Robert Sternberg:
One of the things you learn, especially as you get older, is that if you don’t exercise, your muscles atrophy. And you can sort of get away with it when you’re younger, but the older you get, the more you better go to that gym or find some way of, you know, staying in shape, whether it’s by running or walking or weightlifting or whatever you’re doing. Because it’s use it or lose it is true. And it’s not just for exercise. With exercise, you actually feel it. It’s the same for your brain. If you don’t use parts of it, you begin to lose it. That’s how pruning occurs in post infancy, that the parts that you don’t need are pruned.

Robert Sternberg:
They go away.

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

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

Cyndi Burnett:
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, be talking.

Cyndi Burnett:
With scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and exploring new perspectives of creativity, all with a.

Cyndi Burnett:
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.

Cyndi Burnett:
So let’s begin. Hello, and welcome back to our second double espresso episode with Dr. Robert Sternberg. In our first episode, if you were listening, you’ll know that we got into the weeds about a number of different theories that Dr. Sternberg has published throughout his long, distinguished career as a psychologist writing in the field of creativity. In this episode, we’re going to be looking toward the future of the field of creativity and talking about some of Bob’s more recent work.

Cyndi Burnett:
So, Bob, in our last episode, you brought up the fact that you just submitted an article around creativity. So would you like to share a little bit about what you submitted?

Robert Sternberg:
Yeah. But let me say one other thing first, if I may, which is relevant, and that is I mentioned in the last episode this 2018 triangular theory of creativity and the idea that creative people defy not only the crowd, other people. They’re not. They not only have the guts to go against what others do, but also they defy themselves. They’re willing to move on with their ideas, and they defy the zeitgeist, meaning they question the way things go on in the world. So that lasted for a couple years, which is good for me. And then I realized there’s something else wrong. And that is I had.

Robert Sternberg:
I have written a lot of papers on Teaching for Creativity. And I’ve written a book on it and I’ve edited books on it. And I realized that at the time I thought I was doing a really good thing. And then I changed my mind. I decided I’m not. I wasn’t doing such a good thing. And I’ll tell you why. Because the world is getting really screwy and an awful lot of creativity is being used for bad purposes.

Robert Sternberg:
You know, there are people who are bragging about, you know, well, we invented the latest glide bomb which can destroy even more people and travel hypersonically, so to make sure it destroys the people. And there are a lot of companies that are doing really bad things, social media companies that are addicting kids to social media and that are harming girls body images. And it’s. For them it’s all about clicks and profit. Google used to have as a motto something like, don’t do evil or don’t be evil. And then they got rid of it. And it seemed to me that that’s very symptomatic of what’s happening in not only Silicon Valley, but much of the world, that creativity is being more valued, but an awful lot of it is ill used. If you look at, you know, like, all right, we have creativity, but then we have horrible problems with climate change and we have problems with violence and wars and with the addictiveness of social media and with fentanyl and with pollution.

Robert Sternberg:
And so I started to say, well, you know, there’s just too many people. They, you give them a course on creativity and look at what they’re going to do with it. The wealth in our country is so crazily distributed that, you know, now these billionaires are going into space for a space junket while other people don’t have homes, they can’t eat. There’s nothing they can do for their kids. And I thought, like, wow, I mean, like, where is any sense of responsibility in the world today? And that got me into a new line of theorizing which I call transformational creativity, which, which sort of takes off from work on transformational leadership. And the idea was that most of the creativity, the trouble with what I was doing and what a lot of people were doing, is that an awful lot of the creativity, I think most of it is what I came to call transactional. It’s that you do something for me and I’ll do something for you and you do something for me. I mean, if you look at our schools, the schools are built around transactions.

Robert Sternberg:
You do well in school and we’ll put you in the gifted program. And if you do well in the gifted program, you’ll get better grades, and then maybe you’ll get into a better college or a better graduate school or law school. It’s tit for tat. We’ll do something for you, but then we expect you to do something for us. And then if you do something for us, for us, we’ll do a little more for you. Maybe we’ll give you a prize, or maybe we’ll put you in a higher track, or maybe we’ll write you a better recommendation. And in the business world, it’s no different. A lot of the creativity people are doing really bad things in Silicon Valley, say, but they’re paid really well, and even if they didn’t want to do them, they can’t move because they, you know, they have a kid and they have a house and the kids are in school and the kids have friends.

Robert Sternberg:
And it just gets to the point where I realized that teaching for creativity isn’t the way to go, because much of the way we’re teaching is this transactional kind of creativity. Tit for Tatum. You pay us off, we’ll pay you off. And it goes back and forth. And so transformational creativity is different. Transformational creativity is where you teach kids not only to be creative, but to be creative in a world that. To make the world better, to make the world a better place for you, but also for other people, to make some kind of positive, meaningful, and maybe enduring difference to the world. And I concluded that, yes, we should be teaching for creativity in the schools, but not in a way that pretends to be value neutral, because nothing is value neutral.

Robert Sternberg:
If you don’t teach value, someone else will be, and kids will get swept up. And it’s all about the money thing, which you see very much at the college level. I think it’s really important to teach for this kind of transformational creativity with the idea that you can make your life better by being creative, but also think some about combining creativity with aspects of wisdom where you try to make things better for others. And, you know, there’s so many ways you can do that, whether it’s in your job or in, you know, what you do outside your job. But that is sort of what. So I’ve edited a book with Sarah Kirami on transformational creativity. I’ve written some papers on it, but I think the most important today, and these are all 2020. I started doing this work, I think, in 2021, and it continues through now the end of 2024.

Robert Sternberg:
And so what we’re trying to do is get a group of people who believe in the idea that creativity should be used for good purposes, that too much of it’s being used for violence or for pollution or for things that actually make global climate change worse. And we in the schools have a responsibility to teach kids to use it. Well, I did a study which I published a few years ago. I looked at reading primers in 1900. These are, you know, the basal readers. I looked at 1900 basal readers, and I looked at 1950s bezel readers, which were similar to the ones I did. Dick, Jane, and Sally. And then I looked at 2000 Basel readers.

Robert Sternberg:
And the results were really clear that as the years went on, less and less of the content in these basal readers for, like, first graders, second graders, less and less of the content was about how to be a moral person, how to be a good citizen, how to be somebody who contributes to society. And more and more was just test, like, skills that you’ll need to do well on achievement tests and SATs and ACTs. And I think that that direction is reflected in how the kids grow up. You know, Jennifer Jordan, when she was a graduate student of mine at Yale, did a study on moral awareness in business executives. And she found that the longer you were in business, the less moral awareness you had and the more your decisions were operational. They were about maximizing profits. And I don’t think it’s just in business. I think our society has shifted to being very instrumental.

Robert Sternberg:
So I think that somehow we. And I’m not saying we should go back to 1900 because a lot of those values weren’t particularly good. You know, the society was racist and xenophobic and sexist and misogynistic. But, you know, a lot of that’s coming back. I think, unfortunately, in today’s world, a lot of the bad values are coming back because we’re not teaching kids to think more critically about. When you’re creative, are you using this creativity to make things better for others beside just yourself or your family? So that’s one thing that I think is important. I know you interviewed James Kaufman, who is a former graduate student of mine and just a one. He was a wonderful student, and we have continued to collaborate over the years.

Robert Sternberg:
I think he’s one of the absolute top people in the field of creativity. I’m very proud to have had him as a student. And one of the. He just wrote a book called the Creativity Advantage, which I think is great. It’s about how creativity can make your life better. But one place where he and I differ, and he and I and Vlad Glaviano, who’s another young superstar, actually wrote an article on this. We have. It’s an article that each of us talks about our views and he thinks more in terms of how creativity can make your life better, whereas I think more in terms of, yeah, make your life better, but not at the expense of everyone else.

Robert Sternberg:
Be sure that as you’re making your life better, it’s not just about you. Because we can’t afford to become a society where, you know, this increase in narcissism, which psychological studies show begins to dominate our society, and everyone’s just out to make their life better by the expense of other people. So that’s sort of my view on one way in which the field should go, the importance of making the world a better place.

Cyndi Burnett:
Bob, I’m going to resist the temptation to follow up because I certainly hold your view. And actually, the transformational side of creativity that you’ve been writing about is the work that’s caught my attention a lot recently. And it’s something that I’m very passionate about. And I do think it’s something that we can actually bring into our classrooms. I don’t think it’s that difficult. I sometimes think about the entrepreneurial side coming from outside of America. One of the things that I recognize. See, now I have gone off on a tangent.

Cyndi Burnett:
I apologize. But one of the things I recognize is that within the US there’s a very much of an entrepreneurial culture. And I actually have come to value it. But it is very much about getting to the top. And I also think that it’s an impact on mental health, because before you know it, you’re beginning to identify. Identify how you deem yourself as being success, typically by monetary gain or being recognized. And then you have to judge that, right, because you can’t judge yourself. So now you look left and you look right and you begin to compare your success to other people’s success.

Cyndi Burnett:
And I just think that it leads to kind of really a negative, dark place, you know, but that entrepreneurial spirit, if you listen to it, it’s not. We like, for example, we could be teaching entrepreneurial spirit within the context of social entrepreneurialism and the idea of integrating it’s in things like design, thinking, empathy, as well as other type of change theories where you’re talking about the fact that what is the unintended consequences? So we can talk about this brilliant thing that we’re about to release into the world and how it’s going to address this problem and make lots of money. But then we can also talk about the unintended consequences. And I, I do hope that we talk a little bit about AI on the show, but I know time’s getting late, but once again, here we are with a new tool. It’s addressing a whole bunch of problems and we’re on our way to adopting in the classroom. A lot of us are getting excited. Some of us are saying, oh, I’m going to jump ahead and work out how I can master it to the extent I’m going to get monetary gain from it. But none of us are talking about the unintended consequences and the impact it might have on groups that might not actually benefit as much as we might benefit from it.

Cyndi Burnett:
And it’s incredibly frustrating. But to your point, and that’s the takeaway that I plan to bring the debrief, we should be teaching it, and we can, and I do believe this is something we can teach. We can.

Robert Sternberg:
I just had an argument with one of the students in my wisdom class Thursday, and he said, well, you know, you’re talking about all these problems in the world, but Steven Pinker says how the world has gotten better and, you know, there’s less violence and less crime and more this. And. And I said, yeah, I think that the world has gotten better for Harvard professors, but not just Harvard professors. It’s that if you look at means, averages, things really do look better. The problem in our societies is the tremendous variation within the societies. So for Pinker’s audience, which is probably mostly middle and upper class, mid, upper, middle and upper class people, the world has gotten better in many ways. But there are an awful lot of people who work at Walmart, who work as supermarket cashiers, who clean houses, who are doing plumbing, and, you know, they’re important, too. And for them, a lot of them aren’t paid a living wage and often the working conditions are bad.

Robert Sternberg:
My daughter Sarah, who’s a law professor at Duke, shows in her work how the legal system is utterly skewed toward the rich. I mean, if you’re wealthy in general, not always, you’re treated much better than if you’re poor. You know, like if you have a legal case, you can delay it and delay it again and delay it again and appeal it, and you can just keep it going indefinitely. Whereas if you’re poor, the screws turn tight very quickly. So I think that if you only look at the average and say, yeah, things are looking pretty good, but if you’re living in the Middle east right now, or if you’re living in Ukraine or if you’re looking living in Russia or other dictatorships, things don’t look so good at all. So I think what we need to be reflecting upon is that, you know, yeah, for the typical middle to upper middle class or especially upper class people in the US Things are going okay, but they’re not so okay. We really need ways to make the world better for everyone, not just people like ourselves. And I think both on the left and the right, politically and ideologically, people have become too concerned about people who look like me, who think like me, who have my religion or my skin color.

Robert Sternberg:
And when we think about the common good, it shouldn’t be common good just for people who are like us, but really for everybody. And I don’t see us doing that. There was just an article by David Brooks, op ed this morning in the New York Times about how both political parties have become kind of like religions, which I like the article because I’ve felt that way too. There’s sort of. You no longer see that many people who might vote this way or that way. They’ve become ideologically stuck. And we said an important part of creativity is not getting stuck, but as a society we’re getting stuck and so are a lot of other societies. So I think it’s really important that we take stock and not appeal just to sort of the far ends.

Robert Sternberg:
And our primary system is really horrible in that it makes it so that political candidates try to appeal to the extremes rather than the large majority of people in the middle. And we should talk about AI whenever you’re ready.

Cyndi Burnett:
Before we go to AI, I often get the question around the role of creativity in education. And given you’ve been in the field for 50 years, this was the number one question I wanted to ask you today. You’ve been in the field for 50 years. How have you seen the role of creativity in education change over that time period? Do you think, you know, Torrance wrote an article back in the 70s that it was a quiet humor. Creativity is a quiet time in education, but do you think it’s louder? Do you think it plays a role? Have we made the significant change that we’ve wanted to make, or is there a lot more to do? What recommendations would you make, particularly to those young academics listening?

Robert Sternberg:
Yeah, I just have to tell you something about the 50 years. First, I made a joke to my class. I was telling them about my son Seth, and I said, my son Seth, who’s 70 years old, is doing so, and I was waiting for the laughs. No one laughed. And I realized that if I made that joke 20 years ago, people would have laughed. But they figured, oh yeah, the guy’s, you know, he’s about a hundred. So it makes sense that it have a 30 year old son. So the 50 years, yeah, that is a long time.

Robert Sternberg:
And I’m showing my age with the wrinkles in my face, hopefully not in my mind. So how is creativity changed? I think it’s changed, but not necessarily in ways we would want. So when I was in school, no one pretended to care about creativity. And unfortunately, if you look at standardized tests in 2024, they’re not all that different from standardized tests from when I was a kid in the 1800s. And I know people will believe that given the wrinkles on my face, you know, they still don’t allow for creativity. I think that schools are a little bit more receptive to it, but not in the way you’d want necessarily. Some are, but some now talk about creativity, but it’s the kind of creativity that, you know, just don’t step on any feet, color within the lines and be as creative you want, but just make sure you, it’s no different being a professor. You’re allowed to do some wild coloring, just stay in the lines and don’t upset the apple cart.

Robert Sternberg:
So I think there’s more talking about it. But sometimes people say they want creativity as long as it doesn’t threaten them personally. And an awful lot of creativity is by its nature threatening. So I think that’s one problem. I think the second problem is that too often creativity has been in a service of financial gain. You know, an awful lot of very powerful companies are being creative, but in a very transactional way for the power of the CEOs or for their next space trip or to enhance shareholder value. And yeah, that’s the way business works. But I think that an awful lot of creativity is not for the benefit of the consumer, but rather for the benefit of the shareholders and the executives, and especially the top executives.

Robert Sternberg:
So I don’t think that that’s good. And the third problem is I think there’s more emphasis on creativity, but in a transactional way, the transaction, the creativity will get you. You need to be creative today and that’s the way you’re going to have a nice house and a nice car. I’m living a gated community and there’s nothing wrong with any of those things. But when it becomes transactional like that, instead of people thinking how can I use My creativity to make the world better for everyone. They think, how can I use it to make the world better for me? So I think creativity gets a more positive response in those three ways, but not necessarily the way I would like to see it, which is being more transformational and a worse problem, which we talk about, I talked about in my original articles on transformational creativity is pseudo transformational creativity, which we have a lot of leaders, but also other people who pretend to be transformational. I’m going to make life better for you. But it’s fake, it’s, it’s a fraud, it’s a ruse.

Robert Sternberg:
And really they only want to make life better for themselves. They want more money or more power or more fame or more glory or their kids to have more opportunities. You know, we’re at a point where social mobility in this country is in the toilet, really. And pseudo transformational creativity, the trouble is it frigging works. Gene Lippmann Blumen wrote a book called the Allure of Toxic Leaders. I think that’s what it’s called, or something close to that. And, and toxic leaders who are pseudo transformational, they’re appealing, they have simple solutions and they are charismatic and they sort of feel like someone you’d want to talk to over a beer. And they say, I’m for you.

Robert Sternberg:
And these politics, they’re for themselves, when in fact they’re only for themselves. So people find pseudo transformationally creative people appealing. And I say pseudo transformational, they are creative. They figure out, how do I reach this particular audience that I need the votes from. But it’s not really to be transformational for those people. The people are fooled. And this is why liberal arts is so important. Because the same thing has been going on since Greek and Roman times.

Robert Sternberg:
And if people took history seriously, if they studied it and learned from it, they would say, oh, this leader’s doing exactly the same thing that the pseudo transformational leaders and the fascist era leading up to World War II did. They’re doing the same thing in the lead up to World War I. And if you go back to the Roman Empire, the same thing they did then. So it’s really important to learn from history. And we’re not. And so we have in the United States and other countries, pseudo transformational so called populist leaders who pretend to be looking out for the people, but it’s always based on division. The one thing that always characterizes pseudo transformational leaders is it’s us against them always. And so it’s always, you know, this country is really yours.

Robert Sternberg:
And it’s being stolen from you, the jobs are being stolen from you. The money’s being alter. This is really our country. It’s not their country. These people are bringing in false religions. They’re stealing our drugs. It’s always the same deal. And it’s like, holy crap, it still works in 2024.

Robert Sternberg:
People believe this stuff, even though it’s the same sort of proto fascistic line that pseudo transformational leaders have used for years. We just wrote a paper that was published about a month ago called the Wonderland Model of Toxic Creative Leadership. It’s in the. It’s in the journal Possibility Studies in Society. And we actually go over what we call the Wonderland game. And the leader always said, I’m gonna, I’m gonna lead you to Wonderland. It’s like, it’s like a game. And here’s how you get there.

Robert Sternberg:
And it’s a. But it. You always have to be. You have to be with me. And if you’re not with me, you’re against me. And the others are enemies, and we have to vanquish them to make the world a good place. So that’s why so much emphasize real transformational creativity. Because too often people use their creativity in the service of pseudo transformational leaderships.

Robert Sternberg:
And even in dictatorships, of which there are quite a few in the world now, there are people using their creativity to make things better for the dictator and somehow convincing themselves that it’s really for them.

Cyndi Burnett:
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Cyndi Burnett:
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Cyndi Burnett:
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Cyndi Burnett:
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Cyndi Burnett:
So, Bob, we are getting a little bit tight for time, but we can’t move forward without having a brief conversation about artificial intelligence, probably specifically generative AI. So you’ve started to write a little bit on this topic, and it’s something that we’ve spoken about during the offtakes of today’s discussion. So why don’t you start off by just telling us your general take on generative AI? And I’m particularly interested both from a creativity perspective, but also from a Creativity perspective as it exists with nurturing creative potential in the classroom.

Robert Sternberg:
Yeah, well, my brief line is that I think generative AI has been really good for generative AI companies. It’s really making them a lot of money and if you have shares in them or if you’re a high level executive, you’re doing really well. But my view is this, one of the things you learn, especially as you get older, is that if you don’t exercise, your muscles atrophy. And you can sort of get away with it when you’re younger, but the older you get, the more you better go to that gym or find some way of staying in shape, whether it’s by running or walking or weightlifting or whatever you’re doing. Because use it or lose it is true. And it’s not just for exercise. With exercise you actually feel it. It’s the same for your brain.

Robert Sternberg:
If you don’t use parts of it, you begin to lose it. That’s how pruning occurs in post infancy, that the parts that you don’t need are pruned, they go away. And so what I’ve said in some of the papers, including one I wrote for you, Matthew, in a book you’re editing with James Kaufman, what I’ve said is that in some ways it can be okay. Like when computers took over computing, okay, you know, that’s not so bad because it’s too bad that now kids don’t know how to do statistical stuff by hand, but in a pinch they could learn how to do it. And it’s pretty routine work. And it’s something computers are really good at is computing fast. But people have law, they don’t know how to do these statistics. A lot of the kids don’t even know what the statistics techniques are doing.

Robert Sternberg:
They don’t know what the computer is doing. They’re just looking at outputs. With generative AI, I think the stakes are much higher because if you don’t use your creativity, you’ll lose that too. And there’s nothing society needs more than for people to be creative. And so as they ask more and more questions of generative AI, their ability to generate creative responses begins to atrophy. And not only do they lose the ability, they lose the attitude of being creative. They say this is something the computer can do. And even worse, they begin to think it’s their idea.

Robert Sternberg:
Just like, you know, if you do a statistical analysis by computer, you feel like you did the analysis even if you have no friggin clue what the computer did. Okay, that’s not the end of the world. But what about kids who are turning in papers written by AI and they really think it’s their paper? This is not hypothetical. I’m going to tell you what just happened to me within the last few days. So I gave my first quiz in my courses and I forbade the use of generative AI. And it was very clear in the test instructions and in the syllabus. And then we got the papers. This was a take home test.

Robert Sternberg:
And my TA reported there on one of the questions, many of the answers weren’t so good. So she said she looked up ChatGPT’s answer to that question and they had that answer and it was wrong. And so they were just writing down the, they’re not supposed to use it. They wrote down the wrong answer, they lost the points. But you know, even when there’s sanctions for using it, they did it anyway. So they’re becoming that dependent that it would risk the sanctions because that’s sort of, you know, being creative is a thing of the past. And I said, I wrote them an email last night, an announcement. I said, you know, I want you to know something that I asked ChatGPT to summarize my triangular theory of creativity.

Robert Sternberg:
And I got the answer and it summarized my triarchic theory of intelligence, but presented it as though it was my triangular theory of creativity. And it was very authoritative sounding. It was just totally wrong. And I said generative AI can give you an answer. It’s totally wrong and it doesn’t care. It doesn’t have a guilty conscience. It doesn’t feel like, geez, I shouldn’t have done this. So you really have to be careful.

Robert Sternberg:
I asked it to summarize James Kaufman’s book the Creativity Advantage. And the summary was totally trivial. I mean if a student did that kind of a summary, you know, the best they’d get is something in the 70s, it was just trivial. And so I really worry in the papers I’ve been writing have been much more detailed, but I really worry that people will lose their ability to be creative, they’ll lose their interest in being creative and even worse, they’ll start thinking that the AI products are theirs. And even worse than that, they’ll start if the AI can’t answer a question I’d like to answer, I’d like to answer, then I’ll just ask a different question until I can find one that the generative AI will answer. So their standards for creativity will begin to go down. So yeah, I’m really worried because I’ve seen it in my own classes, and this is at a good university. And, you know, I’m not here to blame the kids.

Robert Sternberg:
I think one of my fellow professors said, it doesn’t matter what you say in the test, it’s of us. They’re going to use generative AI because that’s what kids are doing these days. That’s where our society is going. And if we don’t do anything about it, and then we’ll reach. It’ll be like climate change. It’ll happen slowly and people will lose creativity. And the other thing we really have to worry about is that the AI can be programmed to favor specific ideologies, religious views, corporate views, whatever you want. You know, you assume that because it’s from the computer, it must be objective, but it’s totally false.

Robert Sternberg:
Any dictatorship is going to take over the generative AI from that country and turn it into politically supportive generative AI. It all depends on what you feed it. So often you don’t even know that the information you’re getting, which you think is somehow unbiased, is actually very biased toward the ideological views of whoever created it. So, yeah, I’m really worried.

Cyndi Burnett:
Well, I, I do want to throw a TED Talk into the latter part. There’s a great TED Talk that’s called the Truth About Unbiased Search Results. And the reason why I bring that up is it talks a little bit about. Google is past making decisions about what should and shouldn’t appear on its search results. And so that is in essence going to transition to AI. There’s decisions being made about what should and shouldn’t appear in the responses from AI. And another piece just to put out there that I can relate to is that reference. I use the word not overuse of AI.

Cyndi Burnett:
And what I’ve realized is it’s a fault on my end. But students don’t know what the overuse of AI is. And it’s really difficult at this time to in essence sanction the use of AI without the students really kind of knowing at what point am I offloading my learning right to me? And I. You said it earlier on slightly different context. But this transactional relationship that we have in education, if we simply have got a relationship where our students come to class, hand something in, and then we grade it, particularly just with a letter, then that transactional relationship, why should a student commit to learning in that moment? Because it’s the fastest and most efficient way to deliver the thing in which I’m going to obtain that letter grade. And I think that’s Where I’m really concerned about, because that transactional relationship is embedded, I think, particularly in higher education. And I’m not convinced there’s any learning. I mean, I would question whether some learning’s taking place anyway because I think we already live in a culture where some students will pay someone else to write their paper because there’s lots of online platforms to do that.

Cyndi Burnett:
And I think we’re also in a culture where students already don’t read material and therefore all they’re expressing is what they already know as opposed to expanding their knowledge because they’ve made a commitment to learning the material. So I think AI is going to make this existing culture. It’s basically going to exasperate the problems we already have. And I would argue going back to conformity and just asking questions. We’ve already seen the outcomes of our society from, from not asking questions, from not thinking critically, from not choosing to learn. And I’m really worried about the future from, from that perspective.

Robert Sternberg:
Yeah, I agree. Yeah, it’s. It makes it worse because you don’t even have to pay for someone else to write the papers. You can use generative AI for free.

Cyndi Burnett:
Well, Bob, I think, you know, trying to cover your 1800 publications and 50 years in the field is really hard to do in just an hour. But we are so grateful for your time and for giving us so much of your knowledge today. So thank you so much for coming on our show. Now, before you go, we ask every guest, what three tips would you give to educators to help them bring creativity into their classrooms? So what three tips would you give?

Robert Sternberg:
I would say tip number one would be that yes, you have to balance teaching for creativity with teaching practical things, but try to teach it in a creative way and encourage kids to be creative in learning. Because many. What we found in our research in the 1990s is for kids who are creatively inclined, they’ll actually do better on fact based tests as they learn in a creative way. Many kids just, that’s how they learn. So you’ll be better if you do some variation. If you do some more didactic teaching and some more creative teaching, you’ll actually be benefiting more different students who will then do better on any test that you give. So that would be number one, vary your teaching style. I think suggestion number two would be encourage kids to defy the crowd, the conventions and themselves and the world.

Robert Sternberg:
And don’t just say it, really reward it, not in just a contrary way, but in a way that’s novel and useful in a way that’s creative in a way, that’s constructive. Don’t just say you want that, but reward kids when they’re creative. Too many times we say we want kids to be creative until they do it. So that’s the second thing. And the third is to encourage good values. I know that teachers are almost afraid often to encourage good values, but I mean, who could be against making the world a better place? So give them real world activities to do where they think about, you know, what kinds of solutions. Can I come up with some of the problems that face the world or that face us in our school or in our community and think creatively about them and see if you can’t take the creativity away from the sort of torrents like, you know, what is an unusual use of a paper clip or complete destroy. Apply it to real world problems.

Cyndi Burnett:
So this would be my three absolute pleasure talking about. To Cindy’s point, we haven’t probably got through the 1800 plus papers, but it’s just, it’s just been wonderful sharing all of this and also talking a little bit about how it relates to the K through 12 classroom. Now, if you are an emerging scholar in the field of creativity, then please take this episode, share it with your classmates because I suspect there’s a lot that might spark some ideas in emerging scholars with their papers. And likewise, if you’ve got a colleague in your school building who’s really passionate about creativity and wants to learn more about creativity, then this is Robert Sternberg and this is an episode that they should be listening to. My name is Dr. Matthew and my.

Cyndi Burnett:
Name is Dr. Cindy Burnett. This episode was produced by Matthew Warwood and Cindy Burnett. Our podcast sponsor is Curiosity to Create and our editor is Sam Atkins.