 to the creative life from the American Creativity Association on Think Tech, Hawaii. I'm your host, Phyllis Bleath. I'm president of the American Creativity Association. The title of today's show is Creative Thinking in Education. Joining me today is a very special guest for the American Creativity Association because it's Dr. Joyce Juntun. She is the founding board member and first executive director of the American Creativity Association, which was founded in 1988 when she was still teaching gifted and talented classes in Minnesota. Today, Dr. Juntun continues to serve on the board and her day job is as an instructional professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at Texas A&M University. Along with those duties, she is program coordinator for the undergraduate degree in creative studies and the master's degree in creativity and cognition. Her current research focus, however, it goes even further. It is on building academic success in high-ability students who are raised in poverty. Thus, Dr. Juntun is a subject matter expert in our topic today. Along with her work, she has published several classroom activity books for teachers on ways to develop creative thinking within the content areas and numerous books on the subject. So with that, Joyce, welcome. Thank you, speaker. Yes, and do you remember when we first met? Oh, one of my first trips to the Austin area took me in ISD. That's right, I'm gonna take a moment and tell my story with you because it's so powerful and it got us to where we are today. So you did come to the EISD and I had a five-year-old. My oldest was five at the time and only one. And I went over for a brown back that you held for us parents for gifted students. And he was brand new in the program. And there we all were. And at the end of about an hour and a half, you were just dazzling in the ways that creativity can be taught. And I had never understood creativity as anything, but if you were either born with it or you weren't. And I often associated with art, which I was terrible at. And so I just thought I was a creator. And I left that brown bag with this such an aha that I booked myself on the very next conference at the American Creativity Association that was held in St. Paul, Minnesota. I was the only one that I knew who went, I went by myself, checked into my hotel, I went to the conference and there you were. And I walked up to you and I said, you came to Eames and I met you. And here I am, I don't know what this is all about, but you so inspired me. And I said, but I'm not creative. I can only really, I'm just an organizer. And you said, well, Phyllis, what we created is me badly is organizer. And so whatever you wanna do, you should do it. And I said, well, I wanna start a chapter. She said, do it, do it. And that I have never left the American Creativity Association today I'm president. Now, that was, let's see, that was 1995. So it's been a long while. So here you are talking about this subject. How come you chose it for today's show and what gets you so fired up about it? Well, actually in turn, I was privileged to have a principal who understood how to really make this happen in the schools. And I even find today what happens is really one of three things usually happens in the school. Sometimes people, as you refer to say, oh, I'm doing creativity if I add an art project to something in my costume. Others do creativity of what we call formally. They have formal lessons in creativity. But that principal, he was so smart, he wanted us to understand that creativity was a way of thinking and therefore we had to embed it within the content we were teaching. It was a part of social science, part of language arts and so on. And it was that understanding that I realized why many teachers and many schools would like to do things with creativity but don't always go about it a way that has a lasting impression and a lasting result. They do it the shortcut way. So I wanted to kind of take this opportunity then today to kind of share what are some of the things we did or that principal helped us do and help us understand that made creativity something that lasts forever. In fact, I get notes up for me, this started in mid 70s. I get notes on then from students I had in a second grade classroom that still have those tools and still use them in their adult careers. So that was what we were going for. It's something that creativity is your birthright. Every single human being has it. Whether you develop it or do not develop it, that part's up to you. And so this principal helped us understand if we did it as the way we taught content it would have a lasting result rather than something that just happened in that classroom at that time and it was gone the next time. That is just so interesting. I get the sense because I later got involved in gifted education as well and started a parent support group for it. And at the time there was the Texas Association of Gifted and Talented and there was a National Association for Gifted and Talented. So there were some circles within circles for supporting what became really ways to encourage creativity because there is a lot of synergy there and maybe you want to talk about it. But what I'm getting the sense of is that you were a classroom teacher, K-12 and you were getting, this was not your day job to teach creative thinking. So you were creating, carving out a new subject matter that it sounds to me like you can correct me that you were developing a curriculum and a focus on something that was polonically involved with whatever your current content was. And you were looking for support. At the same time, I think you have some books that help teachers. I mean, I think you were a pioneer is what I'm hearing in creative thinking skills as a tool to learn in your classroom and also to give teachers a way to bring it into the classroom. And Matt, if you'd show the slide on these workbooks that Dr. Juntun has developed over the years, now that's a lot. I have two of them here. One of them is developing creative thinking which is just sort of the one-on-one. I also have one creative thinking with foods. And for those who are watching this that can pause the recording and that can take a look at the various ways that you have out of whole cloth, I think, been a pioneer in bringing this very topic of today to everyone. And what do you think about that? I know I could go on. Well, actually the pioneer was my principal. I mean, I've often said he was a principal at the right time in my teaching career. Creative thinking has been around for a long time. But what the principal did was two kinds of things. First of all, he brought to our school Dr. Paul Torrance with his basic elements of creative thinking. Dr. Calvin Taylor, who had what he called the multiple talents of thinking became talents unlimited. We looked at Frank Williams' teaching strategies, creative plans, this problem solving process and we kind of put it all together. But it was a principal's purpose to say, this will happen in your classroom. Now, I learned one of the first things I learned actually, Dr. Calvin Taylor sent a teacher from Utah to our school. And I think it's always funny because she volunteered to be in classrooms and nobody volunteered for her right away and I went, oh, I'll take you. And so she came in and she did an example of one of Torrance's basic creative thinking strategies. And my principal came walking by the door and he just opened it and he said, how's it going? And I said, I can do this. And he turned around and looked at me and he said, then do it. And that is kind of what started me. Then after that, I actually left the classroom to lead it within our schools. And so those books came out of the fact that we focus on different content areas at different times because the principal wanted to do which is, as you mentioned, similar and gifted. We were not to teach creativity as an add-on. It was to be an instead of. Instead of how you normally do, how can you do that same review using creative thinking? Instead of how you normally teach this, how can you use creative thinking? Those are a couple of things that were very important. The first thing was since we wanted to empower students to be their own creative thinkers, we labeled everything we did by the correct name of the strategy. We explained, what does that strategy do? Then we did it within a content area. And the goal was that students can be a creative thinker when you're not around because what I see happening a lot of times is students do wonderful things with the right teacher who is guiding it. Our goal was, if that teacher goes and you have a substitute, if you go on to and move to another school, it's not doing you, do you still know what to do? And one of our kind of groups kind of came in a way. I remember one day there was a substitute teacher who was trying to teach something and this was in a fifth grade classroom. And all of a sudden one of the students raised his hand and he says, you know, we need some originality there. You just go over to the side, I know what to do. And he goes up and he says to the rest of us, okay, we know what to do. And so we always started up with the thinking warm-up. Dr. Paul Torrance talks about that. You can't get productive creative thinking if you don't warm your brain first to be a creative thinker. So he looked around and says, all right, what should we do about warm-up? And somebody suggested something and then he did it. And then he turned around and said, okay, now for our lesson today, the way this works is you went on and did it and the whole class participated. He got that, he looked at the sub, he said, that's how it works. And he went and sat down. And so that was what the principal was saying. Do they need the teacher to be a creative thinker or have we done our job in such a way they don't need us? They can still be a creative thinker. And I think that's kind of one of the key things that has happened. Doesn't happen overnight? It takes several years of working on this, but the goal was accomplished. Okay, so I heard two things and I wanna maybe build on it. You talked about warming up the brain and you talked about let's bring in originality. And when you first got introduced, you talked about principles that the teachers could learn to introduce creative thinking in the classroom. And I wonder is originality one of them? And I know this is not a class in creative thinking today, but if you could give some examples, some hardcore examples of what those principles are that the audience today could think about and get their teeth in, I would appreciate that. So is originality one of them? Well, it's not, there are whole torrents or basic elements of creativity, which most people know about fluency, flexibility, originality, liberation. Okay, I don't remember. We combine so many things together that actually I would tell my students at the end of the year, which by the way, we call these things their bucket of tools. And we said to, we're gonna give you a bucket of thinking tools. And to my students, I said, I'm gonna give you 36 different creative thinking tools this year. You're gonna know what they are. You're gonna know how to use them. But guess what? Over your lifetime, you're gonna add hundreds more to that bucket. And you want a bucket because no tool works every time and every situation. So when we face a challenge, you have to be able to say, what's in my bucket that will help me? And you pull it out and you say, what does it do? So the only reason that that was one of the, as is now the strategies, but remember we did a whole realm of them. And so it was just that when we started, we started with the Paul Torrance elements and then we moved on from there. Okay. Could you repeat them the four? Cause I don't think every- The four basic elements. Yeah. And most people that are familiar with creativity, unfortunately these are the only things they know and they miss all the other strategies and that becomes the sad part. So Paul Torrance, has he developed the ways to major fluency, flexibility, originality, and liberation. And you will see those in Calvin Taylor's work. You will see that talk about it and Cindy Karn's work because those are the things people often think about first. But remember for us, because kind of the way we did it was, we would introduce some of our faculty members. We had what we called the, I called it the drip method versus Niagara Falls. Now what happens when people want to make a change, they often do Niagara Falls, which means they just flood people with information. They flood them with so much information, they walk away with nothing. So Mr. Bronis, my principal had this idea that we would have 15 minutes of each faculty meeting devoted to one thing teachers could do in the classroom. And they would come in, we'd introduce the one thing, we'd explain what it did, what was the label, what did it do, we'd try out something with it and we'd have a short discussion on how can you use this in math, science, social science, et cetera. Then they had the week to use it. And Mr. Bronis said the goal was, teachers would leave the faculty meeting knowing something they could do in their classroom that week without ever having to take one note. And that's what became the powerful thing. Drip, drip, drip, drip. We did this for three years, three years. It wasn't just a month here and a month then, it wasn't like a day before school started, let's go for six hours and be wonderful. It was drip, drip, drip, drip, drip. And so that's what I think made the difference in teachers being able to grab it and to use it because we did it by drips instead of Niagara Falls. Okay, so you're reminding me of sitting in that brown bag with you and I just wanna share with the watching audience and with you because this is a small kind of thing. And yet it just impacted me so much about how I was leaving my own creative thinking on the table when I tried to do something. You said, I'm gonna teach you brainstorming and I'd heard a brainstorm, but it was a thing. You said, everybody gather a piece of paper and write down 10 things that you can do with this book. So then we all wrote it down, we're all happy that was fun. Now you said, throw the paper away and write 10 more. And then there was some groaning and you smiled and then you didn't say anything. So we all wrote our next list of 10 and then you smiled and you said, how for those in your room, how hard was the second 10 for you? And a lot of people were saying, you know, why did you do that? I mean, I was running out at nine and you said, people really do groan. You said, people think that they're being creative when they've come up with three solutions to something and what their creativity exists of is toggling between the first thing they think to do to the second to the third. And then they're tired and they're done. They think it's thought of everything and they go back to the first and their idea of being creative is to keep rotating between the only three things that they come up with in that list, you know, the first list. And you said, this idea of brainstorming forces you, you have to throw the list away and that second 10, it was actually painful. But I grew, I learned, I knew, I mean, we got silly. And then you said, well, silly is breakthrough. Silly gets to innovation. And then you said, and you're not supposed to judge anything in brainstorming. There's no wrong answer. And you said that was really important. So I don't know if I'm feeding back to you what, you know, what those teachers are going through in a conference because just that exercise for me and I want other people to know too, if you try it, you're going to feel stretching in your brain and you're not going to like it. I didn't because I feel like I've got to come up with the right answer. But I did realize that there was a whole world that I could stretch and move into to be more creative and you just demonstrated it. Well, and there's not two students the way we explained it. And I explained to my students every year is there is a wall and the way I would tell the students is this, when the students write some answers down to an idea and then they'll go, I'm done. And I'll say to them, are you done or have you just stopped in front of the wall? And then I would tell them, now all the great things in the world on the other side of the wall, but you have to decide whether you're going over the wall or not. See, that's one of the key things about creative thinking. You can choose to be a creative thinker. You can choose not to be creative thinker. No one can make you a creative thinker, it's your choice. So when a student would say an assignment, I'm done. I would just gently look at them and say, are you done or are you just stopping at the wall? And if they say, I'm done, I would say fine because I can't make them. But I tell them, if you choose to go over the wall, I am here to help you have strategies to go over the wall. I am here to be your cheerleader. I am here to give you a boost, but you have to decide if you're going over the wall or staying in front of the wall. And when you talk about silly ideas, I think though, and it came from Sydney Barnes would often say it is easier to tame a wild idea than to make a blah idea exciting. And so that's why we look at the fact and say that it's many times, I tell my students now, even at the college level when we're talking about this, that many creative ideas are raw or. And so they're just the raw or they haven't been refined. And part of what we do after we look at those ideas, we say which ones have possibilities and then we work to refine them. So no beginning idea is a finished idea. It's just a beginning idea. Not to tell you about why this became so powerful for the teacher, because Mr. Brown is not only to his credit as a principal, would you believe he participated in everything we did for professional development. He didn't sit and watch those 50 minutes. He sat down at a table of teachers and actually participated with them. So he understood. Then guess what he did? He used them in the faculty meetings and we should do in the classroom. So he might say to them, you know what? I think we need a little forced relationships here. And so he would bring up the challenge that we had. He would tell us the strategy we were going to use. And then he would guide us as he was, as if he were the teacher through the activity with the faculty. And so it helped all the faculty members to say this is something we do to the kids. This is something we all do to change the way that we think. And we did find out, which is not surprising, that the greater the level the teacher had of the understanding of creativity, the easier it was for his or her to encourage that in the classroom. I remember a teacher. I think she was the first grade teacher. Susie came to me and the first year we were doing something, she said, oh, my students are horrible. They're just, they're not good at thinking. They're just awful. And I had to go to, my job was to go into the room, help you do it, all that. So we did that kind of thing. So I remember the second year, Susie came back and she said, wow. You know, this year I got some really good students. They're obviously fantastic. And I looked at her and I said, Susie, you're a better thinker this year than you would wish. You understand them all. And she goes, yeah, yeah. I said, see, when you understand what's like to think that way, it is easier to help your students understand. And that's one thing I feel badly about in schools today. We often have teachers do things to the students, rather than help them learn how to use all these kinds of things themselves in their own life. And then that would translate to better use of the classroom. Wow. You know, we really need a couple of hours with this because I wanna make sure that we get some of the core principles in that you are so passionate about. And one thing I'm gonna just kind of feed back to you. You said to me, Phyllis, we're not gonna be talking about creativity today or doing like, if you had a classroom where you had the kids building, you know, drawing or coloring or building things creatively, that that's doing a creative activity and that is distinct and separate from this creative thinking skills that you wanna instill into people and starting in the classroom. And I just wanted to separate that out. And I wanna leave people with the idea that with resources, you know, where do they go from here? You have two degrees, degree tracks at Texas A&M and creativity, but as far as I know, they're very rare. I mean, aren't there only a couple of higher education institutions that even get degrees in creativity? Yeah, and we're talking a very specific thing. We're talking about how it happens in schools. When students come to study creativity, you're, I mean, I have people from the military, I have people from corporations, I have artists, whatever. So you're looking at creativity more generally. But we're talking about, and what I most want people to see is when you want to have to have it in the school, it needs to come in bits and pieces with good support and it needs to happen over and over and over again. And I know you want, so I know you want examples. So let me give you a couple of examples. Okay, we've got one minute. We talk about this comprehension and review. And so for example, one of the review things I did at the elaboration, I would have students start with a three word sentence, a wind, blue. And then they had to rewrite that five times, dropping one word, adding two. And then they had to identify the parts of speech in all five sentences. So they, see that's an example, I used the elaboration and I used parts of speech. Or the teacher that used fluency is introducing a comprehension. She had her little first graders draw a boat and she said, hear the word, oh, in boat. Tonight, I want you to listen. Every time you hear, oh, I want you to make a picture of what it is that you heard and bring them tomorrow. And the next day when she said, tell me about your pictures, she wrote every one of those words on the board. And then she showed them about how there's two balls, you cross out one, you hear the sound of the other and that's the word she used to teach them about long old. Oh, you know, all I can do, I think, thank you so much. Being in the room with Dr. Joyce Juntun is such a privilege. And this is the area, this is your core value in the world and inspiration. And I think I should leave the viewers with the idea, look up the American Creativity Association, www.actcreatively.org. Dr. Juntun is on the board today. You can reach out to us. There are more creative life shows in the library at Think Tech Hawaii and on our website. And you reach out to us, ask questions. If you wanna start something in your area for local teachers or parents to support teachers, this idea of how to teach creative thinking, reach out to us and you can be directed to Dr. Juntun if this is your passion too. And with that, I will have to leave it there. You all have been watching The Creative Life on Think Tech Hawaii today. And we have been discussing creative thinking and education with our guest Dr. Joyce Juntun from Texas A&M. Thank you so much for participating and thank you to the viewers for tuning in. I'm Phyllis Bles, we will be back in two weeks with another edition of The Creative Life. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.