Episode Transcript
Brent Warner (00:00)
What are some ways you can use creative thinking strategies to increase productive fluency? Sara Davila is helping us walk through her approaches to helping students on this episode of the DIESOL Podcast.
Welcome to the DIESOL Podcast where we focus on developing innovation in English as a second language. I can’t get any of my words out right. But here we are today. I’m Brent Warner, professor of ESL at Irvine Valley College. And I’m here with the wonderful Ixchell Reyes, award-winning educator in innovation, professional development, all the things. Ixchell, how are you today?
Ixchell Reyes (00:46)
I’m
doing well, fighting allergies because of spring and rain. ⁓ How about you?
Brent Warner (00:51)
yeah.
I am doing okay, no allergies ⁓ to speak of as of yet, but ⁓ we’re getting close to the end of the semester here, so I’m kind of looking forward to summer and ⁓ having a little time to focus on some of my own projects too. And we are here with the wonderful, excellent Sara Howareyoutoday.
Ixchell Reyes (01:11)
with.
Sara Davila (01:14)
Yeah!
am very good. Thank you so much for having me on the DIESOL podcast and I am super excited to talk to you about creative thinking and anything else that comes up.
Brent Warner (01:29)
Thank you. So, Sara we’ve talked about having you on the show for a while. It feels like a couple of years, a year and a half maybe. Yeah.
Ixchell Reyes (01:35)
At least, at least, yeah, at least a year because I
Sara Davila (01:36)
Yeah.
Ixchell Reyes (01:39)
remember you promising.
Brent Warner (01:41)
So Sara, bear with me as I ⁓ present your bio for those who may not know, although you’re a well-known person in the field. ⁓ So here we go though. ⁓ Sara Davila is an internationally recognized consultant, specializing in English language education, curriculum innovation, and educational technology. A former classroom teacher, Sara has supported national language policy reforms, built teacher training systems, and designed comprehensive assessment frameworks
for clients ranging from ministries of education to global publishers. As the founder of Educating Her World, Sara brings a systems level of perspective to solving urgent challenges in language learning, focusing on upskilling educators, advancing 21st century pedagogies, and improving learning outcomes. And she’s based in Chicago and working worldwide. Welcome. Yeah, that’s.
Sara Davila (02:20)
That is me? It’s a mouthful.
Ixchell Reyes (02:33)
Byeeee ⁓
Brent Warner (02:38)
But every time I talk to you, you’re like, I’m doing this huge thing and I’m changing the entire country of Panama’s language stuff. And I’m like, okay, well.
Ixchell Reyes (02:42)
Hehehehe. Hehehehe.
Sara Davila (02:46)
Pretty smart.
Just National Curriculum Reform for your weekend. What are you doing?
Brent Warner (02:52)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So how are you doing ⁓ first?
Sara Davila (02:58)
It’s good. mean, I am with each other here. It’s spring in Chicago. So I also have the allergy season going on. We’ve got like double red warnings every single day with the pollen. So it’s nice to see everything in bloom, but otherwise busy ⁓ continuing to do a lot of work on developing new programs, putting new curriculum out there. And of course, just kind of thinking through some of the fun challenges that are going on in education right now, because in English language, especially the sector is just changing really, really rapidly.
what we’re doing inside of the classroom, think is evolving in ways that we haven’t really seen since maybe the mid 2000s when communicative language teaching was really revolutionizing what we were doing in English. So happy to be here, happy to be working and really happy to be supporting a lot of really interesting institutions and organizations as they’re helping to navigate these changes globally. Yeah.
Brent Warner (03:52)
Yeah, tons of stuff going on, but today we’re talking about creativity, lots of creative thinking, all these kinds of things. And, Eishel, I know you’re going to kick us off.
Ixchell Reyes (03:52)
Very, very cool.
Hmm?
Sara Davila (03:57)
It’s.
Ixchell Reyes (04:03)
Yeah, so we often talk about creativity and creative thinking, but what is creative thinking as a technique and how is that different just from creativity alone?
Sara Davila (04:16)
Yeah, no, it’s a really interesting question. actually, I kind of fell down this rabbit hole of creative thinking techniques and creative thinking as a strategy back in 2010, when I was learning more about 21st century learning frameworks. So I think most of us at this point have been in some kind of webinar or a professional development session, where we’ve learned about the four C’s, right? So we have we know that the four C’s of 21st century learning, these are the learning skills.
are communication, critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration. so creativity is a part of a learning skill. And so we think, you know, students are creative. However, if you kind of go a little bit further back in the history of education and educational science, creativity is a really interesting skill. many years, I mean, and still there’s a huge bias to creativity and actually creating something meaningful and powerful. That’s a genius.
that’s not something everybody has. That might be something innate to some people, but not everyone is going to have that ability to just make something that’s amazing and magical. But what’s really interesting is there was some research that was done, and this was ⁓ one of the the fathers of creative thinking ⁓ is Edward de Bono, and he wrote a book back in the 1950s that was updated in the 70s called Lateral Thinking.
And it posits sort of a new way to think about creativity and not that it’s something that’s genius. It’s not inherent. You don’t have to be born as a creative person. These are characteristics and qualities that can actually be taught and learned. And so he came up with this series of creative thinking strategies, essentially, that allow us to create frameworks that we can bring into a variety of different situations to foster creative thinking.
And so it’s a bit more disciplined. It’s not just a random thing. It’s not just asking students to be creative, but it’s actually providing a bit of a scaffold, a structure and a framework to allow creativity and creation to happen. And so when I started looking at that, was like, wow, that’s interesting just broadly is how we come up with ideas and create innovations.
But then if I think about that from a language teaching perspective, it actually breaks through some of the challenges that we have sometimes when we’re teaching language, especially at the lower levels, but even at the higher levels, where the learning can sometimes feel a bit dull, like we’re repeating the same content over and over again, or it’s where we want to get to more productivity, but we find that the students sort of fall off after a few minutes, or that lack of really getting to internalization of fluency.
That’s a bit how I ended up there and thinking about creative thinking techniques. And that’s a bit of how this is different from just being creative, but it’s really scaffolding creativity.
Ixchell Reyes (07:05)
you
So if I, I guess I’m thinking of my, my pre-trained teachers. So my pre-service teachers would want to know, what’s a concrete example of what that looks like? What does it look like if I’m.
Sara Davila (07:22)
Right.
Right. So it’s like, how do you bring that to life in the classroom? Like, what are you doing here? So I’m going to start with kind of a very basic and there are multiple different techniques. And because I’m an overachieving educator, I have a website. So if you Google Sara Davila, you’ll find me very quickly. It’s sarahdavila.com is the website. And this is a labor of love website. This is not a promotion. I have been hosting this website now for over 20 years. And it’s kind of a dumping ground for
any activity that I’ve ever made that’s not under copyright by somebody. So it’s like if I created it, I throw it online. Good, bad, I don’t care. And when I first started working with creative thinking techniques, I actually I threw a bunch of them up on this website. And I’m going to start off with one of my favorite ones. And this is it’s going to seem very obvious when you see it, but it’s a great example. So I’m going to try. We’re going to try sharing my screen. We’ll see how it goes. ⁓ I’m a
Brent Warner (08:15)
Wonderful
for the YouTube fans, a little trickier for the podcast listeners, but we’ll get it going.
Sara Davila (08:20)
haha
So we’re going to make this a little bit bigger. So what you’re seeing here, so one of my favorite creative thinking techniques is actually called reverse brainstorming. Most of us know brainstorming, right? I toss out a topic like food. What are some foods that you like? We have our students do a brainstorm. We elicit a lot of different types of food from our students. And, you know, from there we might do some activities. How do you make the food? What are the ingredients of the food? can we can really specialize that. So with a creative thinking. So think about the reverse of that. So with reverse brainstorming.
And this is a little example activity that I have on the screen here. So in this activity, it’s like, okay, so what are some foods that you might like to cook? And so the first example I have here is pizza. I worked with middle schoolers for a number of years. Pizza is always the top of the list of favorite foods. So I have that up there. then who doesn’t love pizza? ⁓ So pizza, easy. Most people like pizza. That’s an easy one. Most people will cook it.
Brent Warner (09:12)
the list for me too, so way past the middle school.
Sara Davila (09:22)
Now, what’s interesting is like, great, you like to cook pizza, but what are some ways that you would not, what are some things you would not do if you were going to make a pizza? So rather than just think straightforward, all right, if I’m making a pizza, these are the ingredients, this is step one, step two, step three, we’re actually challenging our student to think a little bit differently. So for example, well, would you use frozen pizza dough? Absolutely not. Like I would never do that. So that’s a reverse brainstorm. What are some things that we wanna do?
Maybe you would not use a canned vegetable if you’re making your pizza. So that might be something we list as a reverse of what you would typically do. Another one is like, would you use pre-shredded cheese or would you prefer to shred your own cheese? So it’s like if you would never use a bag of pre-shredded cheese, this would be an example. ⁓ Would you put ham and pineapple on your pizza or is that something you would never do? So it’s really giving you this opportunity to kind of think about something that, I love that.
But what are the things that might happen in there that would change my position that I want to be very clear are things that would have a negative impact on this thing that I’m talking about. And you can do this for literally almost everything. It’s like, well, I love the color red, except if I’m wearing a red dress and I have purple shoes, I would never do that. It’s getting the learner really an opportunity to really expand on something. So you’re not simply making a single statement.
but you’re actually thinking through that statement with some depth. Because in almost any situation, I might be able to say, I like something. However, there may always be some caveats or some little things in there that would actually turn that like to dislike very quickly. And getting your students to talk about that creates all kinds of new conversations because they start thinking of.
these nightmare situations they’ve never thought of before like, you know, what if we put ketchup on pizza? I lived in Korea for 10 years and let me tell you something. I have a lot of opinions about that. But in Korea, you learn to like ketchup on your pizza because that is something that’s going to happen. so that’s kind of a quick example of the strategies. It’s once you understand what the strategies are, they’re extremely simple to implement. And this is one of my favorite little scaffolds is just doing it as a chart exercise.
Brent Warner (11:19)
the
Sara Davila (11:41)
And then what I’ll have my students do here is obviously they’ll list several foods and you can do this in several ways. You could have students do it as a partner exercise. You could have students do it individually, then they get together and share. But essentially the purpose of the creative thinking strategy is to help unbox more opportunities with language so that if you’re in an A1 level or if you’re at a C1 level, you’re really expanding that conversation to go far beyond just a simple statement to complete a response.
to a question or to an answer.
Brent Warner (12:12)
I like it too. So I’m thinking about this because one thing that happens a lot with these types of questions, food questions, whatever else it is, students get used to the same thing over and over again. It’s like, I know how to say the foods that I like and why I like them. And so they end up in different classes having those same conversations. You’re taking the same topic that they already understand, but spinning it in a way that actually forces them to start thinking through how.
different ways to talk about it. And it serves a second purpose too with the pineapple and Canadian bacon is you can find out which of your students are sociopaths or not. And so that’s always a good thing too.
Sara Davila (12:50)
People have very strong opinions to this day about herb and pineapple on pizza. Itchell, if you didn’t know that.
Ixchell Reyes (12:57)
I’m thinking of how this could, I was just going
to say how this changes up any grammar activity that asks students to use I would or I wouldn’t because they’re just canned sentences. And a lot of the times you end up with the affirmative, but it’s harder to produce the negative, the negative form. And so I could already, I can already see this happening with the pineapple.
Sara Davila (13:11)
Exactly.
Absolutely.
Right?
No, it’s like with reverse brainstorming, it’s really magical in the classroom because once students start thinking about like negative situations, they can really come up with a lot of different, like it gets very creative very, very quickly. And they’ll throw in things like, I love pizza unless there’s dog hair on it. And I’m like, where did the dog hair come from?
Brent Warner (13:42)
Hahahaha
Sara Davila (13:44)
But that is the creativity part of it is like, think things will suddenly come forward that you hadn’t even considered and it really suddenly breaks down a lot of the rigidity sometimes.
that we do see when we’re teaching. So that was what got me into it and building some of the strategies around it has been a lot of fun and just helping other educators understand how can we bring that together. So that’s a quick example. these are all of these worksheets, by the way, are available on my website. You can download them very quickly as a package and play around. And I do have a detailed lesson plans for each of the different strategies. So it’s just one lesson plan for strategy. So if you open up reverse brainstorming, you’ll get the whole piece.
But then you can apply it to any of the worksheets I’ve created. And then of course, go off and create your own. I’ve really created these to be templates for educators to use and to just pick up and run with. So I like to say I’m a no-budget, low-budget teacher. So almost all of these techniques can be done with literally just your students and a pencil and paper, if that’s all you’ve got in the classroom. So it’s designed to be very flexible.
Brent Warner (14:39)
Ha ha.
Well, I think we’ll, oops.
Ixchell Reyes (14:51)
Sorry,
Brent, I was gonna say all those templates are so generous because again, ⁓ many places, especially overseas, they don’t have a lot of tech. So ⁓ we’ll make sure that they’re accessible in the show notes so they can get all the things.
Brent Warner (15:06)
Yeah.
Well, let’s talk about one more that’s pretty quickly accessible on paper, ⁓ which is the idea box. I know you’ve kind of, you’ve talked about that and especially working with lower level students and it’s pretty practical. ⁓ So can we talk about that one? Afterwards, we’ll talk a little bit more about some of your ideas around AI and creativity, but a little bit more of this like the let’s get it with, you know, we don’t necessarily have to have all the tech tools. So ⁓ share a little bit about the idea box.
Sara Davila (15:08)
Fantastic.
⁓ I love idea box. Yeah.
Sure.
So with the idea box, this is an interesting creative thinking technique. So reverse brainstorming is, again, that technique from De Bono is just like, well, when you’re brainstorming ideas, think about the opposite too. Don’t just think about the positive, but think about the negatives because that can help you find ideas you want to discover. With idea box, it’s sort of bringing the same thing. like, all right, we’re trying to generate a lot of these techniques essentially include a brainstorming action.
So all right, what are some ideas that you have around X and then you might make a list. But with IdeaBox, what you want to do is then add a series of questions to expand upon that idea. And I’m just gonna show you, I am a show and tell teacher. So it is a lot easier for me if I can show. And if YouTube likes the show, that’s even better. Because I like a good YouTube show. I’m gonna make this a little bit bigger so we can see it on the screen hopefully.
Brent Warner (16:14)
Yeah, please.
Hahaha. ⁓
Sara Davila (16:26)
So here’s again, the first part of this is very, simple. The very first thing that I might do with my students here, again, you’ll see I’m using the chart as my structure frame here because charts are just very easy to explain and use to organize.
Brent Warner (16:40)
So you’ve got hobby,
where, how, and why ⁓ just on the table there. Okay.
Sara Davila (16:43)
Exactly, so that’s that
expansion there. So the first column hobby, that’s the brainstorming piece, right? So let’s make a list of a lot of hobbies that you do that you like to do, or maybe hobbies that you’re aware of that you know about. And so that might be part one of my activity. Again, my students could do this as an individual. If I have a very small class, I’d have my students do it individually, and then we would pair up. If I have a large class, I might have my groups do this.
And then what I’ll do is I’ll have group one and group two actually get together and present their ideas and compare, or I’ll do a jigsaw where I’ll have different students from different groups kind of get together and share out what their groups came from. So these are very expansive depending on the type of classroom you work with. So step one is let’s get the hobbies out. And then the idea box portion here is now expand upon that idea. If painting is a hobby, then where would you paint?
How do you paint? Like, why do you paint? So for example, here, my student says, painting. Where do I paint? I paint in my room. How do you paint? I learned to paint in school. So their idea for how they paint is slightly different from the construct of how. They’re saying, ⁓ well, I know how to paint because I learned to do that in school. They’re interpreting that question there. Or here I have, how did you start? And then finally, how do you keep doing it? I enjoy being able to paint my dreams. So that’s my motivation there. That’s what keeps me going.
So if I have students, like a very common one, it’s like when you say hobby, it’s the first thing you’ll see is soccer. Again, I worked in Korea for a number of years of soccer as a hobby. It’s like, no matter what you do, it’s going to come up. It’s like, well, where, where do you play soccer? Oh, I, know, and then they’re thinking, well, I play soccer here. like, how did you learn to play soccer? Oh, I haven’t thought about that before. I just like, I say soccer. If you ask me, what’s the hobby, my answer is soccer. The sentence is complete. The instruction is complete. The activity is complete.
Brent Warner (18:14)
Mm-hmm.
Sara Davila (18:36)
But now with the idea box, you actually have to go a little bit deeper into it. It’s not enough for you to just be able to state that this is your hobby. We actually have to expand on that and answer some additional questions. if you, one of the other ways you can expand on this, I’m sure many of us have done that, the sort of interview, find someone who, this really unboxes that find someone who is just like, find someone who learned how to play soccer from a parent, find someone who taught them self soccer, find someone who learned how to play soccer from watching TV.
So now you really got your students thinking about like the entire art of what that hobby is, what it means to them, how they created that, that then you can use to just have your students share from this worksheet or even expand that off into other types of activities to really engage the depth and the breadth of communication there. So hobbies is one of these, but I have multiples of these for different types of ideas that you can ⁓ kind of riff on. And then again, you’ll see that the scaffold there as well.
Brent Warner (19:36)
Love it. ⁓ So you had talked about, so this is great, and I was thinking the
you’re talking about the find someone who thing too, because it’s like a lot of times that ends up being kind of a yes no question and then just fill in jump to the next person, try to find the next person right away. And so I like the idea that you might say, OK, no, you’re going to talk to someone for 90 seconds or two minutes or whatever it is. And then you’re going to try to expand as many of these questions as you can in this time. Right. Maybe you can get to the where maybe you can get to the how maybe you can get to the why. Right. But you would say like follow follow up with those. So it’s not just yes no question.
Sara Davila (20:07)
Right.
Brent Warner (20:11)
And then that can push the students to go a little bit ⁓ further through everything as well. So I like that a lot.
Sara Davila (20:15)
Yeah.
And you’ll see on a lot of these activities I have included. it’s like there’s kind of a step one and step two. Step one is doing the brainstorming, the ideation. And then at the bottom, I have additional share language for that interaction. So they can either be doing that with, you know, again, with a partner, if I have a small class, maybe one or two partners, or if I have a large class can be a full group mingle or, you know, get as many students as you can, but you can really expand these very, quickly.
Brent Warner (20:42)
Nice, love it.
Ixchell Reyes (20:43)
This is so cool. I think we had just talked about not doing the same cringy activities in the same way. And this is another cool way to do it.
Sara Davila (20:50)
you
Brent Warner (20:54)
Well, the thing I like about
Sara Davila (20:54)
Yeah.
Brent Warner (20:55)
it too is it’s like it doesn’t take a lot to figure out a way to shift the perspective on it, right?
Ixchell Reyes (20:59)
Hmm?
Sara Davila (21:00)
Right. No, it’s really you start from brainstorming, but it’s literally just kind of adding a spin on that brainstorming and that allows us to go further. there are so many ways to brainstorming. I’m sure you’ve seen things like Four Corners brainstorming, which these are graphic organizers or mind mapping. But when you start with that type of brainstorming, it always tends to be very literal. Like you start with a point and then you next point, next point, next point.
What we don’t realize as educators is that process of like point A and then point A logically follows to B, followed by C, followed by D. That is critical thinking. That is process thinking where we’re actually creating a logical construct and we’re moving from point A to a point B to point C to point D. So what’s interesting about these creative thinking strategies for brainstorming is the goal here is not to be logical, but to be lateral.
Brent Warner (21:55)
Mm.
Sara Davila (21:55)
to
actually shift how we’re thinking so that we’re moving in a slightly different direction to create a larger repository of potential ideas. And so that’s kind of a significant way to do that. And again, it really unboxes a lot. And if you don’t mind, I’m gonna steal things a little bit and take you into a third one because this was the one that I loved doing. It blows my mind the first time I did it. And what this does is it brings a kinesthetic play visual. It’s very, very creative.
Brent Warner (22:14)
yeah.
Ixchell Reyes (22:15)
Do it, do it.
Sara Davila (22:23)
Again, you can do this with just pencils, papers, crayons, if that’s all you have. But if you like me as a teacher, if you go to every single conference, whenever you go to a conference, I love the Expo Hall. Walk through the Expo Hall. Whoever is giving away Post-It notes, go the last day of the Expo Hall and just fill your bag with Post-It notes. I used to do this at Cotes et Sol, I do it at TSol. So it’d have like massive quantities of Post-It notes.
Brent Warner (22:40)
the
Sara Davila (22:49)
And then you can do one of my favorite creative thinking techniques. I’ll just put this up on the screen. I’m getting very good at this, hopefully, as this management. I’ll make this one bigger. So you can kind of see this. Lotus Blossom, is, again, these are the Bono creative thinking techniques. And I’m using one. This is a great one focused on Korea. So we start off with the circle. The circle is sort of the center of our Lotus Blossom. And we might be talking about
Brent Warner (22:57)
The master.
Sara Davila (23:16)
countries and and customs and so I start off here with the example Korea Korea is a country now with that circle what the very first thing that I would want to do is maybe have my students brainstorm several countries so we would have post-it notes for Japan China Germany you know Ghana we could do Argentina we could have Mexico we can have Panama so of multiple different countries in here
Now, once we have the countries, that’s great. now that we know about countries, we want to have some customs. So we can start off brainstorming some customs. in Korea, very true in Korea, one of the important customs here is you do not put your chopsticks in rice. it’s like a common, you can tell someone is new to Korea when you see their chopsticks in rice. It’s right there. then so that’s kind of the…
Ixchell Reyes (24:01)
truffle pie.
Brent Warner (24:03)
Hmm.
Sara Davila (24:07)
here is like we’d say, so what are some cultures and I love doing do don’t. So in Korea, you would not put chopsticks and rice, but in Korea, you would bow if you’re saying hello to someone. So you kind of have both the positive and the negative. And then on top of that, this is the next layer of my lotus blossom, the why.
Like what do i need to know about that why is that the role why is that something that you need to do so now imagine you can see her on the screen like i have kind of my first circle that i have my little post it note then don’t put chopsticks and rice that would be my second post it note then this third that would be a post it note and if you actually have this in physical reality these these little post it notes start to flip up like flower petals and when you do this with all of the countries and then you add in all of the cultural pieces and then you add in all of the knowledge
you finish with this beautiful lotus blossom and then you can pick that up and go around and one of your partners or one of your peers points to a country and then you use the lotus blossom to answer questions. What country are we talking about? Korea. What is something you don’t do in Korea? In Korea, you don’t put chopsticks and rice. Why? because that would be disrespected to your elders. What is something you do do in Korea? And now imagine the conversations you’re suddenly having in your classroom.
Brent Warner (24:56)
Yeah.
Sara Davila (25:22)
Like you’re really expanding that language beyond anything that you’ve ever done before. I have this creative thinking like I have this for the smallest things like what’s your favorite color all the way out to something as complex as cultures and traditions. And it’s just magical to watch this happen. And again, if you don’t have Post-it notes, you can have students use different colored pencils and just draw boxes and bring it forward. But when you’re finished, you have this beautiful mosaic flower circle.
of communication that is just so much fun to do. this is again, another one of those creative thinking things that just unboxes that language in the classroom. I’ll stop soapboxing there.
Brent Warner (26:01)
Yeah, no,
I love it. will.
Ixchell Reyes (26:02)
I am going to try this one. This is cool
because when you’re teaching writing, can now, even if it’s a fluency activity, now you can, you have scaffolded all of the ideas so that they’re ready to be put into a, a paragraph that isn’t, isn’t a headache inducing paragraph for them and, and they’ll be better connected to it. So more likely to, to actually go back and edit and feel proud of it at the end.
Brent Warner (26:20)
you
Sara Davila (26:22)
Yeah, you can even. love that.
yeah, yeah, you can mix and match share. just, there’s so much. Go ahead, Brent.
Ixchell Reyes (26:32)
Mm-hmm.
Brent Warner (26:34)
Well, I was just thinking too, like…
You know, you mentioned the part about like the sticky notes, like you can do it on any modality, but I like that the that little physical part of the curl up, right? Like because it becomes a tactile learning experience at the same time. And so you can really see it kind of growing out of the page physically. Like it sounds silly, but you kind of recognize that that actually has a totally different impact on people than flat writing or whatever else it is. Right. And so, OK, we’re already over time, but I have to ask a question about AI. ⁓
Sara Davila (27:00)
Thank you.
Get in there.
Ixchell Reyes (27:06)
We
Brent Warner (27:06)
We
Ixchell Reyes (27:06)
have to,
Brent Warner (27:07)
can’t not do it. Sara, you’re running most of the ⁓ AI things for TESOL these days, which is wonderful. Always excited to see that going on. ⁓ And I know that you have some thoughts around, like, are we being creative with AI? Are we developing creative thinking around it? Or are we just letting it guide us in ways that maybe we wouldn’t have chosen for ourselves? So I know you have some thoughts on that, if you don’t mind sharing.
Sara Davila (27:12)
I am.
Ixchell Reyes (27:13)
Mm-hmm.
Sara Davila (27:31)
Yeah,
no, it’s actually it makes a lot of sense after what we’ve just talked about, right? It’s like when we think about brainstorming, we often tend to do that process thinking, which is that critical thinking process. The same is often true with AI. And we don’t think about this. I listened to a lot of AI experts, and I’ll tell you, ⁓ you know, working with AI is a great way to ideate and brainstorm, except that you have to always remember. And this is something I really emphasize in.
the TESOL courses that I teach about AI, these models have been trained on the entirety, the depth and breadth of available human wisdom. Anything that we have captured in audio or visual or text format has been used to train these models. So when you’re ideating with AI, you might see a lot of ideas that you have never thought of before, but it doesn’t mean that these have never been thought of before. Like in a lot of ways that we’re just tapping into.
Creativity from other people maybe we haven’t met and that is actually the trap of being creative with AI. We’re starting to see some very early research come out from many of our research partners who are looking at the impact of this in education and what they are finding is that when you ask people to brainstorm with AI, the number of ideas that they come up with is a very smaller set of ideas and they’re less original and less unique. They tend to see a lot of the same thing, the same.
Creative ideas coming out of these brainstorming sessions with AI because they’re being driven by all of that training and information So it’s not that you can’t brainstorm with AI It’s just again you you have to push yourself to really ask is this being creative or is this just? Taking the question that I’ve given and using a critical thinking process to give me ideas that are new to me But are not necessarily new
So I think that for us as educators, when we’re using these tools to be creative, it is useful to stop and say, well, like, what would the opposite of this look like? Doing some techniques and some strategies to really helping us push ourselves to make sure that we’re not allowing that, the AI as a tool to actually limit our own abilities to innovate. Because the one thing that we do know about human beings is you give us enough time and we will be far more creative.
than any machine can ever summarize for us. And so I think that’s always the thing to keep in mind when we’re working with these tools.
Ixchell Reyes (29:54)
And that is a good note to wrap up on.
Brent Warner (29:56)
Yeah, unfortunately
we are going to run out of time here, ⁓ a good time. Thank you so much, Sara This is awesome. Let’s let’s jump out. Let’s dive out.
Ixchell Reyes (30:16)
Alright It is time for our fun finds. And I have found Ground News app. Brent, you’ve heard of it before, think. Ground News app. It’s a news app that compares how different news outlets cover the same story across the political spectrum. So that way you’re, you you see what’s being shown to you and your feed versus reported by and what the headlines are. so how,
Brent Warner (30:25)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ixchell Reyes (30:45)
I guess, so that you’re not stuck with one biased version and go to another biased version. So ⁓ the free version is good enough, I think. So check it.
Brent Warner (30:54)
Yeah,
definitely worth checking out. And then I’ve seen ground news on like YouTube channels too, so if people want to get it, you can get a discount code from somewhere on YouTube. Not from us!
Ixchell Reyes (31:04)
I think it’s worth it. been
thinking it’s worth investing, especially nowadays since there’s a backlash against a lot of the stuff that’s out there. So I’m considering it. What do you have?
Brent Warner (31:17)
All right. Well, speaking of
investing in more balanced technology that’s not so pushing everything one direction or another, if you’re talking about leaving Google as your search engine, may I strongly, very, very strongly, can I recommend KAGI? K-A-G-I. ⁓
⁓ It is a search engine that is like Google was about four or five years ago. It was wonderful There is no ads no tracking of anything ⁓ It puts together the information for you You can search the small web on there if you know about that stuff You can focus in you can build all these little filters into your searches now The one thing is it is not free ⁓ and so I got a test You know you when you sign up for it you can test and get like a hundred free searches or whatever with it and I was just
blown like instantly the quality of the searches there because there’s no ads right I just did a Google search yesterday and literally the way page and a half of scrolling was all advertisements before anything came through right so anyways all that’s gone ⁓ it’s not cheap ⁓ ten bucks a month or you know ten percent off for a year whatever but I’m just thinking I am so the product of
I’m Google’s product, it’s not the other way around when I’m searching on Google these days, so it’s just trash. Kagi, really outstanding, no tracking of you, no ads inside of there, high quality results coming through on every single search. ⁓ Options on the side for like some little AI integrations if you want them, but it’s not prioritizing that in the way that Google searches. So if you’re interested in a, it is like a real heart relieving
Benefit of like having a nice search ⁓ I felt my body Relax when I got a good So anyways kagi is my high high high recommendation even just to explore and see if it’s a possibility for you ⁓ It’s KAGI and it is worth every penny for me Sara do you have any fun finds for us?
Sara Davila (33:24)
Sure, I’m going to be shameless self-promotion. Here’s my shameless self-promotion. My fun fun, if you haven’t already found this, do check out the website. This is my resource library, as I like to say. And I want to point out, I have organized this to be very accessible to teachers. In fact, there’s a little library. I’m on the wrong screen, so I’ll go back to the right one. There’s a library where you can actually search through the library. I have close to 500 or 600 activities and lesson plans.
Brent Warner (33:27)
Yeah.
Ixchell Reyes (33:34)
website
Mm-hmm.
Wow.
Sara Davila (33:53)
on
the site, these are all free to download. And I want to mention if you are on a mobile device, I’ve actually built the site so that when you’re on mobile, it does not automatically load any of the content. All of the PDFs load automatically on a laptop. But I know a lot of people around the world are doing this work sometimes on their phone after school with limited data connections and also just limited access where you’re paying a lot more for that data. So you think very carefully.
Ixchell Reyes (34:19)
Thank
Sara Davila (34:20)
So if you are on a mobile device and you’re downloading, can very explicitly pick what you want and it won’t eat up all of your bandwidth just to go through and browse around. So shameless plug for me if you haven’t already found it. It’s a good fun find. It’s totally free and it’s available on the internet.
Ixchell Reyes (34:37)
Thank you for thinking into that about affordability.
Sara Davila (34:43)
Yeah, no, it’s something people don’t think about. But I just I realized so many I was looking at where my traffic comes from. So many people are on mobile and like I want to make the mobile data as light as possible so that that it’s easy and accessible everywhere.
Brent Warner (34:58)
love it.
Ixchell Reyes (35:03)
Okay, for the show notes and other episodes, check out DIESOL.org slash 137. You can find us on YouTube, Facebook or Instagram at DIESOL pod. can still find Brent. I think.
Brent Warner (35:14)
You… Yeah, I’m still mostly on LinkedIn
at Brent G Warner, occasionally other places, but not so often. Y’shell, how about you?
Ixchell Reyes (35:24)
You can still find me on Instagram at xtc underscore pixie underscore that’s I X Y underscore P I X Y second underscore. Sara, where can they find you?
Brent Warner (35:32)
And Sara.
Sara Davila (35:35)
Well, if you don’t find me at my website, sarahdavola.com, you can definitely find me on LinkedIn as sarahdavola. That is, one woman, I have one social media. That’s, I couldn’t do it anymore with like everything. I used to have stuff everywhere, but these days LinkedIn is where you primarily find me active. Yeah.
Brent Warner (35:37)
you
Ixchell Reyes (35:46)
Hehehehehe
Brent Warner (35:53)
That’s it. All right, thanks everybody so much for joining us. We appreciate your time and please go check out Sara’s work. There’s a lot more. This is just a tip of the iceberg conversation. So go explore and see. She’s everywhere. Yeah, you’ll be back. You’ll be back for sure. We got a lot more to talk about. So awesome. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks everybody. We’ll take care and see you next time around.
Ixchell Reyes (35:55)
All right.
Sara Davila (36:06)
I’ll be back.
Ixchell Reyes (36:07)
Yes.
Sara Davila (36:18)
Have a great day everyone, bye.
Ixchell Reyes (36:19)
Thank you!
Brent Warner (36:19)
Bye!
What are some ways you can use creative thinking strategies to increase productive fluency? Sara Davila is helping us walk through her approaches to helping students on this episode of the DIESOL Podcast.
Welcome to the DIESOL Podcast where we focus on developing innovation in English as a second language. I can’t get any of my words out right. But here we are today. I’m Brent Warner, professor of ESL at Irvine Valley College. And I’m here with the wonderful Ixchell Reyes, award-winning educator in innovation, professional development, all the things. Ixchell, how are you today?
Ixchell Reyes (00:46)
I’m
doing well, fighting allergies because of spring and rain. ⁓ How about you?
Brent Warner (00:51)
yeah.
I am doing okay, no allergies ⁓ to speak of as of yet, but ⁓ we’re getting close to the end of the semester here, so I’m kind of looking forward to summer and ⁓ having a little time to focus on some of my own projects too. And we are here with the wonderful, excellent Sara Howareyoutoday.
Ixchell Reyes (01:11)
with.
Sara Davila (01:14)
Yeah!
am very good. Thank you so much for having me on the DIESOL podcast and I am super excited to talk to you about creative thinking and anything else that comes up.
Brent Warner (01:29)
Thank you. So, Sara we’ve talked about having you on the show for a while. It feels like a couple of years, a year and a half maybe. Yeah.
Ixchell Reyes (01:35)
At least, at least, yeah, at least a year because I
Sara Davila (01:36)
Yeah.
Ixchell Reyes (01:39)
remember you promising.
Brent Warner (01:41)
So Sara, bear with me as I ⁓ present your bio for those who may not know, although you’re a well-known person in the field. ⁓ So here we go though. ⁓ Sara Davila is an internationally recognized consultant, specializing in English language education, curriculum innovation, and educational technology. A former classroom teacher, Sara has supported national language policy reforms, built teacher training systems, and designed comprehensive assessment frameworks
for clients ranging from ministries of education to global publishers. As the founder of Educating Her World, Sara brings a systems level of perspective to solving urgent challenges in language learning, focusing on upskilling educators, advancing 21st century pedagogies, and improving learning outcomes. And she’s based in Chicago and working worldwide. Welcome. Yeah, that’s.
Sara Davila (02:20)
That is me? It’s a mouthful.
Ixchell Reyes (02:33)
Byeeee ⁓
Brent Warner (02:38)
But every time I talk to you, you’re like, I’m doing this huge thing and I’m changing the entire country of Panama’s language stuff. And I’m like, okay, well.
Ixchell Reyes (02:42)
Hehehehe. Hehehehe.
Sara Davila (02:46)
Pretty smart.
Just National Curriculum Reform for your weekend. What are you doing?
Brent Warner (02:52)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So how are you doing ⁓ first?
Sara Davila (02:58)
It’s good. mean, I am with each other here. It’s spring in Chicago. So I also have the allergy season going on. We’ve got like double red warnings every single day with the pollen. So it’s nice to see everything in bloom, but otherwise busy ⁓ continuing to do a lot of work on developing new programs, putting new curriculum out there. And of course, just kind of thinking through some of the fun challenges that are going on in education right now, because in English language, especially the sector is just changing really, really rapidly.
what we’re doing inside of the classroom, think is evolving in ways that we haven’t really seen since maybe the mid 2000s when communicative language teaching was really revolutionizing what we were doing in English. So happy to be here, happy to be working and really happy to be supporting a lot of really interesting institutions and organizations as they’re helping to navigate these changes globally. Yeah.
Brent Warner (03:52)
Yeah, tons of stuff going on, but today we’re talking about creativity, lots of creative thinking, all these kinds of things. And, Eishel, I know you’re going to kick us off.
Ixchell Reyes (03:52)
Very, very cool.
Hmm?
Sara Davila (03:57)
It’s.
Ixchell Reyes (04:03)
Yeah, so we often talk about creativity and creative thinking, but what is creative thinking as a technique and how is that different just from creativity alone?
Sara Davila (04:16)
Yeah, no, it’s a really interesting question. actually, I kind of fell down this rabbit hole of creative thinking techniques and creative thinking as a strategy back in 2010, when I was learning more about 21st century learning frameworks. So I think most of us at this point have been in some kind of webinar or a professional development session, where we’ve learned about the four C’s, right? So we have we know that the four C’s of 21st century learning, these are the learning skills.
are communication, critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration. so creativity is a part of a learning skill. And so we think, you know, students are creative. However, if you kind of go a little bit further back in the history of education and educational science, creativity is a really interesting skill. many years, I mean, and still there’s a huge bias to creativity and actually creating something meaningful and powerful. That’s a genius.
that’s not something everybody has. That might be something innate to some people, but not everyone is going to have that ability to just make something that’s amazing and magical. But what’s really interesting is there was some research that was done, and this was ⁓ one of the the fathers of creative thinking ⁓ is Edward de Bono, and he wrote a book back in the 1950s that was updated in the 70s called Lateral Thinking.
And it posits sort of a new way to think about creativity and not that it’s something that’s genius. It’s not inherent. You don’t have to be born as a creative person. These are characteristics and qualities that can actually be taught and learned. And so he came up with this series of creative thinking strategies, essentially, that allow us to create frameworks that we can bring into a variety of different situations to foster creative thinking.
And so it’s a bit more disciplined. It’s not just a random thing. It’s not just asking students to be creative, but it’s actually providing a bit of a scaffold, a structure and a framework to allow creativity and creation to happen. And so when I started looking at that, was like, wow, that’s interesting just broadly is how we come up with ideas and create innovations.
But then if I think about that from a language teaching perspective, it actually breaks through some of the challenges that we have sometimes when we’re teaching language, especially at the lower levels, but even at the higher levels, where the learning can sometimes feel a bit dull, like we’re repeating the same content over and over again, or it’s where we want to get to more productivity, but we find that the students sort of fall off after a few minutes, or that lack of really getting to internalization of fluency.
That’s a bit how I ended up there and thinking about creative thinking techniques. And that’s a bit of how this is different from just being creative, but it’s really scaffolding creativity.
Ixchell Reyes (07:05)
you
So if I, I guess I’m thinking of my, my pre-trained teachers. So my pre-service teachers would want to know, what’s a concrete example of what that looks like? What does it look like if I’m.
Sara Davila (07:22)
Right.
Right. So it’s like, how do you bring that to life in the classroom? Like, what are you doing here? So I’m going to start with kind of a very basic and there are multiple different techniques. And because I’m an overachieving educator, I have a website. So if you Google Sara Davila, you’ll find me very quickly. It’s sarahdavila.com is the website. And this is a labor of love website. This is not a promotion. I have been hosting this website now for over 20 years. And it’s kind of a dumping ground for
any activity that I’ve ever made that’s not under copyright by somebody. So it’s like if I created it, I throw it online. Good, bad, I don’t care. And when I first started working with creative thinking techniques, I actually I threw a bunch of them up on this website. And I’m going to start off with one of my favorite ones. And this is it’s going to seem very obvious when you see it, but it’s a great example. So I’m going to try. We’re going to try sharing my screen. We’ll see how it goes. ⁓ I’m a
Brent Warner (08:15)
Wonderful
for the YouTube fans, a little trickier for the podcast listeners, but we’ll get it going.
Sara Davila (08:20)
haha
So we’re going to make this a little bit bigger. So what you’re seeing here, so one of my favorite creative thinking techniques is actually called reverse brainstorming. Most of us know brainstorming, right? I toss out a topic like food. What are some foods that you like? We have our students do a brainstorm. We elicit a lot of different types of food from our students. And, you know, from there we might do some activities. How do you make the food? What are the ingredients of the food? can we can really specialize that. So with a creative thinking. So think about the reverse of that. So with reverse brainstorming.
And this is a little example activity that I have on the screen here. So in this activity, it’s like, okay, so what are some foods that you might like to cook? And so the first example I have here is pizza. I worked with middle schoolers for a number of years. Pizza is always the top of the list of favorite foods. So I have that up there. then who doesn’t love pizza? ⁓ So pizza, easy. Most people like pizza. That’s an easy one. Most people will cook it.
Brent Warner (09:12)
the list for me too, so way past the middle school.
Sara Davila (09:22)
Now, what’s interesting is like, great, you like to cook pizza, but what are some ways that you would not, what are some things you would not do if you were going to make a pizza? So rather than just think straightforward, all right, if I’m making a pizza, these are the ingredients, this is step one, step two, step three, we’re actually challenging our student to think a little bit differently. So for example, well, would you use frozen pizza dough? Absolutely not. Like I would never do that. So that’s a reverse brainstorm. What are some things that we wanna do?
Maybe you would not use a canned vegetable if you’re making your pizza. So that might be something we list as a reverse of what you would typically do. Another one is like, would you use pre-shredded cheese or would you prefer to shred your own cheese? So it’s like if you would never use a bag of pre-shredded cheese, this would be an example. ⁓ Would you put ham and pineapple on your pizza or is that something you would never do? So it’s really giving you this opportunity to kind of think about something that, I love that.
But what are the things that might happen in there that would change my position that I want to be very clear are things that would have a negative impact on this thing that I’m talking about. And you can do this for literally almost everything. It’s like, well, I love the color red, except if I’m wearing a red dress and I have purple shoes, I would never do that. It’s getting the learner really an opportunity to really expand on something. So you’re not simply making a single statement.
but you’re actually thinking through that statement with some depth. Because in almost any situation, I might be able to say, I like something. However, there may always be some caveats or some little things in there that would actually turn that like to dislike very quickly. And getting your students to talk about that creates all kinds of new conversations because they start thinking of.
these nightmare situations they’ve never thought of before like, you know, what if we put ketchup on pizza? I lived in Korea for 10 years and let me tell you something. I have a lot of opinions about that. But in Korea, you learn to like ketchup on your pizza because that is something that’s going to happen. so that’s kind of a quick example of the strategies. It’s once you understand what the strategies are, they’re extremely simple to implement. And this is one of my favorite little scaffolds is just doing it as a chart exercise.
Brent Warner (11:19)
the
Sara Davila (11:41)
And then what I’ll have my students do here is obviously they’ll list several foods and you can do this in several ways. You could have students do it as a partner exercise. You could have students do it individually, then they get together and share. But essentially the purpose of the creative thinking strategy is to help unbox more opportunities with language so that if you’re in an A1 level or if you’re at a C1 level, you’re really expanding that conversation to go far beyond just a simple statement to complete a response.
to a question or to an answer.
Brent Warner (12:12)
I like it too. So I’m thinking about this because one thing that happens a lot with these types of questions, food questions, whatever else it is, students get used to the same thing over and over again. It’s like, I know how to say the foods that I like and why I like them. And so they end up in different classes having those same conversations. You’re taking the same topic that they already understand, but spinning it in a way that actually forces them to start thinking through how.
different ways to talk about it. And it serves a second purpose too with the pineapple and Canadian bacon is you can find out which of your students are sociopaths or not. And so that’s always a good thing too.
Sara Davila (12:50)
People have very strong opinions to this day about herb and pineapple on pizza. Itchell, if you didn’t know that.
Ixchell Reyes (12:57)
I’m thinking of how this could, I was just going
to say how this changes up any grammar activity that asks students to use I would or I wouldn’t because they’re just canned sentences. And a lot of the times you end up with the affirmative, but it’s harder to produce the negative, the negative form. And so I could already, I can already see this happening with the pineapple.
Sara Davila (13:11)
Exactly.
Absolutely.
Right?
No, it’s like with reverse brainstorming, it’s really magical in the classroom because once students start thinking about like negative situations, they can really come up with a lot of different, like it gets very creative very, very quickly. And they’ll throw in things like, I love pizza unless there’s dog hair on it. And I’m like, where did the dog hair come from?
Brent Warner (13:42)
Hahahaha
Sara Davila (13:44)
But that is the creativity part of it is like, think things will suddenly come forward that you hadn’t even considered and it really suddenly breaks down a lot of the rigidity sometimes.
that we do see when we’re teaching. So that was what got me into it and building some of the strategies around it has been a lot of fun and just helping other educators understand how can we bring that together. So that’s a quick example. these are all of these worksheets, by the way, are available on my website. You can download them very quickly as a package and play around. And I do have a detailed lesson plans for each of the different strategies. So it’s just one lesson plan for strategy. So if you open up reverse brainstorming, you’ll get the whole piece.
But then you can apply it to any of the worksheets I’ve created. And then of course, go off and create your own. I’ve really created these to be templates for educators to use and to just pick up and run with. So I like to say I’m a no-budget, low-budget teacher. So almost all of these techniques can be done with literally just your students and a pencil and paper, if that’s all you’ve got in the classroom. So it’s designed to be very flexible.
Brent Warner (14:39)
Ha ha.
Well, I think we’ll, oops.
Ixchell Reyes (14:51)
Sorry,
Brent, I was gonna say all those templates are so generous because again, ⁓ many places, especially overseas, they don’t have a lot of tech. So ⁓ we’ll make sure that they’re accessible in the show notes so they can get all the things.
Brent Warner (15:06)
Yeah.
Well, let’s talk about one more that’s pretty quickly accessible on paper, ⁓ which is the idea box. I know you’ve kind of, you’ve talked about that and especially working with lower level students and it’s pretty practical. ⁓ So can we talk about that one? Afterwards, we’ll talk a little bit more about some of your ideas around AI and creativity, but a little bit more of this like the let’s get it with, you know, we don’t necessarily have to have all the tech tools. So ⁓ share a little bit about the idea box.
Sara Davila (15:08)
Fantastic.
⁓ I love idea box. Yeah.
Sure.
So with the idea box, this is an interesting creative thinking technique. So reverse brainstorming is, again, that technique from De Bono is just like, well, when you’re brainstorming ideas, think about the opposite too. Don’t just think about the positive, but think about the negatives because that can help you find ideas you want to discover. With idea box, it’s sort of bringing the same thing. like, all right, we’re trying to generate a lot of these techniques essentially include a brainstorming action.
So all right, what are some ideas that you have around X and then you might make a list. But with IdeaBox, what you want to do is then add a series of questions to expand upon that idea. And I’m just gonna show you, I am a show and tell teacher. So it is a lot easier for me if I can show. And if YouTube likes the show, that’s even better. Because I like a good YouTube show. I’m gonna make this a little bit bigger so we can see it on the screen hopefully.
Brent Warner (16:14)
Yeah, please.
Hahaha. ⁓
Sara Davila (16:26)
So here’s again, the first part of this is very, simple. The very first thing that I might do with my students here, again, you’ll see I’m using the chart as my structure frame here because charts are just very easy to explain and use to organize.
Brent Warner (16:40)
So you’ve got hobby,
where, how, and why ⁓ just on the table there. Okay.
Sara Davila (16:43)
Exactly, so that’s that
expansion there. So the first column hobby, that’s the brainstorming piece, right? So let’s make a list of a lot of hobbies that you do that you like to do, or maybe hobbies that you’re aware of that you know about. And so that might be part one of my activity. Again, my students could do this as an individual. If I have a very small class, I’d have my students do it individually, and then we would pair up. If I have a large class, I might have my groups do this.
And then what I’ll do is I’ll have group one and group two actually get together and present their ideas and compare, or I’ll do a jigsaw where I’ll have different students from different groups kind of get together and share out what their groups came from. So these are very expansive depending on the type of classroom you work with. So step one is let’s get the hobbies out. And then the idea box portion here is now expand upon that idea. If painting is a hobby, then where would you paint?
How do you paint? Like, why do you paint? So for example, here, my student says, painting. Where do I paint? I paint in my room. How do you paint? I learned to paint in school. So their idea for how they paint is slightly different from the construct of how. They’re saying, ⁓ well, I know how to paint because I learned to do that in school. They’re interpreting that question there. Or here I have, how did you start? And then finally, how do you keep doing it? I enjoy being able to paint my dreams. So that’s my motivation there. That’s what keeps me going.
So if I have students, like a very common one, it’s like when you say hobby, it’s the first thing you’ll see is soccer. Again, I worked in Korea for a number of years of soccer as a hobby. It’s like, no matter what you do, it’s going to come up. It’s like, well, where, where do you play soccer? Oh, I, know, and then they’re thinking, well, I play soccer here. like, how did you learn to play soccer? Oh, I haven’t thought about that before. I just like, I say soccer. If you ask me, what’s the hobby, my answer is soccer. The sentence is complete. The instruction is complete. The activity is complete.
Brent Warner (18:14)
Mm-hmm.
Sara Davila (18:36)
But now with the idea box, you actually have to go a little bit deeper into it. It’s not enough for you to just be able to state that this is your hobby. We actually have to expand on that and answer some additional questions. if you, one of the other ways you can expand on this, I’m sure many of us have done that, the sort of interview, find someone who, this really unboxes that find someone who is just like, find someone who learned how to play soccer from a parent, find someone who taught them self soccer, find someone who learned how to play soccer from watching TV.
So now you really got your students thinking about like the entire art of what that hobby is, what it means to them, how they created that, that then you can use to just have your students share from this worksheet or even expand that off into other types of activities to really engage the depth and the breadth of communication there. So hobbies is one of these, but I have multiples of these for different types of ideas that you can ⁓ kind of riff on. And then again, you’ll see that the scaffold there as well.
Brent Warner (19:36)
Love it. ⁓ So you had talked about, so this is great, and I was thinking the
you’re talking about the find someone who thing too, because it’s like a lot of times that ends up being kind of a yes no question and then just fill in jump to the next person, try to find the next person right away. And so I like the idea that you might say, OK, no, you’re going to talk to someone for 90 seconds or two minutes or whatever it is. And then you’re going to try to expand as many of these questions as you can in this time. Right. Maybe you can get to the where maybe you can get to the how maybe you can get to the why. Right. But you would say like follow follow up with those. So it’s not just yes no question.
Sara Davila (20:07)
Right.
Brent Warner (20:11)
And then that can push the students to go a little bit ⁓ further through everything as well. So I like that a lot.
Sara Davila (20:15)
Yeah.
And you’ll see on a lot of these activities I have included. it’s like there’s kind of a step one and step two. Step one is doing the brainstorming, the ideation. And then at the bottom, I have additional share language for that interaction. So they can either be doing that with, you know, again, with a partner, if I have a small class, maybe one or two partners, or if I have a large class can be a full group mingle or, you know, get as many students as you can, but you can really expand these very, quickly.
Brent Warner (20:42)
Nice, love it.
Ixchell Reyes (20:43)
This is so cool. I think we had just talked about not doing the same cringy activities in the same way. And this is another cool way to do it.
Sara Davila (20:50)
you
Brent Warner (20:54)
Well, the thing I like about
Sara Davila (20:54)
Yeah.
Brent Warner (20:55)
it too is it’s like it doesn’t take a lot to figure out a way to shift the perspective on it, right?
Ixchell Reyes (20:59)
Hmm?
Sara Davila (21:00)
Right. No, it’s really you start from brainstorming, but it’s literally just kind of adding a spin on that brainstorming and that allows us to go further. there are so many ways to brainstorming. I’m sure you’ve seen things like Four Corners brainstorming, which these are graphic organizers or mind mapping. But when you start with that type of brainstorming, it always tends to be very literal. Like you start with a point and then you next point, next point, next point.
What we don’t realize as educators is that process of like point A and then point A logically follows to B, followed by C, followed by D. That is critical thinking. That is process thinking where we’re actually creating a logical construct and we’re moving from point A to a point B to point C to point D. So what’s interesting about these creative thinking strategies for brainstorming is the goal here is not to be logical, but to be lateral.
Brent Warner (21:55)
Mm.
Sara Davila (21:55)
to
actually shift how we’re thinking so that we’re moving in a slightly different direction to create a larger repository of potential ideas. And so that’s kind of a significant way to do that. And again, it really unboxes a lot. And if you don’t mind, I’m gonna steal things a little bit and take you into a third one because this was the one that I loved doing. It blows my mind the first time I did it. And what this does is it brings a kinesthetic play visual. It’s very, very creative.
Brent Warner (22:14)
yeah.
Ixchell Reyes (22:15)
Do it, do it.
Sara Davila (22:23)
Again, you can do this with just pencils, papers, crayons, if that’s all you have. But if you like me as a teacher, if you go to every single conference, whenever you go to a conference, I love the Expo Hall. Walk through the Expo Hall. Whoever is giving away Post-It notes, go the last day of the Expo Hall and just fill your bag with Post-It notes. I used to do this at Cotes et Sol, I do it at TSol. So it’d have like massive quantities of Post-It notes.
Brent Warner (22:40)
the
Sara Davila (22:49)
And then you can do one of my favorite creative thinking techniques. I’ll just put this up on the screen. I’m getting very good at this, hopefully, as this management. I’ll make this one bigger. So you can kind of see this. Lotus Blossom, is, again, these are the Bono creative thinking techniques. And I’m using one. This is a great one focused on Korea. So we start off with the circle. The circle is sort of the center of our Lotus Blossom. And we might be talking about
Brent Warner (22:57)
The master.
Sara Davila (23:16)
countries and and customs and so I start off here with the example Korea Korea is a country now with that circle what the very first thing that I would want to do is maybe have my students brainstorm several countries so we would have post-it notes for Japan China Germany you know Ghana we could do Argentina we could have Mexico we can have Panama so of multiple different countries in here
Now, once we have the countries, that’s great. now that we know about countries, we want to have some customs. So we can start off brainstorming some customs. in Korea, very true in Korea, one of the important customs here is you do not put your chopsticks in rice. it’s like a common, you can tell someone is new to Korea when you see their chopsticks in rice. It’s right there. then so that’s kind of the…
Ixchell Reyes (24:01)
truffle pie.
Brent Warner (24:03)
Hmm.
Sara Davila (24:07)
here is like we’d say, so what are some cultures and I love doing do don’t. So in Korea, you would not put chopsticks and rice, but in Korea, you would bow if you’re saying hello to someone. So you kind of have both the positive and the negative. And then on top of that, this is the next layer of my lotus blossom, the why.
Like what do i need to know about that why is that the role why is that something that you need to do so now imagine you can see her on the screen like i have kind of my first circle that i have my little post it note then don’t put chopsticks and rice that would be my second post it note then this third that would be a post it note and if you actually have this in physical reality these these little post it notes start to flip up like flower petals and when you do this with all of the countries and then you add in all of the cultural pieces and then you add in all of the knowledge
you finish with this beautiful lotus blossom and then you can pick that up and go around and one of your partners or one of your peers points to a country and then you use the lotus blossom to answer questions. What country are we talking about? Korea. What is something you don’t do in Korea? In Korea, you don’t put chopsticks and rice. Why? because that would be disrespected to your elders. What is something you do do in Korea? And now imagine the conversations you’re suddenly having in your classroom.
Brent Warner (24:56)
Yeah.
Sara Davila (25:22)
Like you’re really expanding that language beyond anything that you’ve ever done before. I have this creative thinking like I have this for the smallest things like what’s your favorite color all the way out to something as complex as cultures and traditions. And it’s just magical to watch this happen. And again, if you don’t have Post-it notes, you can have students use different colored pencils and just draw boxes and bring it forward. But when you’re finished, you have this beautiful mosaic flower circle.
of communication that is just so much fun to do. this is again, another one of those creative thinking things that just unboxes that language in the classroom. I’ll stop soapboxing there.
Brent Warner (26:01)
Yeah, no,
I love it. will.
Ixchell Reyes (26:02)
I am going to try this one. This is cool
because when you’re teaching writing, can now, even if it’s a fluency activity, now you can, you have scaffolded all of the ideas so that they’re ready to be put into a, a paragraph that isn’t, isn’t a headache inducing paragraph for them and, and they’ll be better connected to it. So more likely to, to actually go back and edit and feel proud of it at the end.
Brent Warner (26:20)
you
Sara Davila (26:22)
Yeah, you can even. love that.
yeah, yeah, you can mix and match share. just, there’s so much. Go ahead, Brent.
Ixchell Reyes (26:32)
Mm-hmm.
Brent Warner (26:34)
Well, I was just thinking too, like…
You know, you mentioned the part about like the sticky notes, like you can do it on any modality, but I like that the that little physical part of the curl up, right? Like because it becomes a tactile learning experience at the same time. And so you can really see it kind of growing out of the page physically. Like it sounds silly, but you kind of recognize that that actually has a totally different impact on people than flat writing or whatever else it is. Right. And so, OK, we’re already over time, but I have to ask a question about AI. ⁓
Sara Davila (27:00)
Thank you.
Get in there.
Ixchell Reyes (27:06)
We
Brent Warner (27:06)
We
Ixchell Reyes (27:06)
have to,
Brent Warner (27:07)
can’t not do it. Sara, you’re running most of the ⁓ AI things for TESOL these days, which is wonderful. Always excited to see that going on. ⁓ And I know that you have some thoughts around, like, are we being creative with AI? Are we developing creative thinking around it? Or are we just letting it guide us in ways that maybe we wouldn’t have chosen for ourselves? So I know you have some thoughts on that, if you don’t mind sharing.
Sara Davila (27:12)
I am.
Ixchell Reyes (27:13)
Mm-hmm.
Sara Davila (27:31)
Yeah,
no, it’s actually it makes a lot of sense after what we’ve just talked about, right? It’s like when we think about brainstorming, we often tend to do that process thinking, which is that critical thinking process. The same is often true with AI. And we don’t think about this. I listened to a lot of AI experts, and I’ll tell you, ⁓ you know, working with AI is a great way to ideate and brainstorm, except that you have to always remember. And this is something I really emphasize in.
the TESOL courses that I teach about AI, these models have been trained on the entirety, the depth and breadth of available human wisdom. Anything that we have captured in audio or visual or text format has been used to train these models. So when you’re ideating with AI, you might see a lot of ideas that you have never thought of before, but it doesn’t mean that these have never been thought of before. Like in a lot of ways that we’re just tapping into.
Creativity from other people maybe we haven’t met and that is actually the trap of being creative with AI. We’re starting to see some very early research come out from many of our research partners who are looking at the impact of this in education and what they are finding is that when you ask people to brainstorm with AI, the number of ideas that they come up with is a very smaller set of ideas and they’re less original and less unique. They tend to see a lot of the same thing, the same.
Creative ideas coming out of these brainstorming sessions with AI because they’re being driven by all of that training and information So it’s not that you can’t brainstorm with AI It’s just again you you have to push yourself to really ask is this being creative or is this just? Taking the question that I’ve given and using a critical thinking process to give me ideas that are new to me But are not necessarily new
So I think that for us as educators, when we’re using these tools to be creative, it is useful to stop and say, well, like, what would the opposite of this look like? Doing some techniques and some strategies to really helping us push ourselves to make sure that we’re not allowing that, the AI as a tool to actually limit our own abilities to innovate. Because the one thing that we do know about human beings is you give us enough time and we will be far more creative.
than any machine can ever summarize for us. And so I think that’s always the thing to keep in mind when we’re working with these tools.
Ixchell Reyes (29:54)
And that is a good note to wrap up on.
Brent Warner (29:56)
Yeah, unfortunately
we are going to run out of time here, ⁓ a good time. Thank you so much, Sara This is awesome. Let’s let’s jump out. Let’s dive out.
Ixchell Reyes (30:16)
Alright It is time for our fun finds. And I have found Ground News app. Brent, you’ve heard of it before, think. Ground News app. It’s a news app that compares how different news outlets cover the same story across the political spectrum. So that way you’re, you you see what’s being shown to you and your feed versus reported by and what the headlines are. so how,
Brent Warner (30:25)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ixchell Reyes (30:45)
I guess, so that you’re not stuck with one biased version and go to another biased version. So ⁓ the free version is good enough, I think. So check it.
Brent Warner (30:54)
Yeah,
definitely worth checking out. And then I’ve seen ground news on like YouTube channels too, so if people want to get it, you can get a discount code from somewhere on YouTube. Not from us!
Ixchell Reyes (31:04)
I think it’s worth it. been
thinking it’s worth investing, especially nowadays since there’s a backlash against a lot of the stuff that’s out there. So I’m considering it. What do you have?
Brent Warner (31:17)
All right. Well, speaking of
investing in more balanced technology that’s not so pushing everything one direction or another, if you’re talking about leaving Google as your search engine, may I strongly, very, very strongly, can I recommend KAGI? K-A-G-I. ⁓
⁓ It is a search engine that is like Google was about four or five years ago. It was wonderful There is no ads no tracking of anything ⁓ It puts together the information for you You can search the small web on there if you know about that stuff You can focus in you can build all these little filters into your searches now The one thing is it is not free ⁓ and so I got a test You know you when you sign up for it you can test and get like a hundred free searches or whatever with it and I was just
blown like instantly the quality of the searches there because there’s no ads right I just did a Google search yesterday and literally the way page and a half of scrolling was all advertisements before anything came through right so anyways all that’s gone ⁓ it’s not cheap ⁓ ten bucks a month or you know ten percent off for a year whatever but I’m just thinking I am so the product of
I’m Google’s product, it’s not the other way around when I’m searching on Google these days, so it’s just trash. Kagi, really outstanding, no tracking of you, no ads inside of there, high quality results coming through on every single search. ⁓ Options on the side for like some little AI integrations if you want them, but it’s not prioritizing that in the way that Google searches. So if you’re interested in a, it is like a real heart relieving
Benefit of like having a nice search ⁓ I felt my body Relax when I got a good So anyways kagi is my high high high recommendation even just to explore and see if it’s a possibility for you ⁓ It’s KAGI and it is worth every penny for me Sara do you have any fun finds for us?
Sara Davila (33:24)
Sure, I’m going to be shameless self-promotion. Here’s my shameless self-promotion. My fun fun, if you haven’t already found this, do check out the website. This is my resource library, as I like to say. And I want to point out, I have organized this to be very accessible to teachers. In fact, there’s a little library. I’m on the wrong screen, so I’ll go back to the right one. There’s a library where you can actually search through the library. I have close to 500 or 600 activities and lesson plans.
Brent Warner (33:27)
Yeah.
Ixchell Reyes (33:34)
website
Mm-hmm.
Wow.
Sara Davila (33:53)
on
the site, these are all free to download. And I want to mention if you are on a mobile device, I’ve actually built the site so that when you’re on mobile, it does not automatically load any of the content. All of the PDFs load automatically on a laptop. But I know a lot of people around the world are doing this work sometimes on their phone after school with limited data connections and also just limited access where you’re paying a lot more for that data. So you think very carefully.
Ixchell Reyes (34:19)
Thank
Sara Davila (34:20)
So if you are on a mobile device and you’re downloading, can very explicitly pick what you want and it won’t eat up all of your bandwidth just to go through and browse around. So shameless plug for me if you haven’t already found it. It’s a good fun find. It’s totally free and it’s available on the internet.
Ixchell Reyes (34:37)
Thank you for thinking into that about affordability.
Sara Davila (34:43)
Yeah, no, it’s something people don’t think about. But I just I realized so many I was looking at where my traffic comes from. So many people are on mobile and like I want to make the mobile data as light as possible so that that it’s easy and accessible everywhere.
Brent Warner (34:58)
love it.
Ixchell Reyes (35:03)
Okay, for the show notes and other episodes, check out DIESOL.org slash 137. You can find us on YouTube, Facebook or Instagram at DIESOL pod. can still find Brent. I think.
Brent Warner (35:14)
You… Yeah, I’m still mostly on LinkedIn
at Brent G Warner, occasionally other places, but not so often. Y’shell, how about you?
Ixchell Reyes (35:24)
You can still find me on Instagram at xtc underscore pixie underscore that’s I X Y underscore P I X Y second underscore. Sara, where can they find you?
Brent Warner (35:32)
And Sara.
Sara Davila (35:35)
Well, if you don’t find me at my website, sarahdavola.com, you can definitely find me on LinkedIn as sarahdavola. That is, one woman, I have one social media. That’s, I couldn’t do it anymore with like everything. I used to have stuff everywhere, but these days LinkedIn is where you primarily find me active. Yeah.
Brent Warner (35:37)
you
Ixchell Reyes (35:46)
Hehehehehe
Brent Warner (35:53)
That’s it. All right, thanks everybody so much for joining us. We appreciate your time and please go check out Sara’s work. There’s a lot more. This is just a tip of the iceberg conversation. So go explore and see. She’s everywhere. Yeah, you’ll be back. You’ll be back for sure. We got a lot more to talk about. So awesome. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks everybody. We’ll take care and see you next time around.
Ixchell Reyes (35:55)
All right.
Sara Davila (36:06)
I’ll be back.
Ixchell Reyes (36:07)
Yes.
Sara Davila (36:18)
Have a great day everyone, bye.
Ixchell Reyes (36:19)
Thank you!
Brent Warner (36:19)
Bye!
In this episode of the DIESOL podcast, Brent Warner and Ixchell Reyes are joined by internationally recognized consultant and former teacher, Sara Davila, to explore how creative thinking strategies can boost productive fluency in language learners. From practical techniques like the Idea Box and reverse brainstorming to the role of AI as a creative partner, Sara shares actionable ideas teachers can use right away, whether low-tech or no-tech environment. If you’ve ever wondered how to move students from knowing English to actually using it with confidence, this episode is for you!
Watch this Episode:
Resources by Sara
Fun Finds
- Ixchell – Ground News App
- Brent – Kagi