I have started my winter break and am thinking a lot about the Creative Intelligence workshops I’ve been delivering lately. What I didn’t expect, and what has surprised me the most, is how much I needed them. This is my seventh year living and teaching in a remote part of Norway as the only visual arts teacher, and I had become used to doing this work alone. I didn’t realise the weight of that until I started connecting with people who genuinely understand this direction in education.
Every workshop I have taught has brought so much to me, such as the Creative Intelligence full day session with the team at Gulliver Prep in Miami. I asked the Art Department Chair, Stacy Goldman, if I could write about it, because even now, it continues to settle in me in that way meaningful things do. More than a workshop, it was a feeling of alignment, community, and shared purpose that I’ve been craving without realising it.
Why Creative Intelligence Matters More Than Ever
Education still carries the habits of the Industrial Age: certainty, control, correct answers, tidy outcomes. Even in the arts, we often begin with observational drawing as if it is the foundation of creativity. It isn’t. It’s sense perception; valuable, yes, but not creative.
Creativity, in its truest form, is the ability to rearrange what already exists into something new that reveals meaning, about ourselves or the world. It’s imaginative, intuitive, embodied, and deeply human. And crucially, it’s the one capacity AI cannot replicate.
This was what resonated with Stacy when she first reached out to me. She understood that the Industrial Age model of thinking was never truly human; it was mechanical, and now machines can do it far better than we can. Which is precisely where Creative Intelligence steps in.
What AI can’t touch are the forms of knowing that sit beneath language and beyond automation: intuition, embodied and emotional intelligence, symbolic and imaginal thinking, depth processing, meaning-making, divergent perception, and that subtle, psyche-led insight that reveals itself through creative work.
And when teachers reconnect with these forms of knowing, they reconnect with themselves. Creative Intelligence invites us to loosen our grip on certainty, soften the ego, and step into a more fluid, symbolic way of responding to the world. That is the real shift: not technique, but orientation.
How the Day Was Structured: Awareness → Embodiment → Integration
The Creative Intelligence workshop is built around a model I developed through research, teaching, and my own Jungian-informed art practice. At its core is a three-part arc – Awareness, Embodiment, and Integration – guiding participants from understanding, into experience, and finally into meaning-making.
Each phase has its own psychological work, and within the Embodiment phase sits the part of the model that people feel most strongly: the 3Ds – Disrupt → Discern → Deliver.
They are not borrowed, not instructional, and not theoretical. They describe the inner movement that occurs when we transition from comfortable, surface-level making into intuitive, symbolic, and authentic creation.
And this is where the day at Gulliver Prep began to unfold in a way that remains with me.
PHASE 1: AWARENESS – Seeing the World (and Ourselves) Honestly
Awareness is the moment we pause long enough to examine the patterns we’ve inherited, those that keep teaching predictable, safe, or overly controlled. It’s also the moment where people realise that creativity is not a luxury or an “art thing”; it’s a form of intelligence, and it’s becoming essential for the world our students are stepping into.
Awareness opens the door, and once you’ve walked through it, the old assumptions feel too small.
PHASE 2: EMBODIMENT – Where the 3Ds Come Alive
This is the phase where Creative Intelligence stops being an idea and becomes something lived. The 3Ds always reveal more than people expect; not about skill, but about personality, trust, and the state with which we enter the unknown. It’s fascinating every time, because it shows us exactly what Daniel Priestley means when he says the three most important capacities in the age of AI are self-awareness, discernment, and collaboration. The entire arc of Embodiment teaches all three.
DISRUPT – Meeting the Edges of the Ego
Disrupt is where automatic behaviour meets uncertainty. It is the stage that exposes how differently we all respond when the outcome is unknown. In the Gulliver team, this was immediately visible in a beautiful way.
Some stepped into the disruption with full trust from the start, open, warm, and ready to see what emerged. Their willingness created a sense of psychological safety that set the tone for the whole day. Others hesitated, which is natural, taking a moment to understand what it means to loosen control.
What was interesting to me was how personality, state of mind, and nervous-system readiness shaped each person’s experience. You could feel the individual differences, yet everyone found their way through, in their own rhythm.
And Stacy’s trust in the process was palpable. She wanted this work, and she embraced it fully, which says so much about her leadership. When a department head steps into disruption with curiosity rather than fear, it frees everyone else to do the same.
DISCERN – When Symbolic Intelligence Awakens
Discern is quieter, more internal. It’s when intuition begins to lead the process. People stop looking at the work and start listening through it, noticing relationships, atmospheres, tensions, and emerging meaning.
From my screen, I could see how absorbed everyone was. Even though the pieces were small and hard for me to see in detail, the energy was unmistakable. Symbolic intelligence had switched on, and once that mode of seeing has awakened, it doesn’t go back to sleep.
DELIVER – Coherence Through Collaboration
Deliver is not about finishing an artwork. It’s the moment coherence arrives, when meaning finds its form without being forced.
This is the point at which teachers realise why creative learning cannot be approached the same way we approach technical learning. Technical learning seeks control, whilst creative learning seeks alignment.
The collaborative works were extraordinary. One group joined together to create a singular, woven piece which became a natural metaphor for the entire day: threads of instinct, trust, personality, and meaning crossing and supporting one another.
The other group combined fragments of their individual works into shared outcomes, showing so much generosity and openness. The uniqueness, energy, and individuality of each piece was unmistakable, beautiful, and inspiring. Creating together offered a release of responsibility. In collaboration, you can feel the ego loosen. You trust the process more freely, and the Gulliver team leaned into this with such heart.
PHASE 3: INTEGRATION – Carrying Insight Forward
Integration is where insight becomes practice, where people begin to understand what a creative culture looks like, not just in theory, but in their classrooms, their relationships, and their school identity. It’s where the experience becomes understanding, and understanding becomes practice.
We spoke about metacognition, ethical creativity, creative conscience, contextual awareness, and what it means to translate internal insight into classroom culture
And this is where leadership truly mattered. Michellea’s presence, participating, reflecting, offering depth from her background in transformational leadership and inclusive pedagogy, made it clear that this wasn’t a “one-off PD.” It was a school genuinely preparing for the future.
And soon after, Natalie tried the project with her primary students. That still makes me smile. That is integration in action: insight moving immediately into community.
The feedback afterwards was thoughtful, generous, and deeply affirming, but more importantly, it showed me how ready teachers are for this shift.
What This Workshop Gave Back to Me
What stayed with me most was the sense of connection, real connection, that came through the day. I didn’t realise how much I needed to be in conversation with people who think and feel in these ways: curious, future-oriented, psychologically attuned, artistically open.
And meeting Stacy, whose vision aligns so effortlessly with my own, has been one of the unexpected gifts of this work. I consider her a friend now.
These workshops have given me something I didn’t realise I was missing: community, conversation, and the reminder that this work does resonate. That people are ready. That there is a collective movement forming that is visionary, brave, and necessary.
If Your School is Ready to Explore Creative Intelligence
If your school wants to move beyond creativity as “making things” and into creativity as intelligence – symbolic, embodied, intuitive, and deeply human – this work is for you.
What I saw at Gulliver Prep wasn’t just a successful workshop, it was a school stepping courageously into the future. When a team is ready for that kind of shift, everything becomes possible.
A heartfelt thank you to everyone at Gulliver Prep who stepped into this work with such sincerity, openness, and courage. Your trust, energy, and curiosity made the day what it was.