’s gross. I, 


Cyndi Burnett: I’m finding that icky. 


Matthew Worwood: Yeah. 


Matthew Worwood: We’re- I’m sorry. 


Greg McClure: Great 


Matthew Worwood: This is gross. I don’t wanna be here right now. 


Greg McClure: Yeah. So- 


Matthew Worwood: What about my friends have got packed lunch. They’ve got nice sandwiches- Oh, they’re living large … 


Greg McClure: and chips. Yeah. Oh- Yeah … they’re living large, and they’re eating slowly, and they’re making sure you see them open their sandwich, and yeah. 


Greg McClure: No so obviously, our issue is repetition of actual ingredients, right? So the students are not really responding to whether or not the food is gross. They’re
responding to fatigue of ingredients. 


Matthew Worwood: I think what’s really important there is that Cyndi and I, First of all, I didn’t know that we was doing a challenge, so I always get nervous. 


Matthew Worwood: And one of the things that I performed, I typically perform badly on the creativity challenges on this podcast. And I go away thinking, “I shouldn’t be allowed to do this podcast.” 


Greg McClure: Yeah. 


Matthew Worwood: So I went into divergent thinking mode. Cyndi, I know, goes into divergent thinking mode, and then I found myself trying to generate, I wanna say wild and wacky ideas but ideas- 


Matthew Worwood: that are completely, maybe not on point, and there’s always that judgment factor that comes in a little bit. But what I found fascinating is, as I reflect, Cyndi and I probably drifted away from this food is gross and found ourselves trying to think about things not related to the food. 


Matthew Worwood: But the most obvious questions were connected to the food at the beginning. You allowed us, you gave us some room to do that, but there was a point where you also redirected us back, and you redirected us back on one of our own questions as well. So- Mm-hmm. Yeah … I’m, I’m sure that’s in, in, in the toolkit as well, but that was- Yes. 


Matthew Worwood: Yeah … something that I noted. 


Greg McClure: I think the, the another big important takeaway for anyone is when you’re talking about clarifying problems or asking quality questions, every question is going to give you something, think of it as finding something in a dark room, uh, by lighting a candle, and every question you light is a little candle. 


Greg McClure: And it may not be close to what you’re looking for, but it will provide you with information. This question didn’t really help us get close to the answer, and that’s okay. It’s battleships, right? We we’re giving it a shot. We’re seeing if it lands. Yeah. And then the closer you get, and I say, “Ooh, I like that frame of question, Matthew.” 


Greg McClure: And then you say, “Okay. All right. It has something to do with scheduling, has something… We’re getting closer here. We’re getting warmer.” And so you can- Practice and learn to hone in on your clarifying questions based on that sort of hot/cold, uh, experience that you have when you’re asking questions, then I think we’re already we’re onto something there. 


Matthew Worwood: Also, I wanna just throw out there, I’ve gone into design thinking mode. But you then could go and then build on, and this is probably more middle schoolers, but there’s probably a reason why they’re only cooking those particular dishes as well, right? 


Matthew Worwood: Yes. And then that int- introduces a really interesting project around that. 


Greg McClure: You’re speaking my language. My experience in creativity, in creativity research, has always been oh, I think I can bridge this for children. 


Greg McClure: So you could see where a simple activity like this can be grown and scaffolded for older grade levels, adding complexity, adding layers, adding other elements of creativity as they learn that. 


Cyndi Burnett: This was a fabulous conversation, and I really enjoyed the activity. Yeah. And I’m still feeling a little lethargic from thinking about eating that much pasta in one week. 


Cyndi Burnett: So before you go, we ask all of our guests in the season, can you think of an educator who unlocked your creative potential, and who were they and how did they unlock it, and what was the outcome? 


Greg McClure: I am fortunate enough to have a list. I could list- Wow … educators. I feel like when you ask me that question, three, four, five names come to mind. 


Greg McClure: I’m gonna actually say, and this is not me scoring brownie points, my mom was a first grade teacher for over 30 years. And she was one of those teachers who would do the creativity, labs and the invention convention where she turned, recycled materials into new innovative products that the students came up with, essentially until 


Greg McClure: those things were taken out of her classroom by force, and curriculum. And she just adapted and found new ways to keep creativity in her classroom, and of course, she brought that home to my brother and I. She also is my number one champion and when it comes to pursuing these types of things. 


Greg McClure: You have to be a little naive to spend all of your time building tools that no one may ever use. And it’s, totally fine with me. I will build these tools because, … of , her voice saying, “If it brings you joy, go for it. And if you think this is good and useful, then who cares?” 


Greg McClure: Right? Like, let that be your legacy. Just build. Have fun, collaborate, and, um, I learned that all from her at a very early age moving forward. So, yeah, shout out, Mom. Ah. She’s listening. 


Matthew Worwood: Well, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast. 


Matthew Worwood: And if you liked this episode perhaps because of the conversation around the science of reading or even these wonderful, simple strategies of how we can offer questions to clarify problems, please share this with a friend or colleague who you think might be interested in doing something similar in their classroom. 


Matthew Worwood: And if you’re not already, please don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on YouTube or your favorite podcasting platform. My name’s Dr. Matthew Worwood. 


Cyndi Burnett: My name is Dr. Cyndi Burnett 


Cyndi Burnett: This episode was produced by Matthew Worwood and Cyndi Burnett. Our production assistant is Anne Fernando