This 90‑minute, highly interactive workshop invites CPSI participants to “elevate” their practice by shifting from mastery-as-endpoint to curiosity-as-engine, using improv, design thinking, and AI as complementary tools. Drawing on research with 94 community college students, Betsy Tuma will show how short, guided improv activities significantly elevated participants’ creative self-concept and individual idea generation, then connect those findings to her “Curiosity Over Mastery” framework for creative and critical thinking in the age of AI. AI will be treated not as an answer machine but as a live curiosity partner—something to interrogate, remix, and “yes–and” in service of more original, learner‑driven ideas.
Takeaways
- Curiosity, not correctness, is the real engine of elevated creative problem solving in an AI‑saturated world.
- Short, structured improv activities measurably boost creative confidence and idea fluency, making groups braver and more generative.
- AI can be designed into sessions as a curiosity partner—something to interrogate, remix, and “yes–and”—rather than a shortcut to the next right answer.
