Jonathan Garra:
People talk about the three Rs of education, and typically that’s reading, writing, arithmetic. Three Rs of education are relationships. Relationships. Relationships like hands down. And I think research study after research study will show you that.

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

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.

Cyndi Burnett:
Creativity, 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.

Matthew Worwood:
So let’s begin. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast. In this episode, we dive into student readiness, trauma, informed teaching, and the differences between teaching creativity in independent and and public schools. If you’re interested in creating classrooms where all students feel empowered to take risks, this episode will share powerful insights and practical strategies you won’t want to miss.

Cyndi Burnett:
Today we welcome to the show my wonderful colleague and friend, Jonathan Guerra. John is a dedicated educator with 17 years of teaching experience, including 14 years in private schools and three years in urban public education. For the past eight years, he has also taught creativity to incoming freshmen in the Educational Opportunity Program at SUNY Buffalo State University. Jonathan is passionate about helping students become confident learners and creative thinkers. He focuses on making education more engaging, especially for students facing challenges like poverty and trauma. His experience in both independent and public schools, especially at the middle school level, gives him a unique perspective on how different learning environments prepare students for problem solving and success beyond the classroom. So, John, welcome to the show.

Jonathan Garra:
Oh my gosh, I’m so excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Cyndi Burnett:
So, John, can you share a bit about your background in education and what led you to focus on student readiness for learning?

Jonathan Garra:
Cindy? I’d say lived experience. I was like, you asked me that question and I flashback to like second grade me and not being the cookie cutter version of what an elementary student should look like being a kid with, you know, when I was in fourth grade, I think is when the first book about ADHD came out and I was diagnosed in fourth grade and I was at a private Catholic school, I wasn’t a fit. I never felt like a fit. And so I think just being a teacher who, who gets that a lot of kids aren’t a fit is really motivating for me and So I, I think it’s really about climate more than it’s about anything else. And, and that’s what I choose to focus on.

Cyndi Burnett:
So you’re looking at that as whole humans and you’re talking about the environment. So what for the teachers listening, what can they do from the moment those students walk in the room to prepare them to be ready for learning?

Jonathan Garra:
I think one of the simplest things is, you know, standing in the hallway at homeroom, at lockers, making sure to say, good morning. I can’t tell you how many teachers are, the first thing they say to a child is, take your hood off, you’re inside. How about, hey, good morning. Maybe consider taking your hood down, or maybe just wait three minutes until they get to their locker and hang up their hoodie. It doesn’t need to start with that conflict or that power struggle. It can just start with a greeting. And then I have, I don’t know, for a decade I’ve start, I start every class just with a check in. On a scale of 1 to 10, how do you feel today? Give me a word or phrase.

Jonathan Garra:
Sometimes we have more time to unpack that. And for me, what that’s about is it gives me an opportunity every single day to look each and every one of my students in the eye and say their name. Because, I mean, I think most classroom teachers know you don’t get that opportunity to interact with each student every day. So just making sure that they know they come into my classroom and they’re going to be seen. I think there’s some simple ways and then I think there’s a little bit more nuanced ways about trying to remember, like, what does this kid love to do? What do they do on the weekends? Did I follow up and check in if it was their birthday or if it looks like they got a new pair of shoes on, like, just making sure the kids feel seen. There’s a lot of really subtle, simple ways to do that that I think have huge impacts.

Cyndi Burnett:
And John, I just want to cite a story that you told me many years ago that you do in your classroom, which I frequently talk about with teachers, which is what you do those first two weeks of school with your middle school students. So can you share that with Matt and our audience?

Jonathan Garra:
Sure. And I’ll say it’s more difficult to do this in a public school. There’s a lot more sort of eyes watching that are more focused on content. But when I taught in independent school, the first two weeks were, I didn’t do any instruction content. It was all getting to know kids, making sure kids got to know me, just allowing them to get used to how my classroom procedures worked and how I talked. And sometimes I get really excited and talk really fast and, like, giving kids time to kind of adapt to that and get used to it. Anytime I’ve been asked about this, I feel like I. I had a student, seventh grade, we had just met days before, and I always did like, a.

Jonathan Garra:
A 20 questions, right? And so the rule with 20 questions was you can ask me any question you want, and I will answer it honestly. The only rule is it has to be a question that if I ask it back to you, you would also answer in front of the class. And I had a student, like, third day of the year, ask me the saddest day of my life. And so, like, there I am, third day of the school year with kids I’ve never met just, like, crying my eyes out about the saddest day of my life. And that, like, that doesn’t. That’s not a fit for everyone, right? Not everyone is going to share that much, but that’s a fit for my classroom. And it’s a way that I help establish an atmosphere and environment in my classroom that, like, listen, we’re all here. We’re all human.

Jonathan Garra:
We’re all going to make mistakes. We all need to see each other if we’re going to learn from each other. You know, I would always say, this isn’t my social studies class. What I want you to learn is almost not relevant. This has to be our social studies class. We have to unpack the things that you want to unpack. I have to understand what your perspective is, because then I’ll have a deeper understanding of what the issue is and what the topic is that we’re talking. So it has to be our shared class.

Jonathan Garra:
And a way to make that our shared class is to be a little bit vulnerable or a lot vulnerable.

Matthew Worwood:
Obviously, Cindy and I love this because One of our 10 actions is to build relationships. And by kind of having these types of conversations that we’re having now on the podcast, I’ve thought more about how might I be better at building relationships. And, you know, it seems small, but I didn’t know much about K pop a couple of years ago, but a student was writing about K Pop, so I became invested in trying to better understand K pop and this particular genre that they were incredibly passionate about. How much time do you think it takes every day or within your classroom to do these little strategies? Because we always hear about time being a Challenge. I certainly have found it hasn’t actually taken as much time as I thought it would do. But small things like tracking birthdays, is there a specific strategy that you could share on how you track birthdays? Make sure that you remember it and you say Happy Birthday when they come through the room.

Jonathan Garra:
There’s a lot in this question I want to try to unpack it first. I want to say you’d mentioned just building relationships, right? And people talk about the three Rs of education and typically that’s reading, writing, arithmetic. Three Rs of education are relationships, relationships, relationships like hands down. And I think research study after research study will show you that. So how to build and how much time does it take? And birthdays specifically. Each month I update the calendar, right? I have a huge whiteboard in my room and the whole whiteboard is a calendar. And it’s got days off on there, it’s got what letter day it is. But I also make sure to have student birthdays up there.

Jonathan Garra:
It’s a way that kids can see themselves in the classroom, but it’s also a really obvious reminder for me of whose birthday is on what day. And that’s so simple, right? I just, I go into the software program that our school uses for grading and attendance and all that and I can print out a full list of every kid’s birthday. So I just have that up on my filing cabinet. And when I do the new month’s calendar, I list birthdays. So simple for that names too is a great one. I think that’s a huge one. That’s when I really try to make a point to know kids names. And actually in my EOP class just this summer, I just had my kids write, you know, we were halfway through the class, it’s a three week class, so we were a week and a half in.

Jonathan Garra:
And I just asked kids to write a reflection on like what they learned and what their experience had been like. And I feel like I’ll never forget this kid, right? It’s 18 years old. Wrote, you learned all of our names by the end of the first class. And at that moment I knew that you actually cared about us. And that made me want to do better in this class. And I was like, holy cow. Like I’m not sure that I meant to be that deliberate about sending that message, but I think unconsciously I meant to be that deliberate, right? And she just made it a conscious thought for me. So that was pretty cool.

Jonathan Garra:
So I don’t know, I feel like there were other questions in there. That, that maybe I didn’t address.

Matthew Worwood:
No, you did. Relationships. Relationships. Relationships. Right. So you definitely addressed it there. And as I said, it might be that I’m overthinking it, but just listening to how you track birthdays and this little system that you’ve integrated, I bet you that in itself is huge. Because I certainly know that my boys appreciate when they go to school.

Matthew Worwood:
And over the tannoy it says, and it’s a happy birthday too. But the idea of walking into the classro and having this teacher say, oh, Jonathan, it’s your birthday today, isn’t it? And they turn around. Yeah, it is. I mean, that’s really cool. And I think it’s something that if you’re not doing it, I encourage you to think about how you might integrate these small little nuances into your strategy of building relationships in the classroom.

Jonathan Garra:
Agree.

Cyndi Burnett:
So, John, I want to talk about readiness for learning in relation to creativity because you’ve had two very different experiences, one in a private school and then one in an urban charter school as well as an urban public school. So can you tell us about readiness for learning and creativity within these different contexts? Because we talk a lot on the show about making sure that when you’re teaching creativity, you understand the social context in which you’re bringing it in. So I’d love to hear your perspective on that.

Jonathan Garra:
This might not be the biggest factor in readiness for learning, but it’s one I’ve been really hung up on lately. And it’s so simple and it’s one I have no control over is sleep. I think so many of our kids, I teach sixth grade this year, so 12 year olds who are on their phones in their beds past midnight, they’re not coming to school with a brain that’s ready to engage with anything useful. And so whether we’re doing creativity or, you know, whether we’re deliberately focused on a creativity skill or whether we’re just, you know, covering up previously the math concept that we did the day before. Their brains are not ready because they’re not sleeping. That is one that I am so hung up on. I used to think as a young teacher that I could stand in front of a classroom and point out which kid’s parents were going through a divorce. I thought I could point out those kids.

Jonathan Garra:
The sort of longer I’ve taught and the more I work with kids, I think it’s about sleep. And I think a lot of times those kids who I would have assumed were going through a divorce, maybe they were and they weren’t. Sleeping because of that. Or maybe they just weren’t sleeping right. I think sleep is maybe the single biggest factor that kids are in control over their parents as far as readiness for learning and creativity. And then I think on the, on the teacher end, it’s creating that environment right where you walk in and you know that you’re going to be accepted for who you are. I think that’s a huge factor for readiness for learning and creativity.

Matthew Worwood:
I have to interject with the sleep thing because I had a class last semester and students in my class are challenged to identify a problem and work to address that problem. And there was a whole bunch of different things that my engagement, attention. But they landed on sleep as one of the drivers towards what is perceived as a lack of engagement. And one of their solutions was to. And they’d actually gone engaged in research around this is to not allow students to submit work after 9pm Now I’ve started to implement that this semester, so I shared it with them. Hey, check out my new syllabus. You can’t submit work after 9pm already I’m getting some students that write emails to me around 8:55 and they say I’m going to need an extra 24 hours because as you said, you want me to prioritize sleep. I actually like that whether they’re going to sleep or not.

Matthew Worwood:
I don’t want to be the reason why they’re staying up late. And I also just. On another sidebar is when you were saying that you remember everybody’s names and you shared that story when you did it in one day, knowing your background of having four kids, I remember thinking how you, how you do with sleep. How did you do that? Because just as a sidebar, I struggled to remember names, even something small like remembering names when I’m struggling with sleep as well. So it’s not just the students. I think we as teachers need to be very sensitive and mindful of our sleep as well. So sorry for the sidebar, but I just want to emphasize that sleep this semester is something that I’m targeting and working to solve in my classroom as well.

Jonathan Garra:
I want to try to remember exactly what you said, but you said something about you didn’t say this, but maybe you implied that they could be lying to you about why they need the extra 24 hours. Right? Are they actually going to sleep? Are they not what’s actually happening? I think that’s a hard thing for teachers to give up that control. But I think it’s so important, right? Like I want to make this Point that if you tell me something, I’m going to believe you. And only you know if that’s truthful. Only you know if you’re taking advantage of me. And I’m going to back you up until you give me a reason not to. Right? If you say I need more time because you want me to prioritize sleep and that’s my obstacle, if that’s what you’re telling me, I have to accept it. I’m not generalizing this to all teachers, but this is my view on it.

Jonathan Garra:
Right. Quick side note, I can remember, like, being in elementary, in high school, and like, I still remember getting a certain feeling when I walked through different classroom doors. Right. I walk through the door to the English room and I feel a certain way. I walk through the room to the, through the door to the science room and I feel a certain way. So, like, my thing as an educator is you don’t have to like my subject, you don’t have to like the way I grade, you don’t have to like anything. But you’re going to walk through the door to my classroom and you’re going to feel a certain way. And me believing what you tell me is a huge part of that.

Jonathan Garra:
So if you’re going to tell me I don’t have my homework because this happened, I mean, I’m going to ask you, okay, how did you problem solve it? What were the ways that you tried to overcome that? But I am always going to give an extra shot until a kid like, blatantly gives me a reason to be like, you know what? This is too many infractions, or this was, you had so many other options you could have done it. But I’m always going to believe them. First, I think is sort of my default. It feels like maybe you said that with the sleep, but I don’t know, maybe that was an unnecessary tangent.

Matthew Worwood:
No, no, first of all, don’t worry about tangents. But the key point is just about building. It’s about building a relationship of trust. Right. So I’m very open. I will say to them, if that’s what you tell me, that’s fine. If it happens three, four times, then we have to have a conversation. And it’s not to do with whether I believe you or not.

Matthew Worwood:
It’s the fact that I can’t keep accommodating it.

Jonathan Garra:
Right, exactly. And I’m glad you said that because that’s what I meant to say, but because we’re really off script. And on that tangent, like, yes, there still has to Be okay. But this is still real life, and you still need to be held accountable. But what you’re telling me that you experienced, sure, I believe that. I buy into that. I realize that may have been real for you. But also, here’s the reality, and how do we balance both? And I think maybe that’s what you just said.

Matthew Worwood:
Well, before we transition to what I think is a really important conversation around your experience working in independent and public schools, I am seeing a trend with everything that we’ve been talking about, even though we’ve been kind of bouncing around and we haven’t quite got into the weeds of creativity. It sounds to me that you prioritize the soft skills, that it’s not just about the teaching of your subject. It’s about the fact that we are raising the next generation of professionals. We are raising the next generation of citizens, and building relationships, obviously important part of that. But even mentoring them in a way that says you need to prioritize sleep and so do I. And so it raises the question we’re more than just teaching the content. Right. We are, dare I say it, I like the word mentor as opposed to being parental in our behaviors, but we are mentoring as well, which is different than teaching.

Jonathan Garra:
Absolutely. When you said that word mentor, I immediately, like, my brain lit up. I think that’s absolutely a great way to say it. And thinking about being parental or you said something about raising children that, like, it takes a village to raise a child. Right. So think about how much time kids spend in school. What does it take to raise a classroom of 20 children who all have different needs and all have different things? And, you know, going back to something I said earlier, like, then why is the only measurable thing that schools are after is content acquisition? Like, we’re raising these kids, they’re spending more time with us than they’re spending with their families. I think we should be targeting other skills.

Jonathan Garra:
Sorry if that went off.

Matthew Worwood:
No, I mean, but that’s. That.

Cyndi Burnett:
That.

Matthew Worwood:
That’s been a debate in education. Right. Like, quite often we have a conversation about what is the goal of schooling. And typically, you’re going to land on supporting the workforce and preparing students for jobs. Now, to your point, we need content knowledge in order to address what are perceived or told by us by industry that there are a skill shortage. But at the same time, we still need to raise. I’m going to keep using the word children. You’re in middle school.

Matthew Worwood:
We still need to collectively raise children in a way that allows them to function and succeed in the world. Which isn’t always just about work.

Jonathan Garra:
Right.

Matthew Worwood:
It’s about relationships and raising families. And we don’t talk as much about that aspect of the education experience as we do about the workforce. And it’s just, it’s kind of really great to, you know, have this conversation with a teacher and to, and to hear that you’re doing that. And I know other educators are doing it as well. We just don’t talk enough about it.

Jonathan Garra:
Agree completely. Yeah.

Matthew Worwood:
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Cyndi Burnett:
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Matthew Worwood:
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Cyndi Burnett:
To learn more, check out curiositytocrereate.org or check out the links in the show notes for this episode. So, John, we’ve talked about sleep. I want to talk about other challenges that are the foundation of being human, as you mentioned earlier, such as hunger, neglect, and other forms of adversity. And I would like to know from you, what are some of the biggest challenges that educators face and that you faced when bringing creativity into classrooms with students that are experiencing these challenges?

Jonathan Garra:
Cindy, that’s a great question. The biggest challenges, maybe, maybe I’d change my answer if I had time to really digest. But I think honestly, a lack of training. I think teachers are taught how to deliver content, how to design a lesson plan. But I think, and this is sort of a common theme so far, but I think one of the single biggest things teachers need is trauma, informed care, training and awareness. And I mean, we think about. Can I. I don’t know what the podcast policy is on this, but I’d love to just reference a TED talk.

Jonathan Garra:
Sure. By Dr. Nadine Burke Harris Dr. Harris Burke Harris is a pediatrician. She starts her TED talk talking about ACEs adverse childhood experiences. And she opens it by saying, it’s brilliant. In the mid-90s, the CDC and Kaiser Permanente discovered an exposure that dramatically increased the risk for seven out of 10 of the leading causes of death in the United States. In high doses, this exposure affects brain development, the immune system, hormonal systems, and even the way our DNA is read and transcribed.

Jonathan Garra:
Folks who are exposed in very high doses have triple the lifetime risk of heart disease and lung cancer and a 20 year difference in life expectancy. And yet doctors today are not trained in routine screening or treatment. And the exposure I’m talking about is not a pesticide or a packaging chemical. It is childhood trauma. And so, like, forget pediatricians, like teachers every single day are working with classrooms full of kids with adverse childhood experiences and trauma and zero training on what to do about it. I can’t tell you how many times per day I see a teacher stand their ground against a misbehaving child. They stand their ground and they say, you will do this or else. Right? One of the biggest principles of trauma informed care is to provide choice.

Jonathan Garra:
And I think there’s a really nice kind of interweaving with creativity here, right? Cause I think one of the things that creativity does brilliantly is teach us to give ourselves choices. And trauma informed training is really about, okay, I’m in this position where I don’t feel safe and I am uncomfortable. What other choices do I have? And I think there’s a real opportunity to kind of weave trauma informed care with creativity in ways that will empower students and empower educators. But I, I just don’t hear those conversations being had and I don’t know what those answers are. I think it’s a conversation that is, that is so obvious to me that needs to be had and I just don’t hear anything about it. I really went on a tangent there with your, with your question, Cindy, but I think what teachers need is training in trauma informed care practices. I think that is the biggest challenge.

Cyndi Burnett:
So do you think that in trauma informed care practices. All right, so is that going to help build creativity in. Do you think creativity should be taught alongside with it as a means to work through the trauma? Is that how you see that relationship?

Jonathan Garra:
Again, I, I don’t, I, I’m not coming to you with answers about this. I sort of view this as a sort of chicken in the egg. Like, if we focus on trauma informed care, can we then supplement that with creativity? Or if we focus on creativity, are we helping trauma informed care practices? I think it’s probably a, both and Cindy, I don’t know. It’s a conversation that I feel like is, in my experience in creative circles and creative communities, it’s a conversation that like, doesn’t exist in those spaces. And like I said, it’s one that is so obvious to me that it needs to be had.

Cyndi Burnett:
So can you share some strategies or examples of how creativity can be used in the classroom as a tool for healing or empowerment in these educational settings?

Jonathan Garra:
So creativity Is a lot of things, right. I think when we think about the conversation of content general versus content specific also. Welcome to an interview with me. I don’t give a direct answer about anything. Sorry. Creativity is a lot of things. When we think about this conversation of is creativity content general, content specific. I think when we think of the Ruth Noller equation, right, Creativity is very content general.

Jonathan Garra:
It’s about a growth mindset. It’s about being open to new possibilities. But when we think about practical application and problem solving, I think it’s much more content specific. So I think there’s a lot of ways that that question could be answered. But I want to take it from the sort of content general Ruth Noller growth mindset perspective and like, maybe this is an answer to the question and feel free to tell me if it’s not, but I remember a specific situation where an 8th grader was goofing off in the auditorium during a presentation and two teachers were both all over this kid about how he had to move. And probably as a trauma response, the kid was just ignoring them. And the teachers were getting more and more and more and more agitated. And I hate stepping in in those situations.

Jonathan Garra:
But here I was like, I’ll make up a name. Listen, Chris, like, you staying in this seat is not going to be an option. You can sit over there, you can sit over there, you can come and sit next to me and like, we can hang out, or if you refuse to move, we can get administration involved. These are all choices you have. Cindy. I’m telling you, within five seconds, the kid moved like, because choices were given to him. And that, like I said, that is a major principle of trauma informed care. And it’s also, I think when you have a creative mindset and you have a growth mindset, it’s just sort of easier to develop those choices in the moment.

Jonathan Garra:
Hopefully that feels like an answer, but.

Matthew Worwood:
I think it also speaks again to that mentorship aspect. How has your experience working in independent schools versus public schools? Is it like one single practice that’s relevant, or are there different types of environments where perhaps certain types of mentorship feels more appropriate when compared to others?

Jonathan Garra:
I think there’s one single practice, and this is this. I’m not here to tell you this is the right answer, but this is my answer. I think there’s one single practice, and I think that’s authenticity. I think be who you are, be transparent about who you are and be consistent for kids. And I think that’s going to work in any environment.

Cyndi Burnett:
So, John, you have Taught in both independent schools and urban public schools. So I’d love to hear your key differences that you see in how you approach creativity and problem solving with those students.

Jonathan Garra:
Cindy, I’d say that’s a pretty difficult question for me to answer. So my experience in independent school was 14 years of teaching in my content area. I taught 7th and 8th grade social studies and I got to teach like what, what I found value in. Right. So if I wanted to teach a month long unit on creative problem solving, I could do that with my eighth graders. There was a time where I had started a unit on Russian history. I was two weeks in and the Arab Spring started, so I threw that out the window and we started a unit on the Arab Spring. Right.

Jonathan Garra:
And I was sort of building the curriculum as I was teaching and I had the freedom to do that. And I’ll tell you, it was extremely challenging, but also just so rewarding and so relevant. Since I transitioned into public school, it’s more I’m teaching what New York State says I have to teach. And I’m teaching it in ways that my administration says I have to teach it. And then I mean to add a whole other layer to that. This year I’m actually an emergency temporary teacher. So I’m teaching science in Spanish. It’s not my content area, it’s not my first language.

Jonathan Garra:
And so maybe that’s a question that somebody could answer better than me. But that’s my answer to that question, based on my experience, is that they are just so different right now for me to compare them. It’s such a wild set of differences.

Cyndi Burnett:
So do you think that teachers who are public school teachers, do you think they can still build creativity in and how?

Jonathan Garra:
I mean, of course they can. I know that they can. Right. The how piece. I don’t know that I have that answer because my experience in public school is. Is so short lived and it’s been kind of all over the place. I taught a year of English, a year of social studies and a year of science. And so if we go back to that conversation of, you know, creativity being content general or content specific, of course there are sort of content general creativity principles that I can share with my kids, but through that content specific lens, it’s really challenging for me to establish this creative environment where my kids can thrive, sort of exploring creativity and exploring content when I’m also new to the content.

Jonathan Garra:
So again, I’d say it’s a really difficult question for me to answer, but I think maybe the one thing I’d want to Highlight for teachers is I think so many teachers do a brilliant job of teaching creatively and they think that’s the ticket, but they, they teach in ways that are super creative to get the interest from the kids. And like, that’s not lost. Right. That extra motivation, that interest from the kids is really valuable. But I think a lot of teachers maybe don’t even realize that maybe a better goal is teaching for creativity. Right. How do you elicit those problem solve? Like the teachers are doing so much work to problem solve and make the lesson more interesting. How can we pass some of that responsibility off to the kids and get the kids practicing their creativity? So not teaching creatively, but teaching for creativity is a thing I would maybe challenge more educators to do because I know so many public school teachers are using creativity all the time and doing it quite brilliantly.

Cyndi Burnett:
Love that. And I think, you know, John, I know you are part of the Weaving Creativity series that I worked on. And how do we integrate these skills into the class, classroom and into the curriculum? And I think giving students the agency and the power to work through some of these challenges, giving the work to them essentially, instead of putting all the work on us to make it creative is what you’re saying.

Jonathan Garra:
Yeah. And two things you said that word agency, which goes back to trauma, informed practices. Right. Allowing kids to have choice and control and then also using Matthew’s word from earlier, like putting the work on them, but being there as a mentor and a guide for them while they have to do that. Yeah.

Cyndi Burnett:
So, John, we are at the end of our show and we end every episode of season 10 with the following question. Can you describe the most creative educational experience you have had, formal or informal, as a teacher or as a student?

Jonathan Garra:
So, yeah, I think about this one a lot, honestly. It was summer of 2016 when there were protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, and counter protesters and a protester was murdered. And I started every year with my 8th graders at the independent school I worked at, just sort of covering the current events from the summer. And this was one that this class latched onto. This class was brilliant. Not only brilliant, but all across the political spectrum in ways that were really critical, but also these kids would listen to each other. This was the year of Trump’s first election. In the months sort of leading up to it, we spent probably the first six or eight weeks of the school year designing this curriculum.

Jonathan Garra:
The kids sort of did it with me looking at Confederate statues and sort of, what was the history of the statue? Who paid for it? Why was it there? Should it stay, if it shouldn’t stay, what should we do with it? And I’m telling you, the kids worked in groups, in groups that were mixed across the political spectrum and sort of they decided, what should we do with these statues and why after doing all this research about why they exist. And it was so relevant to the time. It was really driven by the kids political interest. And it was, you know, like we had just talked about, it was the kids doing all the work with me, kind of guiding them and learning alongside with them. It was such a cool experience and really driven by those kids. But again, only an experience that you’ll get in an independent school. It’s really hard to create those opportunities in a public school curriculum.

Cyndi Burnett:
Well, John, I’m so glad that you came on the show today. And I’m so grateful that my son had the opportunity to have you as a seventh and eighth grade history teacher as you made such an impact on him. And I will tell a very, very brief story, which is my son took his 10th grade AP history exam, and when he came home that evening, he said, I have to call Mr. Guerra because he always had us thinking critically about these topics. And I think that’s the reason why I did well on the test today. So thank you so much for coming on the show today. If you like this episode, feel free to share it with a friend or colleague. And don’t forget to leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform.

Cyndi Burnett:
My name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood:
And my name is Dr. Matthew Worwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
You’ve been listening to the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast hosted by Matthew Warwood 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 create.