#356 – Inspiring Creativity, with Kevin Honeycutt

In this episode, we are joined once again by Kevin Honeycutt, a technology integrationist and staff developer, who talks about inspiring our students to create. He offers insights and ideas for creating space where kids can discover their passions through play and creative opportunities. This can range from low-tech cardboard activities to tech-rich creation projects. It can also be done during short time periods in individual classrooms or as a full-day experience for the entire school. Tune in for ideas and inspiration to get your students experiencing the power and joy of creation.

Play every day for as long as you can.

Kevin Honeycutt, teacher, author, and motivational speaker

Resources

The following resources are available from AVID and on AVID Open Access to explore related topics in more depth:

• Empower Students Through Creativity and Choice (article collection)
• Igniting the Fire: Inspiring Students and Educators, with Kevin Honeycutt (podcast episode)
• AI and the 4 Cs: Creativity (article)
• Teacher Insights: Creativity and Choice Starting in Kindergarten, with Kaia Tomokiyo (podcast episode)
• Engage Students by Cultivating Their Curiosity (article)
• The Power of Empowering Students, Part I, with Dr. John Spencer (podcast episode)

The Importance of Joy

Kevin is passionate about making a positive difference in the world. He says, “I want to write on the world with permanent joy ink. I want to leave a contribution that makes a bunch of kids in the future fall in love with learning that leads to a better, more joyful life.”

Joy is one of the key elements in inspiring students and tapping into their creative ideas. This can happen by allowing students the space to explore, experiment, and play. Kevin says, “If you’re playing, there’s joy attached to the learning—joy. If joy is the number one emotion attached to learning, then you’re going to want to do it again, and again, and again.” The following are a few highlights from our conversation with Kevin:

• About Our Guest: Kevin Honeycutt is a technology integrationist and staff developer from Colorado Springs. He spent 13 years teaching K–12 art and now travels the country and the world sharing ideas with educators. He is passionate about student creativity, project-based learning, STEM, and STEAM, and his website, kevinhoneycutt.org, offers a host of resources for educators.
• The Power of Play: Kevin says, “Play is where ideas audition for a part in the brain’s production of understanding.”
• Space for Invention: With the pressure of packed curriculum and high-stakes standardized tests, it’s easy to get trapped in an ultra-structured school day. Still, Kevin encourages us to make space for creativity, saying, “If you want kids to invent or make anything new, you’ve got to give them assigned time to do nothing.”
• Be Intentional: Kevin reminds us that we must intentionally plan opportunities for students to create. He says, “If we don’t think about this, it won’t happen. It won’t accidentally happen.”
• Making Learning Stick: “What makes learning permanent?” Kevin asks. It’s emotion. When we are emotionally attached to the learning experience, we are more likely to remember it, and this is especially true when learning is joyful.
• Digital Recess: Schools are flooded with powerful technology. It’s important that we give students time to experiment and play with these tools, so they can unleash their creativity. Kevin encourages us to “make some room for digital recess.”
• A “Tradigital” Approach: Kevin believes in the power of blending offline and online learning experiences. He calls this his “tradigital” approach. While he loves technology and uses it often to inspire student creativity, he also says, “My thing is always going to be this close to cardboard—once removed from cardboard, and duct tape, and stuff like that—but never removed from joy.”
• A Whole-School Experience: Kevin has been working with schools to facilitate whole-school creative experiences, setting up huge makerspaces and creative exploration areas in school gyms. Fittingly, he calls this “Courting Whole School Learning.” Through these experiences, Kevin wants to “Plant STEM, STEAM, engineering, math in the minds of girls and boys of all ages, so after that day, they are on fire.”
• Student Mentors: A key element of Kevin’s whole-school learning experiences is training middle and high school students to be mentors, who both set up the learning playground and also facilitate the learning with younger students during the event. Kevin says, “I think that they felt proud that they were the role models for those little kids, and you should have seen how wonderful they were.” He adds that the student mentors don’t need to be the top students in the school, saying, “Make ‘em leaders. They will rise. I have seen it.”
• Embrace Iteration: Kids need to learn how to adapt and overcome adversity. To that end, Kevin says that we need to give creative space for failure to happen. “Don’t draw dark lines because they don’t erase. Draw light lines, and erase and change, and erase and change, and fall in love with iteration. ”
• Music as a Hook: Kevin says, “Every song needs a hook, and every lesson needs a hook.” Music can be the creative hook that students need to be drawn into learning. He says, “Music creation should happen as often as coding, programming, robotics. Music is one of those things.”
• Bringing in AI: At one of his conferences, Kevin wrote and performed a song in real time with the help of AI as a creative partner. He explains, “I wanted to show them, if AI is your muse—co-pilot, not pilot, it’s your copilot—you can create fast. Don’t think you are creating perfect. These are iterations. It’s okay, shake it off. These are sketches. These are pencils without dark lines.”
• Rigor: When kids are inspired, they will work hard. In fact, Kevin believes, “Rigor is passion unleashed.”
• Joy Is for Everyone: Kevin says that we’ve “gotta get over that idea that they [students] gotta earn joy. Joy should be there on day one.”
• Toolkit: Kevin offers a palette of digital tools that teachers can embed in their classrooms, including Make-A-Fort, Makedo, Snap Circuits, Arduino, and Dash Robots. These are some of the creative tools that he weaves into his whole-school learning experiences.