Dr. Teresa Amabile:
Well, kids are going to make mistakes, and what you need is the equivalent of what we saw in some of these teams. And that is celebrating failure value, celebrating what you can learn from your mistakes, and saying, okay, we know this experiment didn’t work. It’s fine as long as we can go back and figure out what we did, what happened, and why, and that will inform the next experiment. The same thing is applicable in a classroom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matthew Worwood:
So let’s begin. Hello, and welcome back to our second part of our double espresso with Dr. Teresa Amabley. And in the previous episode, we explored nurturing creativity in children and Teresa’s famous work on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, as well as creativity in learning environments, which comes from Teresa’s work on creativity in context. But in this one, we’re going to look at the power of progress and the progress principle and finish up the episode looking at creativity in retirement. So let’s get going.

Cyndi Burnett:
So, Teresa, I want to talk about the progress principle, which introduced a key idea that small wins drive motivation and creativity. We’d love for you to explain this concept, and then we’d love to hear how this principle might be applied inside of classrooms.

Dr. Teresa Amabile:
So I did this research with grownups who were working inside corporations. So you’re asking me to make a leap here, but I will make it for you, Cindy and Matt. I will make. I want to just briefly describe a little bit about that research. We wanted to know what really happens inside people’s heads, where they’re trying to be creative every day in what they do in their work. So we figured the best way to get at that was to ask them to fill out a daily electronic diary. This is something called the experience sampling methodology. A daily electronic diary toward the end of their workday about their motivation that day and their emotions that day and their perceptions of their work environment that day, their work environment, their team, their managers, their organization, and even themselves.

Dr. Teresa Amabile:
So this combination of emotion, motivation, and perception is what we call inner work life. So you see here I’m moving beyond the single minded focus on motivation and how it affects creativity to looking also at emotion. And of course, perceptions of the work environment are about the social environment. If it’s kids, we’re talking about the classroom environment or the home environment. If it’s adults, we’re talking about their environment at work. So we studied primarily R and D teams, teams that were doing the most innovative creative work inside the organization, trying to come up with the next generation of products or processes, trying to solve the most complex client or customer problems. Their work could not succeed unless they were creative with it. So that’s what we defined as a creative project.

Dr. Teresa Amabile:
And we asked these 238 professionals, these were all knowledge workers, to send us this daily electronic diary every day for the entire course of their project, which on average was three to four months. We ended up with nearly 12,000 of these daily diaries. Each diary asked for just scale rated measures of various emotions today, intrinsic motivation today, extrinsic motivation today, and perceptions of the team and the organization that day. The most important question was briefly describe one event that occurred today that stands out in your mind. It can be anything at all, as long as it’s relevant to this work or this project. We had separate measures of each person’s creative contributions to the project and technical contributions to the project each month by their supervisor and their close colleagues. We found that of all the events that occurred that were positive at work, the single most prominent leading to positive inner work life was simply making progress in meaningful work. And those days and those weeks and those months when people were making progress, even small wins, even small seemingly trivial steps forward, that’s when they had the strongest intrinsic motivation toward their work.

Dr. Teresa Amabile:
That’s when they had the most positive emotions and the most positive perceptions of their work environment. That’s the progress principle. And then we found that on those days, in those weeks and those months when people had the most positive inner work life, that is when they did their most creative and productive work and when they were most committed to the project and they were better colleagues to each other. So you can see that there’s a feedback loop here. You make progress, even if it’s incremental progress, and that enhances inner work life, which of course includes intrinsic motivation. And as you enhance inner work life, that further fuels progress, that fuels creative productive progress. So we did see some of these positive spirals going on in some of the 26 teams that we studied. We also saw the opposite, unfortunately, death spirals.

Dr. Teresa Amabile:
Where there were events happening that led to very Negative inner work life, low levels of intrinsic motivation. And that was a detriment to performance, to creativity and productivity, which of course then fed into an even more negative inner work life. So how does this apply in a classroom? Let me just say these teams inside these companies were all experiencing setbacks. Of course, you don’t try anything new without experiencing setbacks. But what’s meaningful is that as long as you’re experiencing more progress than setbacks, you’re good in terms of intrinsic motivation and those positive spirals. Learning involves making mistakes. That’s something that’s so clear in so many of your podcasts and it’s known in creativity research and learning research. You learn by making mistakes very often.

Dr. Teresa Amabile:
Well, kids are going to make mistakes, and what you need is the equivalent of what we saw in some of these teams, and that is celebrating failure value, celebrating what you can learn from your mistakes, and saying, okay, we know this experiment didn’t work. It’s fine as long as we can go back and figure out what we did, what happened, and why, and that will inform the next experiment. The same thing is applicable in a classroom. Okay, so you had trouble with these math problems. Let’s figure out why, and let’s look at the ones that you had an easier time with. What were you doing there that you can learn from, and what were you doing in the ones where you made these mistakes, and what can you learn from that? So having that attitude that mistakes are to be learned from can take away the sting of setbacks and can lead to further progress. What’s important is to help kids see the progress that they are making in the classroom.

Matthew Worwood:
Do you want to bring more creative and critical thinking into your school? Look no further than our podcast sponsor, Curiosity to Create.

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:
To learn more, check out curiositytocreate.org or check out the links in the show notes for this episode.

Matthew Worwood:
I’m so sorry to go off script, but I feel a need to quickly ask this question. Teresa, we are really getting tight for time. We want to have a conversation about retirement, but before we do that, I can’t resist the temptation to just ask you about Gen AI, because it’s it. There’s the possibility that Gen AI may assist in you being able to make quicker progress and to a certain extent, maybe feel a little bit less connected to the outcome and therefore be able to feel less emotionally connected and therefore perhaps be better identifying mistakes. I mean, it’s. I feel like I’m a bit panicked with time and rush, but is this anything that’s being thought about? I mean, I’m not, I’m a centralist with AI. I’m not for or against it. But from the progress perspective, it just makes me wonder.

Matthew Worwood:
As a creative, you can see your outcomes a lot faster sometimes and then make modifications, et cetera.

Dr. Teresa Amabile:
You know, Matt, this is a question. I’m so glad you asked that. This is a question that I’ve been wondering about too. I wrote a little essay on creativity and AI back in 2019, I think, and I’m still wondering about the extent to which Gen AI can help creativity of people at all stages of life versus undermine. I don’t know the answer to that. I think that’s one of the areas in which we need a lot of vigorous research. It’s very exciting though. I think there is a potential, and I talked about this in this essay, there is a potential for Gen AI to support human creativity.

Dr. Teresa Amabile:
But I think if people begin to view the AI as a possible replacement, they’re going to feel competitive with the AI and it’s going to undermine their intrinsic motivation and their creativity. I think it depends a lot on how the AI shows up and what our attitudes are toward it.

Matthew Worwood:
I literally just wrote something very similar before coming on here building on your computational theory. But I’m going to stop now, otherwise I’m going to derail us. Cindy. Sorry.

Cyndi Burnett:
Well, Teresa, congratulations on your recent retirement and we’d love to hear about this new book that you’ve written around retirement and what you’ve learned in writing this book.

Dr. Teresa Amabile:
It’s based on 10 years of research with a wonderful research team, my four co authors. One of the most interesting things I learned in doing this research was that people are more satisfied in retirement to the extent that they had the opportunity to be creative in the final years of their career. Life satisfaction in retirement is more closely related, significantly related to creative opportunities in the last years of the career and it is not related to creative activity in retirement. Isn’t that surprising and interesting? So there’s a lesson here for organizations. Don’t sideline your older workers as they’re approaching retirement. Give them the opportunity to use those years decades of accumulated wisdom, knowledge, skill to engage in complex problems. Ideally with your younger generations of workers so that they can pass on that wisdom. Not only is that going to benefit the organization, but it’s gonna benefit those individuals who are retiring.

Dr. Teresa Amabile:
They’re gonna be happier in retirement. And I think from the interviews that we did, I think it’s because people are going to feel that they can kind of put a bow on, you know, they can wrap up their career and put a bow on it in a very satisfying way and then move on to the next phase of their life, rather than having lingering feelings of, oh, I guess I wasn’t that valued, and, you know, at the end of my career, I didn’t matter that much. I wasn’t as important in doing my work as I thought I might have been. I wasn’t making the kind of contribution I thought I was. People who leave the workforce with that attitude, we know are unhappy and have a more difficult time adjusting to retirement.

Cyndi Burnett:
I love that story, Teresa. And I really love this idea that people who are ready to complete their careers or move on to something else, or as you said in your book, cross the Bridge, that they continue to really emphasize their own creativity and take on those complex problems in the final years, because I think also they have that content knowledge to go with it, that they have this depth and breadth of understanding in their careers. And with the help of maybe a younger generation working side by side, they can mentor them as well, which is so powerful. So thank you so much for sharing your four books today, which we’ll link all in the show notes. Now, before you go, we ask every one of our guests if they would be willing to share their most creative educational experience, either formal or informal, that has happened at any stage of your life and what impact it had on you.

Dr. Teresa Amabile:
There were many to choose from, but I’m going to choose something that happened in my second to last year of grad school. I had done an initial experiment on creativity. I described it to you. It was the art parties that I had in my apartment complex with children. And I was excited by this. And my advisors, my graduate advisors, were pretty impressed by that experiment. And I told them, this is what I want to do. This is what I want to study.

Dr. Teresa Amabile:
I want to study creativity. Research before that had focused on creative personality and creative thinking techniques. I want to look at the effect of the social environment, the immediate social environment, on motivation and creativity. That was something that just wasn’t a thing. It hadn’t been done before. I said, I want to develop a social psychology of creativity. Creativity in the mid-1970s in psychology did not have a great reputation. It was a topic that very few people were working on.

Dr. Teresa Amabile:
There were a lot of methodological issues with some of the creativity research that had been done. And they tried to discourage me from doing it. They said, teresa, we think if anybody can do good research in this area, you can. But we really hope you’ll pick a different topic for your dissertation because you’re going to have an uphill battle. There’s very little research going on in this, and the field doesn’t really have a great methodological reputation right now. I thought about that for a few weeks, and I went back to them and I said, you know, isn’t this all the more reason to get some new research going with a new methodology, the science consensual assessment technique that I had developed for that first study? And if nobody’s doing the social psychology of creativity, isn’t that a reason to start doing it? And to their great credit, after that meeting, they said, go for it. And they could not have been more supportive. And they really engaged in brainstorming with me about the best design for my dissertation experience.

Dr. Teresa Amabile:
It was wonderful after that initial hesitation. So that’s my creative educational experience that I wanted to share with you and your wonderful audience members.

Cyndi Burnett:
I love that story so much because I think being someone in the field that has been. And Matt and I have both been working really hard. We’re almost at four years of this podcast. In fact, when this episode comes out, it’s been four years. And sometimes people ask us, like, why do you do this? It’s like, well, because this is important work. And it’s because of the scholars back in the 1970s, like yourself, Teresa, that said, we need to be doing this, and this is important. And so we have a lot of emerging scholars that listen to this podcast. So I hope.

Cyndi Burnett:
And I know. No, I know that you have inspired them today to keep doing this important work. And I’m so grateful for this double espresso that Matt and I had a chance to talk with you about your work. So thank you so much for coming on the show.

Dr. Teresa Amabile:
You’re so welcome, Cindy and Matt. It was wonderful fun for me to talk to you, and I hope that your audience gets a lot of value out of this double espresso.

Cyndi Burnett:
Thank you.

Matthew Worwood:
Well, to end There, my name’s Dr. Mattie Wirwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett. You’ve been listening to the Fueling Creativity and Education podcast, hosted by Matthew Word and Cindy Burnett. Our creative producer is Catherine Fu. Our editor is Sam Atkins, and this episode was made possible thanks to our sponsor, curiosity to.