Social Emotional Learning Topic: Creativity

Transcript for Podcast Lesson on Creativity with Chelsea

Jenny Woo [00:00:07] Hello everyone, I'm Jenny and you're listening to 52 Essential Conversations. Today we have Chelsea Myers sitting with us to talk about creativity. Chelsea plays in the intersection between teaching and neuroscience through her time spent in the classrooms and at the research lab. She has taught in project-based learning school environments from 5th all the way to 12th grade on both the West and East Coasts. While working for the Laboratory for Educational Neuroscience at the University of California San Francisco, Chelsea was a Research Fellow for the Center for Childhood Creativity, where she helped to translate neuroscience research to usable knowledge for parents and teachers. Welcome, Chelsea.

Chelsea Myers [00:00:59] Hi Jenny. Thanks so much for having me.

Jenny Woo [00:01:02] Tell us what is creativity is to you and why is it important.

 Chelsea Myers [00:01:08] It's so interesting from both my teaching background and my research background to answer that question. From a researching standpoint, a creative idea tends to be assessed based on whether it's both original and useful. As a teacher, I tend to think of inventiveness, spontaneity, and imagination. Really though, the non-researcher in me tends to feel that putting a strict definition around creativity is against its very nature. Parents like you, Jenny, of young children have an opportunity to see amazing creativity each day in your children, which stems so much from being so curious about everything around them. Children, when given the right environment can do tremendous things, come up with amazingly inventive worlds, solutions, and ways of navigating their surroundings. And it is through constraints, expectations, social norms, and responsibilities that we start to see that decline in creativity as kids get older and turn to adults. Something called the Fourth Grade Slump has been identified by researchers as a time around nine to ten years old where we really see a decline in creative thinking. Despite this decline, creative thinking is something that we are seeing become more and more important in our adulthood and for our economy. When so many of our jobs are automated now, top employers are looking for innovation and innovation comes from people who think creatively. Paul Tough, an amazing journalist that writes a lot about education talks about how we no longer need just problem solvers but problem finders as well. I have always loved that and I think it is so much related to how I approach creativity with my students.

Jenny Woo [00:02:46] Let's break this down. Tell us what you've done at school or even tips for parents in fostering the type of right environment where we can encourage problem finders.

Chelsea Myers [00:03:00] Great question. So much of creativity for children is about the imagination: coming up with new worlds and imaginary friends. It is probably really basic to say this, but embracing the power of play is one thing a parent can do. So often, kids are inundated with schedules so early on in their lives, and that leaves little room for imaginative play. Protect and prioritize that time for your kids. I think also, research shows us that it is important for us not as adults to put constraints on their curiosity, so using open-ended language as your child explores novel things, such as "I wonder what this is for?" "what do you think?" for example. A language that is encouraging and not dismissive of ideas. As an educator, we often call this "yes, and" rather than using that dreaded "but" phrased. As Carol Dweck promotes, using growth mindset language praising effort rather than results is a great way to foster creativity. Facilitating brainstorming can really help where kids are generating a lot of ideas and organically seeing how some ideas lead to others and asking questions that help kids to see patterns and relationships in the world. Being in nature can especially help facilitate that part too. And just overall, allowing your kids to fail a little bit and helping them through frustrations when they are stuck can be really helpful. Teaching strategies that we often use on our own as adults, like taking a break from something and coming back for example. Movement, as well, can be super important for those aha moments, and movement for creative expression is really great.

Chelsea Myers [00:04:40] Some really important research in psychology and neuroscience recognizes a phenomenon called the "Undermining Effect," which basically is that when something is already intrinsically rewarding--they just like doing something. It is given an extrinsic reward, a treat, or something of that sort, it actually undermines the innate desire and enjoyment of that activity. I think recognizing that is really important for parents and educators. Can we identify and help kids to see when they have done something for pure enjoyment, not for any outside rewards? I think especially as kids get older and approach the slump that we talked about, putting effort into creating environments for creativity can be important. I'm amazed during my time as an educator at how cardboard, pipe cleaners, and other recyclables turn into poly elevators and zip lines. Allowing for these materials and a space to get messy can be super important. When parents are able, providing new experiences such as museums, nature walks, cultural festivals, art performances can be really enriching in creativity provoking.

Jenny Woo [00:05:49] I love how you know these are great tangible examples of how to create that environment where they can make mistakes, fail, and explore that process. And it's so funny that you said "yes, and" versus the "but." It's like every time I lay out a bunch of materials for my kids to play, it's always "oh this is great, so amazing what you're doing" but then in my head, I'm like "oh it's so messy, what am I going to do!" So that's one thing, the balance of just the fact that you do need to clean it up and this mess is there and real. Then also I'm feeling the tension of when do you step in as a parent to use some creativity moments as a teachable moment, say "how about this or do it this way." It's such a balance between the two. Any tips for us in handling messiness and also the tension of letting go, leaving them alone vs. going in and teaching them.

Chelsea Myers [00:07:01] Yeah, that's such a challenging question. I do think that if you are facilitating your children in a way that again uses that open language rather than "you should do it this way," providing a lot of different options of how things can be approached and strategies. I truly believe that when you can, to try to let your children come to those moments on their own and it's really interesting because I think as parents and I know my own parents did this as well is that they're afraid to watch us fail. And really those are some of the most influential learning experiences in our lives and they're especially fruitful when they're in a supportive environment around parents that are there to comfort them or direct them or support them in that failure and all the emotions that come with that. Embracing that and the power you have as a parent to understand the comfort that you can provide in those struggle moments that lead to great learning and productive futures for your children.

Jenny Woo [00:08:17] Yeah. That's a great point. And it actually reminded me of embracing failures within ourselves as parents. I think a lot of the times we do feel pressure and that you know we need to get this teachable moment right. We need to capitalize on this learning experience. We got to do it now versus just modeling the fact that we don't know the right answers and we're looking for it together and embracing that. I think for me as a former executive coach, I've worked with a lot of adults who have a fear of failure. And ironically, those are the things that are holding them back from getting to the next level as you mentioned, the 21st-century skills and jobs.

Jenny Woo [00:09:03] So any tips or resources that you have for us as parents?

Chelsea Myers [00:09:09] A lot of my interest in this topic stemmed from my work with an amazing center out of Sausalito, California right outside of San Francisco called the Center for Childhood Creativity. While I was working at an educational research lab in the area they asked me to come on board to help them to translate some of the newer neuroscience of creativity research into some usable digestible knowledge. Their website has an amazing set of resources on the subject, including the paper that I worked on called Inspiring a Generation to Create, Critical Components of Creativity in Children. That paper includes a really interesting overview of creativity and also which I absolutely love, provides games and strategies that parents and educators can use to help foster creativity, some of which definitely has some parallels to what we talked about today.

Jenny Woo [00:09:58] Well thank you so much for your time, Chelsea. And thank you for tuning in to 52 Essential Conversation.

Social Emotional Learning Topic: Perspective-Taking

Transcript for Podcast Lesson on Perspective-Taking with Dr. Clements

Jenny Woo: Hello everyone. I'm Jenny and you're listening to 52 Essential Conversations. Today, we have Lindsay Clements joining us to talk about Perspective-taking.

Jenny Woo: Lindsay is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Developmental and Educational Psychology at Boston College. She researches how parent-child and peer-to-peer dialogue can impact early learning and executive function. She also has experience working with schools to build and implement learning support programs for struggling students and those with disabilities.

Jenny Woo: Welcome Lindsay. 

Lindsay Clements: Thanks for having me.

Jenny Woo: Tell us, what exactly is perspective-taking and why is it important?

Lindsay Clements: Perspective-taking is really what it sounds like. It's the ability to take another person's perspective into consideration. As researchers, we often think of that in a couple of different ways. One way that we can think about it is more from a visual perspective and understanding that if someone else is standing at a different place in a room or a classroom, that they're experiencing that classroom a little bit differently than we are. So, we can stop to think about what that experience is like for them--what they see and what they feel in that particular position. Another way that we can think about it is more from an empathetic or interpersonal perspective. And that's getting to know a person, understanding that they have different beliefs, likes and dislikes, than us. And understanding that because of that, they experience different situations, different people, even TV shows a little bit differently than we do and stopping to think what that is like for them. These both ways that we think about perspective-taking are important because both contribute to executive functioning and there are two ways that really happen. One is through what we call inhibition. In order to take another person's perspective, we really have to inhibit our own to take a few moments and put ourselves in another person's shoes and think about what this is like for them. The second way that supports executive function is through what we call cognitive flexibility. And that really means that we're switching in our brain between different perspectives. I'm situated in my own perspective. I take a moment to try to understand someone else's so I'm flexibly switching to their perspective and then I switch back to my own. By taking other people's perspective, whether it's from an emotional standpoint or just in thinking about what the space that they're in is like for them, we're supporting our own executive function and we're supporting kids and developing their executive functions.

Jenny Woo: This sounds like a really critical skill and I can already think of examples of when I wish my children could have a little bit more of those. For example, as parents, we've had a long day at work or just running errands coming back and there are times where I wish my children could take that perspective of mine and realize that I've had a hard day, I need a break right. Or, if my twins could understand each other and have fewer fights. Tell me, what can we do at home to encourage and build perspective-taking skills?

Lindsay Clements: One way that we can do it from kind of an activity fun thing to do perspective is to prompt children to do that. We could do that on the go. If we're driving in the car, we could ask our children "what do you think this park looks like for me versus you because I'm in the front seat and you're in the backseat?" Or, if we're at home and somebody is watching a TV show. Whether it's a children's cartoon or a show that you might like to watch, you can still comment on the different characters' emotional states and maybe prompt during the commercial break your child to role play and think about if you were this person in the show and this other thing happened to you, how do you think you would feel? You can also do that with something like a book character or even a character in a commercial.

Jenny Woo: That's great. And I know that role modeling is also very important. What can we as parents do ourselves to role model this type of perspective-taking for our children?

Lindsay Clements: One thing that's important to remember is that perspective-taking along with all executive functions are developmental skills so kids get better at it as they get older. You might want to think about how you can make role modeling more age-appropriate. For younger children, you might take the time to tell them a story in more detail about not only what happened to you in that particular story but how you felt and how someone else felt during it. Kids are beginning to understand that in any given situation there's a lot of different perspectives happening that are all interacting and cooperating. To build a different situation, for older kids you can do the same thing, but your questions might be a little bit more complex. There's a better understanding of more diverse emotions beyond just happy, sad, angry as children get older. You might ask more probing questions like "do you think they felt both happy and sad when this happened to them? What do you think would make them feel better?" And kind of just talking about how perspectives are complex and different things can be happening all at the same time.

Jenny Woo: That sounds great and that actually led me to think about how this is done in the classroom. I can certainly see the type of inquiry-based method done through writing and talking. Tell me what have you done as an educator, a teacher in the schools that you've worked at?

Lindsay Clements: One thing that I have seen a lot of my students enjoy is some of the more project-based learning where children have a lot of agency or input in what it is that they're going to be doing so they can choose a topic, choose how they research it and choose what their final product is--whether it's a paper, an art project, a video, they can work with their teacher to decide what it is that's most important to them and then students can look around and see that other students have different interests for them. Different preferences for how they go about their research for what kind of project that they want to produce and that can help them understand that what I'm doing is important to me for these reasons and I can ask other people what you are doing and why is that important to you.

Jenny Woo: Very useful. Lindsay, if I want to learn more about perspective-taking and even executive function skills. Where can I go?

Lindsay Clements: Executive functioning is becoming a more popular area of research as well as a more popular area of discussion for both parents and researchers in that partnership. There's a lot of resources through different projects, one of which I work on is called The DREME project, D.R.E.M.E. And that's out of Stanford University. There's a lot of researchers working on that around the country. We do a lot of work on the parent-child connection in terms of executive functioning and also as a secondary interest in math. We have a great website that has parent blogs as well as different research projects that we're working on and little blurbs about what those mean. I would encourage any interested parents or teachers, if they have a moment, to look at that website. We also linked to other parent resources or teacher resources that might be interesting for those who want to do a little deeper research on that topic.

Jenny Woo: That sounds great. I'll be checking it out soon. Thank you so much for your time, Lindsey for being here with us. And thank you for joining us for 52 Essential Conversations.