Teaching About Creativity

Teaching “about” creativity means teaching the explicit skills involved in creative thinking.  Dr. E. Paul Torrence (1966) identified specific factors of creative producers whereby the character traits or behaviors involved in the creative process could be identified. He named four factors as having statistical significance in determining creativity.

These factors include:

• Fluency
• Flexibility
• Originality
• Elaboration

There are a variety of ways to teach these skills. In the Talents Unlimited Model (Schlichter, 1986), these essential elements are taught through the “productive thinking” talent and then incorporated into the talents called “forecasting”, “communicating”, “planning” and “decision making”.