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The Transform your Teaching podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio. Join Dr. Rob McDole and Dr. Jared Pyles as they seek to inspire higher education faculty to adopt innovative teaching and learning practices.
If you create an environment where it's their energy, their effort, their attitude, their response, that to me is gold. Watching somebody struggle through something and come out the other side of it with an answer is so satisfying. And to me, that is the learning moment.
Narrator:This is the transform your teaching podcast. Transform Your Teaching Podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio.
Jared:Welcome back to the Transform Your Teaching Podcast. We're on the campus of Cedarville University. My name is Jared Pyles. With me is Dr. Rob McDole.
Jared:We are continuing our series on active learning. And today with us, we have brought in one of our, favorite people, Mr. Jim Stevenson, who's the president and co founder of the International Center for Creativity here in, Cedarville University. And then we've already had some off air conversation about F1 and racing, and I'm going to attempt to not bring that up because I think we could talk for days.
Rob:That was a terrible attempt not to.
Jim Stevenson:I'm not gonna bring up the racing that I love.
Jared:You know, as we record this, Lewis Hamilton won his first race in three years. And even if you don't like Lewis Hamilton, you had to enjoy the, the whole drama and the excitement that was yesterday.
Rob:It just goes to show you even a blind squirrel can get a nut. Yeah. What? His car wasn't dolphining this time?
Jared:No. It wasn't porpoising this time.
Rob:I'm sorry.
Jared:Not dolphining. Porpoising. We're leaving
Rob:that Pardon me.
Jared:We're leaving that in.
Rob:Porpoising.
Jared:Yeah. There's There's still some porpoising.
Rob:On my back.
Jared:Yeah. Anyway but thanks for coming on.
Jim Stevenson:Well, gosh. Thanks. Thanks for having me in. I was brought here under false pretense. I was told this would be a discussion about racing, and now we're gonna talk about learning.
Jim Stevenson:But I'm okay with that too.
Jared:But thanks for coming on. We appreciate it.
Jim Stevenson:Yeah. Absolutely. Thank thanks for having me.
Rob:So tell us a little bit about what you do at ICC, how you got into the into the biz, especially the education business.
Jim Stevenson:Yeah. Sure. Well, reluctantly. The the ICC is an independent entity that we founded in 2002. There were two other cofounders, and, we had just, exited a business.
Jim Stevenson:We had sold our marketing firm that actually, about 50% of our business was global mar motorsports. So we were brokering and doing product launches and brand activation inside of various platforms and motorsports. But we'd sold that business, and we were sitting around going, oh, listen. You know? Now what do we do?
Jim Stevenson:Are we gonna travel, write a book? And my wife's like, or you could get a job. So, you know, we decided to do the the wise thing. But we were we use these things called crazy Fridays to bump ideas off of each other, and we came up with some absolutely horrific ideas, you know, making fun of each other, poking in front of each other. But we were doing consulting at the same time for some of the brands that we continued to work with.
Rob:Now for our listeners, where are you located? And then also you keep saying we. Are you talking about you and your wife, or is there
Jim Stevenson:something This was, the the same partner. Tom Balliett is the other cofounder of the ICC that's currently still active. He and I, still run the operation and own the operation together. The third partner we had was a fellow by the name of Jim Moore, who was a former head of design at General Motors for And he was, kind of nearing the end of his career, but really had this passion about instruction. And he had been an adjunct professor at Columbus College of Art and Design, Cleveland Institute of Art, that sort of thing.
Jim Stevenson:And he taught industrial design, and Tom's an industrial designer by trade. So a lot of the ideas that we had centered around that discipline. But our clients that we were consulting for, and we were doing creativity consulting because their staff they were running out of gas because so many of them have been trained on CAD. And CAD is a production tool, not a creativity tool. And it was killing the artists weren't going into design because it looked like you sat in front of Cat all day.
Jim Stevenson:So there was this weird flux kind of in the in that environment. And then at the same time, we read this article in Newsweek called the creativity crisis. And I remember reading this thing and just getting hit between the eyes. It was doctor Paul Torrance was talking about, his lifelong work, and there was a professor from the College of William and Mary, who had done a study on his work. And he created the creativity quotient, which was a test of of creativity as much as there's an intelligence quotient.
Jim Stevenson:And what he discovered was that, kindergartners scored 95% as creative geniuses. And by the time you graduated high school, it was, like, 5%. Yep. So his conjecture was school kills creativity. Mhmm.
Jim Stevenson:And he's not wrong. Right? I mean, that's just think a lot of us feel the assembly line process. So we were like, yeah. We agree with that.
Jim Stevenson:And then our clients kept telling us they didn't like what they were seeing from design schools, that they these were not creative problem solvers. They were just CAD jockeys. And they would they couldn't they didn't have a process to go through and identify opportunities for innovation, how to cultivate those and curate them and vet them, and then ultimately, a disciplined way to find out if there was a home or put it in a marketplace. So we kept scratching our heads going, is that a thing? Is that a thing?
Jim Stevenson:Could that be a thing? Because this is 2002. Right? Or, you know, right now, you can't turn on the television without hearing innovation. Innovation.
Jim Stevenson:Innovation. Well, then we'd tell people, yeah, we're gonna start an innovation company. And they're like, well, that sounds nice. Good good luck with that.
Rob:Sounds very creative like so many others.
Jim Stevenson:Yeah. But then at the time, we were working with General Motors, Union Tools, Rubbermaid Newell, Worthington Industries, Honda, a whole bunch of companies that where we were doing professional development, where we were working with their design engineers or architects or creative like, marketing staff, ad agencies, giving them a system and a process for repeatable creativity.
Jared:And
Jim Stevenson:our clients kept telling us, you should start a school. You should start a school. And we're like, no. No. We don't wanna do But I I met a dear, dear mentor of mine that I go to church with, Dr. Dan Estes, who we all know so well here on Cedar Hill's campus, so I'd consider a mentor and a friend.
Jim Stevenson:I was poking him a little bit. Like, hey. What's going on over in the cornfields, Dan? And he's and he said, well, you know, we're looking for creative programs to help differentiate us. I said, you guys need industrial design.
Jim Stevenson:He's like, is that what you do? I'm like, well, not us. I mean, somebody should do it, but, you know, like, we're corporate guys. But it it was a it honestly was our Jonah moment. It just kept coming up over and over and over.
Jim Stevenson:And I will never forget. It was literally a 02:30 in the morning wake up going, wait a minute. In all of our research, I've never found an evangelical Christian school that teaches industrial design. And I'm like, ugh. That's us.
Jim Stevenson:We're running away from it, and and we started tacking towards that being added to our consultancy. So the ICC was already an entity with a client base, and we still do corporate work. But the ICC was created for solving those problems in this specific environment.
Jared:Our our series is on we're doing active learning, but we wanna talk about the spaces where active learning happens as well.
Jim Stevenson:well. Sure.
Jared:Yeah. Because there are there are big universities across the country that are converting their classroom spaces or their libraries into these more, what they're calling, active learning spaces.
Jim Stevenson:Right, right.
Jared:And we've had difficulty defining active learning because some people think it's just, well, the opposite of passive learning. When we've looked at that and said, well, I don't think it's that.
Rob:There's no such thing as passive learning.
Jared:No such thing as passive learning. Okay. There's there's some sort of activity involved in some capacity.
Jim Stevenson:Still a verb. Exactly.
Jared:So we we've been to ICC, and we've seen those spaces. And I want to get your maybe you can start from the design side of things. Sure. When you went in with the idea of designing the space, what were the things that you considered?
Jim Stevenson:Yeah. Some really basic things is that vertical... putting your attention on vertical spaces like walls is what encourages collaboration. Horizontal spaces collect junk. Vertical spaces encourage collaboration. So instead of spending a lot of time on desks and seating, which which we have.
Jim Stevenson:Right? I mean, you you gotta sit down there once in a while. But we spent a lot of time on vertical spaces, and that means areas to pin up analog work, places for Post-It notes, places for whiteboards, places for screens because it encourages you to get up and clump together as people in in and and around an idea that everybody's looking at at the same time. And so vertical spaces versus horizontal was important. We also wanted to future proof this space, which meant instead of screwing things into the walls or into the floors, everything's on wheels because we can reconfigure this space any way we want it.
Jim Stevenson:So one of the reasons we are attracted to the raw space or the raw environment where we were is because of the way the building's designed. It's a truss system, which means that there's, you know, an external, superstructure and then these long spans of metal trusses that allow for big open spaces. So you're not working around columns and all those things because that people tend to start bifurcating spaces by like, oh, there's a column. Great. I'll draw a straight line to the wall from that column because we had to.
Jim Stevenson:And we didn't really have to do a lot of that because of the nature of the building, and that's part of the reason we chose this space. And then we also wanted to make it future proofed by, not creating you you can see into spaces, from other spaces. Yeah. And it's an accountability exercise. Right?
Jim Stevenson:So we can all see each other. Even our offices, there's glass on, everywhere. So we're not separated. The only time a door closes is to just help alleviate maybe some carryover noise. Mhmm.
Jim Stevenson:But what we wanted was the shared accountability of being able to see other people working, other people collaborating, other people. It creates an energy when you can see it
Jared:Yeah.
Jim Stevenson:Instead of cloistering it off in in these closed rooms. And it build that builds energy in the studio. So we put glass garage doors between our studios so not only could the juniors see what was going on in the digital lab because it it right now, the upstairs is a kind of a Jack and Jill lab, digital room where they both can access it, but they look in and see visiting instructors coming and going.
Jim Stevenson:They see the seniors collaborating. They see them walking back and forth, and the juniors all of a sudden start understanding what's the expected culture. Right? And they the seniors are looking into the junior studio going, what what are they working on? Oh, I remember that project.
Jim Stevenson:I'm gonna wander in there, you know, afterwards and and see how they're doing. So I think, that was intentional. The other thing we wanted to do, and one of the architects that had to stamp our we designed our own spaces, but we still we needed a licensed architect to submit it to to the code enforcement for us. He said, man, you've got a lot of wasted space. And I said, those those two things, those words, that doesn't exist.
Jim Stevenson:It's just space. Right? It can't be wasted unless you decide not to use it. We can we can reconfigure it. We can put it to use later on, but we intentionally plan these wide open areas.
Jim Stevenson:And not just for egress or not just for the aesthetic, but functionally, that space could be transformed very easily into something else because we didn't chop it up. So we intentionally left our rooms as big as we could get them and then used furniture and fixtures. We actually designed them ourselves because we couldn't find anything we liked
Jared:Oh, wow.
Jim Stevenson:That was in budget. So we're like, you know,
Jim Stevenson:this is what we want. We drew it out on a literally a napkin kind of an idea. Mhmm. I took a picture of it and sent it to Edgeworth Creative and said, hey. What's this gonna cost?
Jim Stevenson:And and because we started, like, with the table tops and said, hey. That's really the most expensive piece. So we just took a four by eight sheet of plywood and ripped it lengthwise, and that was two table tops. So even with the expense of birch plywood, which has gone crazy, you're still not spending that much money, and then they welded up the frames for us. So we we like to we like to be creative even in our own furniture and fixturing, but we use that to divide rooms instead of drywall.
Jim Stevenson:Yeah. Because I think it it allows you to go, hey. You know, I when we moved in here five years ago, this is what we were thinking. Yeah. But now we didn't wanna be stuck.
Jim Stevenson:Now we just continue to evolve the use of the space, including our shop. Our shop has changed enormously. We've gotten away from, heavy woodworking, which is traditional industrial design. And even though the students don't really touch it all that much, you know, there's somebody else running a lot of the equipment, we use hot wire cutters and foam Mhmm. Because it's safe, it's cheap, it's it doesn't make a lot of noise, it doesn't make a big mess.
Jim Stevenson:But that was us solving our own problem, running it through our own design thinking process, and then we came up with these tools. And now we're starting to get calls from other makerspaces going, hey. Hang on. What did you do? You know?
Jim Stevenson:That's cool. So that's our kind of our philosophy was get them out of the building for really specific work instead of trying to replicate it in house. That's one of the advantages we have of being in Columbus Mhmm. Is if we want them to see how furniture's built or how blow molding takes place or roto molding or casting, we drive over and look at it. Right?
Jim Stevenson:We can we get in, and we have some grumpy old guy that's been working forever look at their design and go, hey, kid. That's that's really good. But if you move this over here and that over there, you'd save some material, and this thing could get flat packed better, and maybe you could stack more of them up in a shipping container. And all of a sudden, everybody's head's blown, and you you don't get that if you just try to go build it yourself in the in the shop. Yeah.
Jim Stevenson:So we try to take them to where the work's taking place instead of replicating it in house.
Jared:Any lighting? The only thing we've seen about talk about is lighting. Do you guys have any kind of natural I know there's a lot of natural light that comes into those spaces. Anything else you consider with that?
Jim Stevenson:Yeah. Lighting's rough no matter where you are and how you do it, especially this transition over to LED because it can be really harsh, and it's really bright white sometimes, and and the eye doesn't always love that. So what we wanted was a floor that had some reflectivity to it, so that's why we did the polished concrete floor. It wasn't just practical. Mean, I it's easy to clean, but there's also a little bit of reflectivity to it that brightens the space when you look into it.
Jim Stevenson:It doesn't have this dead matte floor on it. It's it's got it's it's reflecting the the above lights. We also wanted to reduce shadows as much as we could, which is hard to do Mhmm. If you don't have a a light that's directly overhead. But we were able to find some diffusers that we really liked and and these blade LEDs that we really liked, that helped diffuse the light well enough that it didn't create a lot of shadows.
Jim Stevenson:Mhmm. You know, back in the eighties and the nineties, we had so much pinpoint direct hot pots everywhere, like little spotlights and all this sort of thing, and they are just shadow makers. That's, like, what they do. Mhmm. So it's been a hard adjustment to get away from that and try to find diffused light.
Jim Stevenson:And, obviously, God's light's the best, but in Ohio, you know, we don't always get a lot of it externally. For about an hour. We get it for, yeah, about an hour in June.
Rob:Especially in the winter.
Jim Stevenson:Yeah. Yeah. And you know what? That's a real thing. We find out that the energy in the studio starts to dive a little bit in February.
Jim Stevenson:Late late in the afternoon, it's getting dark, and we can just feel that energy coming in. So we try to supplement it with music. Mhmm. If if we've got labs going on, we'll we'll rotate some music. We'll even put some fun things up on the big screens like fireplaces or running brooks or waterfalls or all this stuff just to provide some counterpoint to those big dark windows.
Jim Stevenson:Sure. Right? Just to bring a little bit of life and energy into the space.
Rob:So something you said was very interesting to me. I wanna walk down this path. We've been focusing when we talk about active learning either on learning spaces, but I I don't think I've really thought about it in terms of culture creating. But I don't think I've thought about it outside of necessarily a course or a classroom.
Jim Stevenson:Mhmm.
Rob:And how the design that you choose and those active learning things that you do inside your class could have spillover
Jim Stevenson:Yes.
Rob:Not only to the space. Right? I know this. Environment is important. Absolutely.
Rob:I mean, lighting is important. Where you're at is important. I understand learning can happen anywhere at any time, and it does because that's how God's created us. It is. But what you're talking about is activating this.
Rob:I would say active learning to me is making full effect of the learning capabilities of the individuals involved in the process.
Jim Stevenson:It is. I think one of the characteristics of creativity is humility, and we try to to have the humility to say we don't have with all the answers. And if students walk up and they'll ask us, hey, can I we try to start with yes? Mhmm. Right?
Jim Stevenson:We try to start with yes because they'll ask, like, crazy things. You know? Or and and that's good. That's good. It's the International Center for Creativity.
Jim Stevenson:But we also want some professionality. So there's always that fine line to walk of how much should we let him get away with. But there was a spot when we were doing some of this ramp up. There's a professor at the College of William and Mary's Business School. His son was in our program.
Jim Stevenson:And we got to collaborate, and they started an innovation center and an entrepreneurship center. And they asked us to come down and help them with their innovation center. And you just talk about humbling. Right? You know, it was to be able to say, wait a minute.
Jim Stevenson:You're gonna share with us what you're doing. We'd be be more than happy to share what we're doing. But we walked into this big building. It's gorgeous, the Mason School of Business, and it's exactly what you'd expect. There's marble, and there's these colonial portraits because it's right next to Williamsburg.
Jim Stevenson:You know? And it's got that really rich vibe to it. Well, then we walked down this one hallway, and they opened the door, and it looks like romper room. Mhmm. Right?
Jim Stevenson:We walk in, and there's, you know, bare concrete floor and there's all these toys and games on the wall and there's just, like, crazy stuff everywhere. They they have these cubes. They're maybe 24 by 24 by 24 cubes that are really high density foam. And they had them stacked in the corner, and they're like, that's their seating. They can configure it any way they want.
Jim Stevenson:So they pull it off, and they they stack it up in different areas the way that that group is gonna be working or the way this group's gonna be working. And the big struggle they had, you guys will chuckle with this, is that, you know, on a weighted average, a lot of their students are coming in with over four point averages, grade point averages. Mhmm. So they just wanna know what the answer is. Yeah.
Jim Stevenson:Yeah. Now they're taking an innovation class or a creativity class, and they're like, just tell me what the answer is. Yeah. And they're like, we can't. Yeah.
Jim Stevenson:Right? All we're doing is sharing a process with you. You're on the exploratory. You're you're the one that's digging down this path. And that type of student really struggles because high tolerance for ambiguity is a characteristic of creativity.
Jim Stevenson:And, Lisa, that was something they struggled with. But the seating thing was almost a gateway for him to be able to say, okay. Well, well, at least, he said, they'd come in sometimes in the classes. They'd they'd all be lined up in even rows. And Yeah.
Jim Stevenson:And even and then the next time they'd come in, they'd be they would have made a shape out of it. He said they came in once, and he said, what's this? And he goes, it's a ship. They're like, alright. It's a ship.
Jim Stevenson:Who cares? Right? You're engaged. But they let them kinda create their environment, and they also let them play in that environment, right, which is an Edisonian principle. You play hard, you work hard, and it's all in the same Mhmm.
Jim Stevenson:Environment. Right? So it takes that edge off of it. Like, oh, we have to be formal in this space, but we can be relaxed in that space. Yeah.
Jim Stevenson:Well, hang on. You want results over here. Let's let that expansion and contraction take place right where they're getting their work done.
Jared:That's cool.
Rob:This goes back to our conversation with doctor Leveque Bristol
Jim Stevenson:Mhmm.
Rob:In self determination theory, which is goes back to ownership.
Jim Stevenson:K.
Rob:The idea of competency of allowing people to be competent, I think, is what you're grabbing a hold of when you're starting to talk about how these students who were four point o's couldn't seem to couldn't seem to latch on to what was going on.
Jim Stevenson:Right.
Rob:But as soon as you give them ownership of something that I mean, that seems so much different to me. Where are you gonna put your seat? But yet, you're forcing them to own the situation.
Jim Stevenson:Right. And it's also permission to be wrong. We we have an exercise. Tom actually runs it. They don't pass it unless they fail it.
Jim Stevenson:I mean, they they have to come up with a concept that they can't execute.
Rob:Right? That they can't execute.
Jim Stevenson:Right. They'll come back and and and be so frustrated. They're like, I can't make this work. It'd be like, congratulations. That is insane.
Jim Stevenson:Because you're you that's where the learning happens. Right? Learning happens in failure, and yet typical academia should be a safe place for that to happen. Yeah. But there's there's steep consequences.
Jim Stevenson:You're like, oh, man. I don't wanna mess up. I got a good grade going. I can't screw this up. But if you create an environment where it's their energy, their effort, their attitude, their response, that to me is gold to to watch.
Jim Stevenson:And and this this will sound I just can't come up with a better way of saying it. But watching somebody struggle through something and come out the other side of it with an answer is so satisfying. And to me, that is the learning moment. And when they look at you and say, here's what I got out of this, and and they nail it, or they tell you something like, wow. I I we didn't even intend for that exercise to activate that synapse, and yet this person's telling us that's what they got out of that exercise.
Jim Stevenson:So we'll do rapid prototyping too because another speed is your friend in creativity. We overthink things Mhmm. Generally. Mhmm. And when you have a deadline, creative things happen because you're just going with it.
Jim Stevenson:Right? You look at a two minute offense, and all of a sudden, they get real creative real fast. Right? They're running a program, but they're freestyling like crazy to make it work because that clock has really, really become their enemy. And those kind of environments are critical for for learning.
Jim Stevenson:So we've compressed like, the way we teach classes is we do modules. So they take one class at a time. It's very similar to a grad program. So they are in class Monday through Thursday, 9AM to 03:30 in the afternoon. Four days a week, they're there most of the day.
Jim Stevenson:So it starts feeling a little bit like a workday. But what it also does, they only get four weeks. Right? And even though they have more contact hours, they feel like it's super compressed. If you give somebody fifteen weeks to do something, they're gonna take fifteen weeks.
Jim Stevenson:Yeah. Right? If you give them four weeks, they'll get it done in four weeks, and sometimes it's better. Right? Plus there's no retention issues.
Jim Stevenson:You know? You're you're hitting them every day. They're they don't leave the subject, but speed is your friend because that compression makes you quit overthinking, and you have to commit. Because there's divergent thinking, which is creating possibilities, and then there's convergent thinking. The real dissonance that we get is when to flip the switch and say, well, I've been developing possibilities.
Jim Stevenson:Now I have to commit to one
Jared:Mhmm.
Jim Stevenson:Or two and start converging on working that idea to a prototype, and then we're gonna do it again. We're gonna diverge different places that the prototype could be, find out the problems, and then converge again on a better solution. So that pivot point happens sooner when they have deadlines.
Jared:Last question. We like to do, some homework for our listeners since we're talking about active learning. And our listeners are, you know, instructors, mainly higher ed instructors. There's some that are K-12 as well, what some homework that you would give to active learning, active learning spaces? What is one takeaway that you would give them to say, hey, you could apply this on Monday, you could apply this in a month?
Jared:What is some homework you would give them?
Jim Stevenson:The unexpected is always a welcome breath of fresh air. So get out of your comfort zone. Whatever whatever you do, whatever that that list of, man, I wish I would have learned how to play piano. Do it. Right?
Jim Stevenson:Go start taking piano lessons. Yeah. Even if you just get online and you you start you start doing our guitar lessons or you wanted to paint or you wanted to learn photography if you wanted to learn it. At some point, get out of your comfort zone and be bad at something. Be a learner at stage one.
Jim Stevenson:You've reached the pinnacle of your discipline. You've got credentials and you've got all this stuff, But start over so you have empathy for people that are new. Right? You've got to have empathy for that student that's sitting in your classroom that has no idea those intricacies and subtleties. Couple of books that I love, one's called world class learners, and it talks about this environment of of what it takes for world class learning.
Jim Stevenson:Also, I just finished a book up called Whatever It Is, I'm Against It. And the subtitle of that book is Resistance to Change in Higher Ed.
Jared:Oh, I I am writing that down right now.
Jim Stevenson:Whatever It Is, I'm Against It. Brian Rosenberg wrote it, and he's been through the system. He was a former president of a small of Macalester College, I think. It's a quick read. It's a fun read, but he takes six chapters to frame the inherent problems.
Jim Stevenson:But he gives the last chapter, he gives a couple of basic lifelines of here's some ideas on how to actually execute some change in a change averse environment. So I think those would be a couple of a couple of short things that I'd throw out there.
Rob:I don't know, but I'm against it.
Jim Stevenson:Yeah. I'm I'm I'm against reading the books.
Jared:Is, I'm against it.
Rob:I'm against it.
Jared:Well, Jim, we appreciate you coming on.
Rob:This has been
Jim Stevenson:great. You. Appreciate
Jared:That's gonna do it for us on the Transform Your Teaching Podcast for this episode. Be sure to like and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. And, if you have any questions, send us an email at c t l podcast cedarville dot edu and check out our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog. Thanks for listening.