M-E-B-B-E So.

What changes when we respond to an unexpected idea with “maybe so”?

In this interview, Dr. Tanya Knudsen and Dr. Freddie Reisman explore how that small shift can make room for creative thinking. Drawing on Freddie’s work with Dr. E. Paul Torrance, they discuss why creativity belongs to everyone, how classrooms and workplaces can either encourage or constrain it, and what happens when a child’s creative strengths are mistaken for a learning difficulty.

The conversation moves from open-ended questions and the eleven factors of creative thinking to brainwriting, assessment, and the value of mistakes. At its heart is a practical invitation: pause before judging an idea, stay curious, and give people space to explore what might be possible.

The Global Creativity Initiative Podcast is a scholarly commitment to sharing creativity and specifically creative process for problem solving (aka life) with all of humanity.  Visit our website to learn more about The Global Creativity Initiative. Write to us at gci.creativitypodcast@gmail.com

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Everything is complicated.

SPEAKER_01 0:01

We're stuck in a lot of ways. How can creativity help us? It helps us to see that there are options that we don't have to be stuck. That's probably the most important thing that creativity does for us. It helps to break us out of a constricted world.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

And that constricted world could be at home in conversation with your family, in the classroom, at work, with friends. Creativity helps us to move beyond that stuckness and start to explore what else might be. That's right. Starting with maybe so. Welcome, listeners, to the Global Creativity Initiative podcast. My name is Tanya Knudsen, and I am your host. Here we meet creativity scholars and experts from around the world. Because everyone is born with a seed of creativity, this podcast unpacks and explores the mechanisms of this vast and wondrous field. I want to welcome back today Dr. Freddie Reisman, who is joining us to talk about creativity in education today. Welcome back, Dr. Freddie Reisman. Thank you. Good to be here. Let's step back to that time when you were at the University of Georgia and you worked there with Dr. E. Paul Torrance, who is really a founding pillar in this field of creativity and creativity in education. You had many years with him. What did you learn working with him?

SPEAKER_01 1:41

The first year that I was at Georgia, this man was standing outside my office and he said, I'm Paul Torrance, and I'm glad to meet you. And I wonder if you could do me a favor. Well, I had heard the name Torrance. I knew he was chair of the division of Ed Psych, but I didn't really know anything about creativity at that time. Although, as I look back, I was creative. My mother was creative, my dad was creative. Um and so I said, What can I do for you? And he said, Well, I want to get gifted education certified as a teaching certification in the state of Georgia, and I wonder if you would go to Atlanta with me and talk to the state superintendent of schools because he's the person who can make this happen. And I said, sure. And his wife Pansy drove us because uh Dr. Torrance never did take up driving. And so we pitched the superintendent and we walked out of there with approval for state certification for the gifted, and of course, that involved creativity.

SPEAKER_00 3:10

And so we want to dive in today talking about creativity and education. I want to go back though, first for a second. When you say your parents were creative, what did that mean to you? Because this is an important point to share with parents. We know that parents shape children. We do that. What does it mean to be a creative parent, in your estimation?

SPEAKER_01 3:32

Well, my mother was a um graduate of the first HOMEC program at Circus University, and she was a dual major, HOMEC and piano. And so she was very uh musically creative.

SPEAKER_00 3:51

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 3:51

My dad was a physician, and uh he would recount uh interactions with some of his patients, and he became an anesthesiologist. As I look back now, he was a really creative problem solver, but the way they interacted with me was they really um applauded anything that I would do that was kind of out of the box, um, and they always were very supportive of my crazy ideas and my crazy wishes. And that is something that Dr. Torrance did. I would come to him with kind of outlandish ideas sometimes, and he would just say, maybe so. Maybe so. And so the people who are important in your lives are very influential whether your creativity blossoms or or not.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

Maybe so, maybe so. That's a wonderful thing to say because really we're not saying no, we're not saying yes, we're saying, hmm. Maybe so, maybe so. M E B B E maybe so okay, maybe we need to start using that. You talked about Torrance's work designing education for the gifted few, which we know creativity in education really became something in that section of education. You also talked about your mother being in what we would consider traditional creative arts, right? And then you talk about your father being a physician. These are three different domains. I wonder if you could tell us what is it that we are missing and misunderstanding about creativity? What have we always misunderstood about creativity, given that you mention it in three really different domains?

SPEAKER_01 5:54

Well, the key is allowing the individual to explore, to question, to come up with outlandish ideas and not be tossed down, be supportive, the people, even your peers are important. You know, they can either say, oh wow, that's a crazy idea, or gee, that's really interesting. Let's try it. So the environment and the culture are very uh important uh influences. The whole idea talking about education and classrooms, and I don't care if it's a a pre-K-12 or a corporate learning environment, being allowed to express ideas, to think about things differently, and that's what is really the cornerstone of what we refer to as a creative environment.

SPEAKER_00 6:55

To clarify, we're not saying be uber positive and pouring it on children or adults or anyone. What we're saying here is to accept the offer. Somebody puts something out. It might be outlandish, it might be boring, it might be crazy, it might be risky. We're not saying uh yes or no or otherwise, we're saying maybe so, maybe so. We're giving it some space and we're allowing it to air, just like a good bottle of wine, so that we give it the opportunity to maybe become something.

SPEAKER_01 7:31

Yes, I also want to point out that you can guide the person in a more uh powerful or correct direction by questioning. So instead of saying, oh no, you can't do that, just say, Well, is there another way that we might think about? Or do you have any other ideas that relate to this? So instead of knocking them down immediately, guide them with appropriate questions, which gets them to thinking in a different way.

SPEAKER_00 8:08

Yeah. We are using language and open-ended questions to let something perhaps unfold. Because let's be clear, ideas are incomplete thoughts and they do not have feelings. Although if you're an ideator, you do have feelings about your ideas. That's true. But you know, we want to encourage more exploration around a thought. Is that what you're saying?

SPEAKER_01 8:34

Yes, yes, exactly. Because elaboration is one of the creative characteristics that are tapped in the Reesman diagnostic creativity assessment. And so the ability to elaborate, whether it be through speech or writing or drawing, uh, that's a creative thinking skill.

SPEAKER_00 8:59

And there are so many creative thinking skills. In fact, Dr. Torrance developed many of them. I have been using them for years in teaching. Just as an example, when we learn a word like perspective, then I always ask the students, well, what might be another word for this word so that we can explore it? Because not everyone will understand that word in the same way. And so we want to provide multiple touch points for that thinking to come forward and for more students to say, Oh, I get it. Maybe I didn't understand that word, but I do understand this word. Right.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

Well, and that relates to the factors that are tapped by the uh Reesmann diagnostic creativity, it says with the RDCA, uh, originality, uh, coming up with another thought. If it's novel and unique, that's showing original thinking, fluency. Maybe someone can come up with a lot of ideas, flexibility, coming up with different categories of ideas, resistance to premature closure. Have you ever been in a conversation with someone and they finish your sentence and it's not what you wanted to say? Well, that's not creative. No, it's not uh tolerance of ambiguity, being comfortable with the unknown, of course, the famous intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, intrinsic being, doing something for the love of it, extrinsic, doing something for some kind of reward, a teacher smiling, or a boss giving you a promotion or a raise, divergent and convergent thinking. Uh I think uh we may have covered the 11 factors.

SPEAKER_00 10:54

These 11 factors help us understand what it is to think creatively and then also develop our creativity. Let's say I do cut people off or I do have an aversion to risk. Well, these are factors that if I become aware of them, or when I become aware of them, I can learn to overcome them.

SPEAKER_01 11:19

Right, right. Awareness is the whole goal. The RDCA goal is to make people aware of their creative strengths, and they are aware of them by becoming aware of what they are. Now, these 11 factors, some of them have emerged from the Torrance tests of creativity. For example, originality, uh fluency, elaboration, uh, flexibility, and Torrance's work emerged from JP Guildford's uh research and creativity. So the RDCA has a research base, it's it just hasn't pulled these uh uh factors out of the air.

SPEAKER_00 12:08

Well, exactly right. They've emerged over decades. Let's talk a little bit about being in an environment that allows for creative thinking to occur. Now we're talking about education. Let's be clear, education can happen in preschool up into the corporate environment. What is the space like where this can happen?

SPEAKER_01 12:36

Well, that's a real challenge. In the education world, everything is standardized now. Publishers have made millions on their standardized tests, and the school districts, unfortunately, have bought into it and evaluate teachers on how well their class does on these standardized tests. So that's a big inhibitor in the corporate world. Um, if the boss wants a standardized kind of environment, then the employees have to tow the mark, they have to fit in with the corporate policy, and that's very restrictive. The military, same thing. And that really is something that we have to fight.

SPEAKER_00 13:37

And it's not like creativity is something new that we're trying to bring forward. When brainstorming came out across America in the late 50s, boy, did it sweep across corporations. Now, though, people don't generally use brainstorming in the way that it was designed to diverge, explore, and then converge, and then use all of that other stuff that we didn't really use, that we diverged on as a bank of information and building the narrative for that which it is we're trying to work on. There's been a semantic shift in the word brainstorming, which happens to all language, it changes over time.

SPEAKER_01 14:17

Well, the the underpinning of brainstorming was to not come to premature closure, to let people come up with these wild ideas, and then the convergent comes in when the team then starts to analyze all of the ideas, collapse them into categories, and then uh converge down until they come up with a solution or a problem uh that they all want to work on. Another approach to brainstorming is called brain writing, because in brainstorming, uh many times one or two people uh are very verbal and they kind of take control of the conversation, which kills the whole concept of brainstorming. But with um brain writing, the same generation of ideas occurs, but the people are individual in the beginning, it doesn't start out collaborative. People write down their ideas and then they share them, and then the collaboration comes.

SPEAKER_00 15:35

And I found that brainwriting works especially well with mature crowds, multilingual crowds, and working asynchronously. Not everybody has to be generating ideas at the same time. In a brainwriting exercise, you are learning what others have written or suggested, and you build upon those in written format. So it's another form of divergent thinking before you analyze and uh get to any decision making about what might stand out and what you want to take further to develop. It has changed when somebody says, let's brainstorm, boy, it doesn't show up that way of let's diverge and then let's hit cluster and restate and converge. There's something missing in an understanding of what creativity is. What is it that we're missing? What's the key piece in your mind?

SPEAKER_01 16:24

Some people think creativity is something that just a few people have, which is a myth. We're all bored with creative strengths, it's diversified through exercises, practice, education, and uh it's a real unfortunate myth that creativity is for a few exceptional people. I could share a story. Dr. Torrance and I went into a school in Athens, Georgia, and we were interested in working with two first grade classes. There were two little boys uh in in each of the first grades. In other words, they they were in different uh classrooms, and they were in the on the Metropolitan test, they were in the slow learner, they came out in the slow learner range, but on the Torrance test of creative thinking, their scores were over 120, which meant that that was very creative. And the two teachers talked with Dr. Torrance and me, and they said, but these boys are troublemakers, they can't sit still, they don't have friends because they don't uh really accept what their peers say, and they're such liars. Dr. Torrance kind of twinkled and said that, well, maybe so. Lying is a very creative activity, and these youngsters have to be shown how to use their creativity in socially acceptable ways. And then he proceeded to give the teachers a number of activities that they could implement, and they agreed that they would implement them. We went back and it was two or three weeks, and in observing the two little boys, one little boy was helping a classmate with reading, and another kid was um helping uh a whole group of kids in math, and the teacher said these boys have changed around completely without giving them the activities that you suggested. And one teacher said, One little boy even carried my stuff to my car. And so it just highlighted that creative kids can't sit still, they have a lot of energy, they can't sit in a seat for hours, which is expected in in classrooms. They question what the teacher says, even what their pair says, they want evidence, they daydream when they're bored, and so identifying their creative strengths changed their lives because the two boys would have been in the slow learner track right up through high school because that's how it was. If you were identified as a slow learner on the Metropolitan Test in first grade, that's it. You you were you were pegged.

SPEAKER_00 19:52

I appreciate that story. I had a similar experience with teachers in Pakistan, and they often talked about slow learners and what to do with that. And when we introduced some creative thinking skills and tools in the classroom, boy, were they interested and excited and they enjoyed the learning. How we deliver learning is just as important as what the learning is. We talked about that in the last episode. If we can allow the student to meander a little bit in thought and explore, that will help them not only build their creativity, but get a better result and help them feel better and contribute to their motivation. And so it all hangs together in terms of a spiral. Is it an upward spiral toward being more fully developing human with our creativity? Or is it maybe a more of a downward spiral of more constraint and contraction around how we're supposed to be or what the perception is that we're supposed to be?

SPEAKER_01 20:52

Right. And you know, in the corporate world, uh many corporations have created a talent manager. And the talent manager's job is to develop creative environments for the employees. So that's a really big step.

SPEAKER_00 21:13

I think it is a big step because it allows for us to incubate, break away from what we've been doing, and allow things to come to us. We know that is real. I wonder, though, about the processes for problem solving in the work environment, in the school environment, they seem to be not as prevalent as maybe they were a few decades ago when creativity was really fresh and new.

SPEAKER_01 21:41

Well, I'm not sure if years ago there were classroom environments that were creative because of the whole standardization. That whole uh idea of standardized. Testing really kills a teacher's ability to create a creative classroom environment. I remember uh one time when I was supervising uh teacher and students in Georgia, my students were so frustrated because they had to teach to the test so that the kids would do well, especially the reading test. And I problem solved with them. Uh, and I said, look, teach like you want to, teach creatively, and then the last two weeks just before the test, just focus on teaching to the test.

SPEAKER_00 22:50

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 22:51

They did it. The kids came out as strong as when they had a focus on the test for the whole year.

SPEAKER_00 22:59

And why would that be? Because why? Because they feel motivated, they have had fun, because what would be what reasons?

SPEAKER_01 23:06

Because what the skills that are need were needed to get a decent grade on the reading test could be packed into a two-week training. Whereas when they did it for the whole year, it was dissipated. The whole uh skill set, they were dissipated, and the kids lost interest. And so they didn't really apply these skills when they took the tests. But when they were focused on the last couple of weeks, and I mean it was almost like a team effort. They wanted to really show that they could do well without having to spend the whole year on the skills, and it worked.

SPEAKER_00 23:53

Let's separate out being creative, like teaching creatively and teaching for creative thinking, because those are two different things.

SPEAKER_01 24:05

First of all, the teacher or the talent manager or the corporate leader has to be aware of their own creative strengths. Because if they're not aware of their own creative strengths, then they're not in a position to help guide anybody else's. And how do they become aware of their creative strengths? Through instruction. It's not something they're born with, they have to be instructed, and this is what's so terrible about teacher prep. Some research showed through a catalog review that about 10 of the top teacher prep programs in the United States incorporate some kind of creativity. But I was recently doing some research, and I found that the University of Maryland, in their title, uses the word creativity, but when you look at what's actually going on in the coursework, there is nothing about creativity. Buffalo State University at their master's level really focuses on creativity. And I was very pleased to be the one of the two outside evaluators for their new PhD program that incorporates creativity. But at the undergraduate level, there's nothing in terms of teacher prep and creativity. So it has to start with education, it has to start with becoming aware through instruction of, for example, these 11 factors that make up creative thinking. And there are more. There's uh humor, there's looking at things from different perspectives.

SPEAKER_00 26:05

There are a few more. And the Torrance Incubation Model for Teaching and Learning is a powerful platform for structuring lessons, for structuring curriculum, and also for bringing the creative thinking skills to life. Torrance was a giant that way in bringing something to us that is absolutely accessible and makes the classroom much more dynamic. Humans are social beings. We do stuff together to live, to solve problems, to create new opportunities. And so, what's the quality of our interactions is our key question. And how are we solving problems? In finding innovative, different novel answers that have usefulness, which is one of our key definitions of creativity. And so creativity really outshines AI because it is the human ability to interact with imagination to create something new. And AI cannot be in the room with wisdom, context, environment, um, case of morality, ethics, purpose to understand and to be able to contribute into conversation. This is a case that we're not even registering.

SPEAKER_01 27:32

And the other thing that is so important in terms of creativity is celebrating errors, celebrating when you're wrong, and taking it apart and looking at it. Okay, what is wrong? Something's wrong. Let's dig deep and see if we can figure out what it is that's wrong. But especially in a classroom, if a kid makes a mistake, it should be bravo, you were thinking.

SPEAKER_00 28:07

Yes, you're alive, you're here, you've got something on your mind. Let's take that into the corporate setting. What would it be like to have a corporate culture that is really founded on being more creative? We would accept people taking risks. What other things would happen in an environment at work that was deliberately creative in its culture?

SPEAKER_01 28:30

I'd like to sidetrack a little bit to the military because that's how Torrance got into the whole research on creativity. He was working for the uh US Army, Use Department of Army, and he was asked to find out why some prisoners of war survived and some didn't. And what he found out was those who survived were using creative thinking tactics, and that started his whole interaction with the field of creativity. He really was one of the giants at starting the fact that creativity could be measured.

SPEAKER_00 29:22

You went into education, you founded a university program, you developed and built another assessment that built on the Torrance test for creative thinking. You built your whole life around what you learned as a result of working with him. Is that right? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 29:43

What I learned from him was how to be positive with people. You know, you aren't always positive. It's easy to just say, oh, gee, I don't think so. He never was negative. Um, and that was a great learning. It's very much like Carl Rogers' unconditional love. It was so powerful, and I found myself implementing acceptance with my students, my peers, probably the most influential learning that he gave me. Um his caring about people was so obvious, and I started to emulate that. He really did care about people being happy, succeeding, just being well, and I I think probably those two things, caring about people and accepting are two of the most powerful gifts that he gave me.

SPEAKER_00 31:08

And if you don't know where to start, answer with maybe so. M-E-B-B-E, maybe so. Dr. Freddie Reesman, thank you so very much for your time today. As we talked about creativity in education, and that means at home, at school, or at work. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Tanya Newtzen. My pleasure. Our next episode, we're going to be talking about creative leadership specifically. How might we be leaders using creativity? Stay tuned, and we will see you next time. Dr. Freddy