Category: creative thinking

356. Teaching Creativity

Posted in creative thinking, engagement, higher education, learning, professional development, teaching
August 28, 2024

When thinking about creativity, many students (and faculty) believe that they are either creative or not. In this episode, Susan Keller-Mathers joins us to discuss how the study of creativity can help us get past this false dichotomy in order to develop our creative thinking skills. Sue is an Associate Professor at the Center for Applied Imagination at Buffalo State University.  She teaches graduate courses in creativity and has published over 30 articles, chapters, and books on creativity, creative behavior, and the use of deliberate methods to facilitate creative learning. Sue has worked with multiple departments on her campus and with colleagues in over a dozen countries to help infuse creative learning into teaching and learning practices.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: When thinking about creativity, many students (and faculty) believe that they are either creative or not. In this episode, we discuss how the study of creativity can help us get past this false dichotomy in order to develop our creative thinking skills.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane , an economist….

John: ….and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer….

Rebecca: ….and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guest today is Susan Keller-Mathers. She is an Associate Professor at the Center for Applied Imagination at Buffalo State University. Sue teaches graduate courses in creativity and has published over 30 articles, chapters, and books on creativity, creative behavior, and the use of deliberate methods to facilitate creative learning. She has worked with multiple departments on her campus and with colleagues in over a dozen countries to help infuse creative learning into teaching and learning practices. Welcome, Sue.

Sue: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Rebecca: We’re glad to have you. Today’s teas are:… Sue, are you drinking any tea today?

Sue: I am, as a matter of fact, I have a blended tea, oolong, jasmine, and green tea, and it’s delicious.

Rebecca: That sounds lovely.

John: Very nice. Because this is the first time I’m recording in our recording space in about two and a half months. I wasn’t sure if I had the tea kettle back here, and it turns out I didn’t. So I bought some iced tea, which I will be drinking today. So I have some peach iced tea. It’s still summer here.

Rebecca: Yeah, that’s good. I have a Hunan noir today.

John: Very good.

Sue: Wow. That one sounds interesting.

Rebecca: It’s a really nice black tea, but the leaves are dried and curled. It’s very fancy. I felt fancy this morning. [LAUGHTER]

John: Could you tell us more about the Center for Applied Imagination and the Creativity and Change Leadership department at Buffalo State University? I don’t think there’s too many such programs in the country, and it was really nice to learn a little bit more about this.

Sue: Yeah, there isn’t many, especially in higher education academic programs, because we are a distinct program. We are not part of any other discipline. We are in the discipline of creativity. So in 1949 some creative thinking courses were introduced at the University of Buffalo by Alex Osborne, who was an advertising agent in BBD and O, and wanted to bring more creativity to education. So it developed from there. And in 67 we started our first graduate courses. Of course, we have a Masters of Science in Creativity and Change Leadership, as well as certificates and undergraduate minors in creativity. So we study the discipline of creativity. There’s been some other programs in creativity, but I have to always look close. We divide them up between those that have the word creative or creativity, but really don’t focus on the discipline, and those that actually have the content of creativity. So we are the first and part of those foundational programs.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about who might benefit in studying Creativity and Change Leadership, and what folks who study that end up doing.

Sue: Yeah, I love that question, actually. When you’re on a plane and somebody says, “What do you do?” if I want a long conversation, I’ll tell them that I teach in a master’s of science and Creativity and Change Leadership. If I want a short one, I’ll try and get away with saying I’m a teacher, because people understand that [LAUGHTER] and hope that they don’t say more. So part of it is how people perceive creativity. And there are disciplines where teachers, for example, K through higher ed, adult learning, will say, “Yeah, I want my students to be creative.” Well, we want you to be creative too, so you first. So that’s an easy one. So we have some teachers, then designers, people in the arts. Well, this is a Masters of Science, not in the arts, however, we do have artists that come, particularly designers who are interested in the science of creativity to add to their professional work. So we say to people: “Do you want to enhance your professional practices? Do you want to go beyond where you are now, learn new skills, being able to put into practice new thinking?” So engineering law, we have clergy, coaches, artists. I even had a course this summer where I had seven dietitians, and I’m like, “Why are you in this course on creative teaching and learning?” They said “We have to communicate to our clients, and we have to problem solve.” …Business, armed forces… actually, I’ve had Marines and special forces, government officials, medical personnel, doctors, psychiatrists, you name it. So the whole idea is, do you want to enhance your professional and your personal self through the development of your creative potential?

John: In preschools and in early elementary education, there’s a lot of focus on giving students creative expression in various forms, but that seems to die out a lot by the time students reach middle school and move into high school, and in fact, it sometimes seems to be a little bit suppressed. Should there be more emphasis on creativity throughout the educational system?

Sue: Well, obviously the short answer is yes, and interesting, because I come from a background of elementary education and gifted education. In the schools and working with young children, you develop those practices. Well, we use those same practices at the university level, because what do we want to do with our pedagogy? We want to have students learn in a way that ignites their motivation, that takes them to think deeper. That’s what creativity is about. So for example, some of the skills like sensing gaps and tolerating ambiguity, and all the skills that are involved in problem solving, who doesn’t need that, right? So it really does belong in all disciplines. Some disciplines are harder to help understand, like I’ve worked with engineers, it’s not my area. My brother’s an engineer. They think different. So can we bring creativity to engineering? Well, of course. If you think of any professional practices, if you think of those people who are top in their field, they’ve brought innovation, they’ve brought change to their field. And so I think that part of helping people understand that it’s important in their discipline is understanding the characteristics, the practices, the processes, the skills people have who do the extraordinary things in their discipline, and then say, what does that mean for us for every day? How might we promote that?

Rebecca: A lot of students say things like, “I’m not a math person. I’m not a creative person.” [LAUGHTER] A lot of faculty and staff say that too.[LAUGHTER]

Sue: A lot.

Rebecca: Yeah. How do we encourage students and our colleagues to get past this sort of a fixed mindset in terms of creativity?

Sue: Well, just a short story. I think the hardest group to work with is my faculty, but we have such a reputation on this campus and a reputation internationally that people go, “I’m not sure what they do, but they’re really good.” [LAUGHTER] And so there’s the start. Pique the interest, right? We want a growth mindset. Let me give you another example. The “I’m not good at math” is interesting because one of the founders of our program, Ruth Noller, was the second woman computer programmer in the country. She worked on the Mark I sequence control calculator at Harvard during World War Two as part of the Navy WAVES. So when people say to me, “Well, I’m a math person, not a creativity person,” I’ll say, “Well, let me tell you about creativity people in math,” but the whole idea that “I’m not creative” is something that we start with in every course and every time that we do a workshop for anyone, because if you’re not open to it, you will not promote your creativity. So, for example, people will say the creative people are those who I put on a platform, they’re the highest, the rest of us, we don’t have creativity. It’s something magical. I don’t know, poof, how they do it. But when we study people in our field, and we begin to see how the struggles they had, first of all, and the way that they’re creative, then we begin to understand a bit more how we might be alike. And we always start with in classes, “How are you creative?” Not “Are you creative?” So once we shift that mindset to a growth mindset and ask the question, “how are you creative?” And then we introduce them to this content of creativity, which we could put simply into a framework. We have lots of frameworks, but let’s put in a framework of creativity and people, creative processes, creative environment, how we set the environment up for any learning experience and then products. So there’s a lot that we do with regard to helping people’s attitude toward knowledge, imagination and evaluation. And so what I just shared with you is Ruth Noller, who, again, was the second woman computer programmer, fell in love with the field of creativity. She was challenged to write a definition of creativity in a mathematical formula. So she said, “Creativity is knowledge, imagination, and evaluation with a subscript of attitude.” And so that helps bust some myths, because now we’re saying knowledge is essential, evaluation is essential, imagination is essential, and that’s what makes up creativity.

John: So based on what you’ve said, it seems like creativity is pretty much important everywhere. Are there any academic disciplines where the development of creativity is not important?

Sue: The short answer, again is no. However, there are disciplines that many people don’t recognize what creativity looks like in their discipline. For instance, I don’t want my bank teller to be creative when they’re giving me my money back. I want precision, accuracy, redundancy. I want all those things. But is there room for creativity in banking? First of all, people would say, “Oh, I know what you’re saying, you know? Yeah, those people are in jail,” like there are ethical and unethical uses of creativity. And if we want to flourish as an economy, especially economists, if you think of economists, there’s a lot of room for creativity there and in all disciplines, but there’s a story I want to tell you. My doctoral dissertation was a qualitative study of extraordinary women of creative accomplishment, so I sent out and asked for nominations from top people in the field. And I had a nomination of a woman who was a historian, who the nominator felt that this person was very creative, and she declined my invitation because she said, as a historian, she didn’t want to be seen as creative. So you can see that what’s going on there is she’s afraid of her credibility, because people will equate creativity with making things up. Where, if we were to unpack that for historians… and I love history, by the way… when I teach the history of creativity, what am I doing? I am bringing the most accurate information in a way that tells a story, that helps people understand it better. So from a pedagogical standpoint, I’m looking at delivering that information in a way that helps people not only grasp it, but get excited about it. And so that was, I think, a good example that I don’t want to bring creativity into my profession. Again to unpack that, where do we need the knowledge? How do we bring imagination in, and how do we use our evaluation effectively?

Rebecca: And that’s not to say that there isn’t room for imagination or any of those things, in maybe the ways that we represent or tell the story of history. [LAUGHTER]

Sue: Yeah. I mean, really, who are the great historians? Not only did they discover, they sensed gaps, they saw things that we didn’t know, and they were able to seek it out. And so not only the storytelling, but the actual acquisition of our history and our story as people.

Rebecca: Yeah, thinking about some of the best exhibits that I’ve seen in museums, that historians are highly involved in the development of some of those exhibitions, but the ways that those are delivered or told or developed to be interactive are highly creative and highly interesting.

Sue: Yeah, and if you think about it now, it’s not the lone historian sitting there and then the designer putting things together. It’s collaboration, and that’s what we teach in creativity, especially because we have a whole strand in creative problem solving, creative process, and so teaming and coming up with ideas or reforming problems or putting things to action and working together, and how important that is. So one of the outcomes in my master’s project was an impact study, and I looked at the impact of a course on creative problem solving. People felt more empowered. They felt they could solve problems better. They were utilizing techniques to get ideas better and to evaluate ideas and to put them into action. So those things are just really important in all areas.

John: As Rebecca was suggesting, if you wanted to describe history, you have to do it in a way that makes sense to people, and you have to make connections, otherwise you just have a series of unrelated facts. And the connections that are being made is really, I think, that form of creative expression there. Is that how you would interpret that?

Sue: Absolutely. And what we teach is specific skills, for example. So the skill you’re describing is based on the research of E. Paul Torrance, 50 year longitudinal study. Put it into context. If you think about the importance of context, that is a creativity skill.

John: And it’s one that I think is common to pretty much all disciplines. They have to make sense of a complex world by simplifying it into stories that are understandable by others, which involves that skill.

Sue: Absolutely.

Rebecca: Which is a nice segue to our next question. [LAUGHTER] What are some of your favorite classroom activities for fostering the development of creativity?

Sue: Oh, I have so many. Well, let me go back to the history first, and that is, I teach a course on pretty much the foundations of the field, and the scholars, the models, the theories. And what people find is that what people were talking about in the 50s and the 60s and the research that was happening, we’re still talking about today. They’re still very current in their thinking, and they’re always surprised. So we put the whole field of creativity into a timeline. And when I do it in person, we do a visual, and the whole room is set up pre-40s, the 50s, the 60s, 70s, and we walk it and we talk it and there’s color, but the skill we use is “put it into context.” What was happening in the 1950s? What was the result of Sputnik, and how did creativity then flourish, the field of creativity? Scientific creativity, there was lots of money being poured into it after Sputnik, because we felt we were losing the space race. And so therefore the field of creativity, a lot of research, a lot of scholars, came about. So we put the whole thing into context. And it’s a lot of fun. It’s a lot of fun to do that course. And the other thing with that course, I’ll stay with that one for a minute, and I do this in many ways, but I have a model based on E. Paul Torrance’s work called the Torrance Incubation Model. And like any good teaching model, there’s a warming up, there’s a digging deeper, and there’s an extending or something that happens to connect it to your learning. And what’s powerful about this is the strategies embedded in the heightening anticipation or the pre- at the beginning, and the deepening expectation strategies and the extending the learning strategies, which alone is powerful. However, the big piece about this is, this is a creativity model. It weaves a piece of creativity into the learning. So for the course that I teach, the foundations, visualizing it rich and colorfully is woven into the entire course. And so I’m teaching for creativity while I’m teaching a content. Now my content happens to be creativity, but I can teach anything, and when I work with other educators to give me an instructional plan that you do in your Business 101 class, it’s pretty good, but you feel like it could be improved. And let’s redesign it using this model called TIM. And let’s integrate a creativity skill so that we’re teaching for creativity while we’re teaching for content. Which brings me to the first thing I introduce people to, and that, again, is built on E. Paul Torrance’s longitudinal research, what’s helped individuals grow up to actualize their creative potential. And he introduced 18 creativity skills based on his research, and it’s quite extensive research that Torrance had done. My colleague, Cyndi Burnett, creativity and education, modernized it and used many of his skills and brought some of those that are more recent in the field and being talked about more… mindfulness, for example. And she put together a set of 20 skills that help define the skill set that we can build because we can become more creative. We can either draw it out more, or we can learn it, however you want to look at it. And so one of the activities I do in the creative teaching and learning course, which is an elective in our masters, is I do 20 skills in 20 days. So they have a journal, and their job is, first thing in the morning on Brightspace, they get an announcement: today is tolerate ambiguity, gives a definition, it gives a link to Cyndi’s website, where there’s videos, and they’re also reading her weaving book, and so there’s no expectations as to what you do with it. Keep it top of mind. Maybe use it yourself. Maybe share it with others. And it’s very interesting to see what they come back with and which skills, no matter which skills they find that they are drawn to more. The idea is they now have a set of 20 skills that they understand help promote creativity and that they can utilize. And so that one has been very successful. I’m very happy with that activity as well.

Rebecca: If instructors would like to learn more about introducing creative skills into their classes, what are some resources in addition to the book that you just mentioned, would be helpful?

Sue: There’s a lot out there now. I love all the videos that are out. Our YouTube channel has alumni profiles and videos. I’ve been working on bringing forward some of the history of Ruth Noller, because I didn’t feel like she was prominent out there, and so I’ve done some videos about her mentoring work. She, for example, talked about a mentee before anyone was using that word. And so now we have these foundations and 12 skills of mentoring, which really helps promote creativity. I’ve done a video on that as well. My colleague, Roger Firestein, another person I’ve taught with, has done a lot. We talk a lot, my colleagues and I talk a lot. And I say, “Give me free stuff. Will you put free stuff up?” Because I don’t want them to have to buy expensive books. So he has a Create in a Flash, which teaches people about creative problem solving, and he’s put videos up for free. He put worksheets up for free. And I’m like, “Thank you,” because then I can head people to things like that. Now my colleague Gerard Puccio has a great course on creativity. So for those people who like the great course. But you can find a lot of things out there, Prufrock Press had some good creativity books as well. They’re still around, but they’re under another publisher. So they often have some good stuff. And what I need to tell higher ed people is, if you find something for younger grades, don’t dismiss it. Take a look at it, because I think that we need to bring that joy into the higher ed classroom, and that doesn’t mean being silly. You have to go with what’s comfortable for you, but if you are going to bring it to your classroom, you’re going to need to model it. So you got to figure out what it means to you and how you operate, and then bring that motivation and joy to your classroom. Who wants to be a dull classroom? We don’t remember things. They might be able to take the test and pass it, but meet them on the street three years later and ask them one of those questions. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Are you suggesting we should have fun? [LAUGHTER]

Sue: I know, I know. It’s silly, isn’t it? And I try hard, try warm ups, I try to put the content into interesting ways to do it, like for our current issues and creativity, my colleagues… and I’ve taught the course as well… but they developed big question paper. You know, what’s your burning question? What is it? So one of the topics that’s really coming forward is polarity, and so creativity and polarities and what does that mean? Or design thinking. How does that relate to some of the foundational processes? So if we can get our students involved in things that are meaningful for them, and they make connections to their future. And my students, like I said, come from all disciplines, and my background is education and my doctorates in curriculum and instruction, I have a psychologist. I had a performer, a dancer who became interested in creativity. I had an architect who’s one of our faculty members. So it’s been inspiring to be with people in all different disciplines who are devoted to understanding and use of creative behavior.

Rebecca: You know, a lot of our listeners, and John and I, go to a lot of meetings. How do we sneak more creativity into these places that we go to all the time. Please help.

Sue: Oh, I love the idea of meetings. Oh, when I used to be in the elementary ed just, just awful. When you’re in a school system, you have to sit there and …… nothing happened, it’s just you’re there. So it’s different here, and I’ll tell you why it’s different, because we frame everything in creative process, and we figure out what’s most important and how to do it. And so we do it. When we need conversations, we have conversations, but they’re managed, they’re facilitated. We are all facilitators. So first of all, how many meetings do we need? Can we do less than we do? Yes, of course, and we can do less if they’re more productive. So we did some vision setting for the university. The session was just to get ideas from faculty. That’s all it was. Was just an idea generating. And so we had our facilitators come. So there’s 150 people in the room, and it’s a framework. It’s described. They do it, they make some decisions, and I could hear people as they leave saying, “Some of the most productive meetings I’ve been to in a long time.” I’m like, “That’s what we do. That’s what we do.” And along those lines, in the field of creativity, I can go out and say, “Listen, I can bring facilitators, and we can facilitate your meeting,” and they’ll go, “Okay, great. Alright.” They have no idea what that means. It’s often not till they see it that they go, “Why weren’t we doing this?” And so a little bit at a time is what I would say to people. Bring a facilitator in if you can, but even if you can’t learn a bit about the facilitation of creative problem solving and know when to identify concerns, lots of times you go right to ideas. Well, I got this idea. I got this… Well, wait a minute, we haven’t even defined the concern yet. We don’t even know what the challenge is. And who was it, Einstein, who said a problem well stated is half solved. So stop trying to solve a problem when you don’t even know what the problem is. And so some of the pre-work before a meeting doesn’t need to be at the meeting, is another thing to consider. So I don’t mind our meetings anymore. 32 years in public education, and I’ve been here for a very long time, and we come to meetings, I won’t say joyful, but a lot of times we have cake, that helps.

Rebecca: Cake always helps.

Sue: …but we’re productive. Well, it’s part of that celebration, let’s celebrate that we are productive, that we work together, that it’s the beginning of the semester, that we like our colleagues.

John: Anything that could make meetings more productive and joyful, I think is worth exploring.

Rebecca: Any gathering.

John: …including our classes.

Rebecca: Yeah.

John: We’ve talked quite a bit about creativity. How did you become interested in this topic?

Sue: Well, I was trained here in Buffalo as an elementary educator, and I was hired by the New Orleans public schools. I was working in a creative arts magnet school in the French Quarter. Loved it. So, dabbling in different universities, looking for a master’s. I was at Tulane University taking the course in gifted ed, and we were sent to Baton Rouge to a conference. And the keynote speaker was Don Treffinger from Buffalo, and he talked about creativity, that was his field. And I went, instantly, you know how the aha happens? I’m like, “This is what I need to bring to students. This is the missing piece. This is what I want a master’s in.” So I eventually picked up, came back to Buffalo for a master’s in creativity, went back into the schools, and for a while, I was teaching creativity and creative problem solving to K to 6 and teaching university students, which was the best. And it was exhausting. [LAUGHTER] It was exhausting. So there’s nothing like bringing fourth grade facilitators into a class where they explain to the undergraduates how they facilitated first graders. Then after that, the undergraduates cannot whine about not being ready.

Rebecca: That’s amazing.

Sue: Well, it was one of my friends that asked me, she was teaching the class. She said, “They’re all complaining they’re not ready. They can’t do it.” I said, you know, I’ve got fourth graders that are really articulate, and they were part of a research project we did to show that kids as young as five can solve problems using creative problem solving. So I brought the two of them in. They’re like, “Well, first we did this, and then….” it was just priceless. Sometimes you have just this essence of something that makes things so clear. And I’m kind of lazy, I don’t capture them often, because I’ll remember them… and you don’t. So a tip for everyone is to make sure that you capture the essence of those qualities or those stories that just really help define something well.

Rebecca: Well, that sounds like such a priceless moment.

Sue: It was great. And I see those kids every once in a while, and that was, I can’t tell you how many years ago. I mean, they’re in their 30s, and they don’t forget. And here’s another thing, and I didn’t mention this, but I used to teach undergraduates. I’ve been doing graduate courses for the last 10 or 15 years, but when I taught undergraduates, our first course, we asked people to invent something. Now, after doing it for a couple years, you see the look on their face the first day. They’re reading the syllabus, and I say to them, “Do not drop this class because of the invention. You will be able to do it. I will help you.” So we teach them through creative process how to sense the gaps, find the need and then create something. And the most interesting thing happened to me years later in an ice cream shop, this woman’s behind me, she goes, “Do you remember me? I invented the…” it’s like that helped define that I am creative. And that’s happened more than once to me, is they’ll say, “Do you remember I invented the …” and I was always curious about that. But for some reason, just I guess, we think of inventors as being creative, and when we think of ourselves as an inventor, then we think of ourselves as creative.

Rebecca: That’s incredible. My daughter is attending a STEAM camp this summer, and they’re doing all kinds of creative thinking activities, and every day she’s coming home telling me about the inventions or the experiments that she’s been conducting in very elaborate one-hour debriefs. [LAUGHTER]

Sue: Isn’t that funny when they come back? And I love that it’s STEAM, because that’s what it should be. There’s a wonderful video The Adaptable Mind that talks about STEAM, and it’s just an amazing video about problem solving around the Ebola crisis. The other thing I would recommend to people and I just was thinking about it, it’s a classic that always is entertaining and thought provoking is Ken Robinson’s, Do Schools Kill Creativity? And whether you’re in higher ed or K-12, I think it’s very relevant to thinking about the importance of creativity in education.

John: Well, this has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you. We always end, though with the question: “What’s next?”

Sue: [LAUGHTER] What’s next? Well, I always have my hands in a lot of pots, because that’s what we like to do. And I had mentioned that I’ve been working on really bringing forward the work of Ruth Noller and the incredible career she had, but we have an innovation suite that is being designed, and so we’ll have a mentoring space, which will be really cool. Also at SUNY, you may or may not know this, under review at SUNY is a doctorate in professional practices in Creativity and Change Leadership. So we would be the first doctorate at Buffalo State University going forward. So we’re pretty excited about that as well. And I want to share this… one of my colleagues, Molly Hollinger, just had her article on creativity and wellbeing, “Measuring Self-Beliefs of Creativity and Well-Being” published in the Creativity and Thinking Skills Journal. And she started off with a quote from Csikszentmihalyi, who is one of the leaders in the field, and I think it speaks to creative potential and fulfillment. We all want to be fulfilled. Well, if you begin to equate recognizing and nurturing your creative potential with being more fulfilled as a person and more wellbeing, I think that that would resonate with people and Csikszentmihaly says, “The reason creativity is so fascinating is that when we are involved in it, we feel we are living more fully than during the rest of life.” And I thought that was just a great quote, because that’s what it’s about, right?

Rebecca: It’s good note to end on for sure. Well, thanks for such a fun conversation. Sue. We appreciate you joining us today.

Sue: I love it. I love it. I talk about creativity all day. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: So could I. [LAUGHTER]

Sue: Yeah. Yeah. Good. Good. [LAUGHTER]

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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