Creativity can be nurtured and grown and should be in every subject, particularly now when creativity is such a competitive advantage. Today’s guest, Susan M. Riley, shares how we can bring creativity into every classroom and gives specific examples for math, science, and engineering. Susan is the author of the book Creativity’s Edge.
Susan argues that creativity shouldn’t be quarantined to one part of the building. Susan shares four branches of creativity and gives concrete examples subject by subject. Math. Science. Engineering. Then, she gives us teachers encouragement to add some creativity into our own days. (I know it is hard when you’re so busy, but I know when I have done this, it has helped me.) So, let’s talk about building our edge with creativity and get some ideas for pulling it into our own classes.
Two things to try this week — one for your students, one for you.
Consider “hard fun” creative projects in the projects you give them for their subject. Reflect on what you’re asking students to do and count to ten past when you want to step in and let them have a little bit of struggle so they can create and invent.
And here is one for you, not for your students.
Schedule a 5-minute creativity moment for yourself this week to create something. I have a planner that I put stickers in and print out photos from a small printer and put it in my planner. It is a creative outlet for me. Find a creative outlet for yourself. If you like to sing, sing a favorite song in the car. If you like to draw, take a moment to doodle. Pull something into your day that is creative, even if it is a creative moment in your lesson. See how it makes you feel and see if you want to try it the next day as well. Let me know what you think.
Susan M. Riley is the Founder of The Institute for Arts Integration & STEAM and host of the Art Works for Teachers podcast. A former music educator with more than two decades of leadership in creative curriculum design, she helps schools build innovative, student-centered learning environments. Riley’s work has been featured by Edutopia, Education Week, and ASCD, and her resources reach millions of educators each year. Her new book, Creativity’s Edge, explores why creativity is the defining skill of the AI era – and how educators and leaders can cultivate it with purpose. She lives in the mid-Atlantic with her family.
If this one gave you something to try on Monday, share it with the teacher across the hall.
This transcript was generated using AI and has been reviewed by humans for accuracy. Minor errors or artifacts may remain but I worked my best to find any issues with the transcript as I reviewed the show. – Vicki
Vicki Davis (00:00): Happy Motivational Monday. This is episode 980, and we’re talking about creativity. I hope that today you will create before you consume, make something before you check email, and give your students the same rule. They make something before they open a device. Give them what our guest today calls hard fun, a challenge just past the edge of easy. And then find your own creative access point.
Whether it’s singing in the car, journaling, whatever it is, and take 10 minutes a day. Creativity is especially important in the age of AI.
Vicki Davis (00:44): Today’s show is sponsored by Experience AI, the free AI literacy program from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, co-founded with Google DeepMind. Stay to the end. I’ll share how you can start teaching AI literacy in your classroom with confidence. No experience required.
Vicki Davis (01:01): Today we’re talking with Susan M. Riley. She is a former music teacher and the founder of the Institute for Arts Integration and STEAM, where she has spent more than two decades helping schools move beyond rigid content silos and into innovative student-centered classrooms. She is the host of Art Works for Teachers podcast and author of the new book, Creativity’s Edge.
So in this book, she gives educators practical ways to use creativity as a hidden advantage in an AI driven world. Her work is featured by Edutopia, Education Week, and ASCD. And she now reaches millions of teachers looking for fresh doable ideas they can use tomorrow.
So Susan, a sentence or two, how would you explain to a tired classroom teacher why creativity is not just one more thing, but it’s actually our greatest advantage in the age of AI?
Susan Riley (01:55): When AI can do everything for us, what else is left? Everything that matters. The things that matter most are creativity. The things that we need to teach our students to be able to think and do and be curious and create are the things that AI can’t do. And so in a future that is unknown, I am a true believer that creativity is the thing that’s gonna set us apart.
Vicki Davis (02:15): You know, my students are very often nervous about — are we going tomorrow? Will I have a job? And I say, okay, if you learn how to think, if you learn how to be creative, if you learn to get along with other people, those are things no machine will ever be able to do. And they become even more important in the classroom. But you’re not just talking the art classroom, you’re talking math and science and all these other subjects. So what are some of the ideas you give all these different subjects for integrating creativity into their lessons? Like math — math teachers are [going] to go, really, Susan?
Susan Riley (02:48): I know, but you know what? Math is where some of the best creative ideas come from, especially for students who struggle in math. Those students like me — I’m one of those people that believes that letters should not be with numbers. That’s just not right. So algebra was never my thing.
Susan Riley (03:03): When you encourage creative problem solving, that is creativity being worked through in a math class. And so when we’re looking at creativity, it’s not just skills of creativity. There’s lots of different ways that people can be creative. In fact, I call it the four branches of creativity. We have skills, that we can work on in the art classroom, but then there’s also application. And so looking at how do we pair maybe math and music together to learn fractions — it makes a beautiful pairing, but we have to be intentional about it. That’s application of creativity. Then we’ve got creative thinking. And then the last branch is creative expression. So how do we interpret what we’re feeling, what we’re seeing, who we are in a creative way.
Creativity doesn’t just live [in] isolation. It lives all around us. And so it’s learning how to leverage that [in the] classroom or content that we’re teaching.
Vicki Davis (03:54): I know our school, for calculus, one of their favorite projects they do in Desmos where they create art and they have all of the equations of all the lines that comes out of Desmos. And that’s a creativity project. And most people would say, hey, if you want to meet those standards, you don’t have time for art. But art is really part of everything because it’s part of human expression, isn’t it?
Susan Riley (04:15): Absolutely. There’s a whole museum dedicated to art and math called Museum of Math up in New York. [If] you’ve never been, go. It has all kinds of projects just like what you described. And its whole goal is to showcase — there’s creativity embedded within our human experience. And so how that comes out can be expressed in a lot of different ways.
Vicki Davis (04:35): Okay, so how about art and engineering? Do you have anything there?
Susan Riley (04:38): Absolutely. So when we’re thinking about engineering, I often think about Alexander Calder as an artist who created kinetic sculptures. How do you create something that moves and is also a piece of art, and what qualifies as art, and taking a look at those pieces and trying to pull them together? Engineering is also about the problem solving, that process, the engineering process that’s embedded into STEAM significantly. [You can] leverage not just visual art, but we could look at music or theater or dance.
Dance is a great way to connect with engineering, looking at how different choreography components pull together. It’s just a matter of shifting our lens just slightly to take a look at our content in maybe a different way than we’ve thought of before.
Vicki Davis (05:18): So let’s shift — science and creativity?
Susan Riley (05:21): Science has a lot of natural pairings, particularly when we’re looking at both movement, if we’re looking at dance, as well as visual art. Think about when you’re looking at developing colors and color theory — there’s a lot that has to go into exactly how many of each color would work together to create a purple or a violet, and documenting that process. I’ve done that with students before when we’ve looked at making their own fragrances.
We actually brought the experience of making a fragrance from Italy. We had a partner from Italy come in and share, like, here’s how perfumery factories actually look at the science of smell and what it is that attracts people one way or the other to one scent or another. And then how do you create that kind of a scent? It is an art and a science of being able to pull them together.
Vicki Davis (06:10): So Susan, in Creativity’s Edge, you talk about creative abilities that AI can’t touch, like finding problems worth solving and linking ideas in new ways. So how can we as educators intentionally design activities that build those muscles inside our students’ thinking process?
Susan Riley (06:29): Yeah, I think it goes back to looking at those four branches of creativity. [I] would love every school to have access to just dedicated arts programs so that they can teach those dedicated art skills. That’s not possible always, but it’s certainly one branch of it. In classrooms, what I’d love to see is when we’re focusing on creative thinking, particularly around developing skills, around lateral, convergent, and divergent thinking —
being able to provide opportunities for students to have what I call hard fun. Give them a challenge that is right on that edge of not quite too hard, right? You don’t want them to be too far ahead, that’s frustrating, but that raises the bar, that encourages them to push beyond what they thought they might be capable of — and then step back.
Vicki Davis (07:14): You talk a lot about filling your own creative cup. For me, I write. What are some sustainable ways teachers can reclaim their own creativity without feeling like it’s just more homework?
Susan Riley (07:25): That’s the key. Everybody has what I call a creative access point. You might not be the best singer in the world. You might not be on a stage, but you can rock it out in the shower or in the car, right? That’s your jam.
Susan Riley (07:35): Or maybe when you go to a museum, it’s like magic just starts to appear and you feel like at home in that place. When you want to fill your creative cup, you got to recognize — what is it that lights you up?
Figure out what that is. And once you know what that is, don’t let it be a burden. Allow it to be this kind of place that you go in order to feel like you’re coming home. Once you find what it is, ensuring that you carve out a little bit of time for yourself every day to practice it. Creativity is a practice. It’s not something that just [stays] stagnant. We can’t encourage creativity if we’re not practicing [it] in ourselves, and being willing to be open to the process, being willing to fail at the things that we’re trying
and learning from them, and being open to leaning into that. And so it doesn’t have to be, you know, a class every week that you have to go to, or this one particular thinking routine that you always have to do. Find the thing that lights you up. Give yourself permission to play with it
a little bit every day if you can. If not, set aside some time during your week — something that you commit to that fills you and allows you to see the world in a different way, or see the world the way that you want to see it. Express yourself. Join a choir. Go do something that builds that. Take a walk and listen to something that you really enjoy and then maybe journal about it when you get home. Something that allows you to participate in the process.
Vicki Davis (08:59): There’s so many ideas I’ve gotten into. Writing the notes — I like to write people in calligraphy and sealing it with a wax seal. That’s so much fun. My mom, in one season of her life, she always liked to walk at the farm and create a feather collection and was always looking for new feathers. And I know people who have done pressed flowers and play the piano or just tinker with an instrument. There’s so many ways to be
just creative and keep that part of our brain, because it does spill over into other areas — as well as just recognizing beauty. I believe [it] makes us happier, because we’re kind of wired to notice beauty. And sometimes there’s just beauty in this little wildflower that jumped up.
I love your message about creativity and humanity and the place it has in our classrooms, because here’s the thing — don’t you think that STEAM powered projects, science, technology, engineering, arts and math, that really pull the arts in, give kids a real meaning and a purpose to want to come to school? I mean, who talks about a test as a great memory of school? It’s always the projects.
Susan Riley (10:15): One of the hallmarks of the research that we know about arts integration and STEAM is that when it’s embraced and brought in intentionally and we’re being thoughtful about it, we see attendance increase. Discipline issues decrease significantly — we’re talking five, ten percent. That’s a big decrease in disruptions. We’re seeing increased student achievement. Like, there’s so many benefits to all of this
that we know can truly turn things around for our students and make them want to come and also invest in their own learning, right? Because it’s really hard to compete when they see influencers on YouTube making millions of dollars and tell them, hey, you got to come to school today so that we can teach you how to be successful in our career. And they’re like, why? Right? Let’s make it relevant for them.
Also, I’m a big believer that if we look at the history of the world, humans were creating before they learned how to feed themselves. It is innately part of who we have been created to be. There’s no other choice. We want to express it. We want to participate in it, and it is the natural hook that’s going to bring us in.
Vicki Davis (11:18): So we’ve been talking to Susan M. Riley, founder of the Institute for Arts Integration and STEAM. She’s host of Art Works for Teachers podcast and author of the new book, Creativity’s Edge. Susan, thanks for coming on today’s show.
Vicki Davis (11:33): Experience AI, co-founded by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Google DeepMind, sponsored today’s show. Experience AI is a free AI literacy program downloaded more than a million times worldwide. It provides teachers with ready-to-teach lessons, with slides, lesson plans, worksheets, and an excellent free AI glossary that I highly recommend downloading first.
Within the resources, there are unplugged activities for you to explore with your learners that don’t require a computer at all. Experience AI supports all teachers, regardless of subject area, and doesn’t require any computer science or background knowledge. Get Experience AI free at coolcatteacher.com/experienceai. That’s coolcatteacher.com/experienceai.
I’m recommending Experience AI because these lessons help you teach AI literacy with confidence and teach students how these systems actually work. Thank you, Experience AI, for sponsoring today’s show.
Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a sponsored episode and blog post. Experience AI has compensated me to share information about the Experience AI curriculum. However, all opinions expressed are my own. I have personally reviewed these resources and only recommend tools I believe offer genuine value to classroom teachers. My endorsement is limited to the educational products and services discussed in this episode. This post also includes affiliate links to books, which means that if you choose to buy I will be paid a commission at no additional cost to you. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” The sponsor has no impact on the editorial content of this show.
