2.3.7 Eliciting Creative Thinking Across the Curriculum: Teacher Perception and Practice

Teaching and involving students in creative thinking is a service to gifted students and to others. First, the practice can provide evidence for possible identification of the creatively gifted. Jot-downs or checklists are often used as a screener for being creatively gifted, but creative thinking has to be active and apparent in the classroom for these to be used. In addition, creative ability can be nurtured by actually using creative thinking and being aware of how it works. Eliciting creative thinking can take place in short-term or long-term ways. Asking the right questions to elicit curiosity demands that students think creatively. Telling students to imagine a scenario does the same. Assigning longer-term plans and projects, from writing a story to designing a park, will elicit creative thinking on a larger scale. Although some have claimed that teaching to required standards makes eliciting creative thinking hard to “fit in,” an examination of standards in most subjects shows that creative thinking is necessary for mastery of many of them. For other standards, active student involvement with creative and critical thinking can enhance desired learning and retention. Using as a basis the interviews and surveys of practicing teachers, along with literature sources, the presenter will summarize teacher perceptions, practice, and barriers to teaching creative thinking and tie them to the benefits described above. These sources of information will address several questions—Do many teachers have a lack of knowledge about how creative thinking works and how to use it in the classroom; are there administrative and logistical problems with planning for creative thinking; does school climate downplay the value of eliciting creative thinking? Finally, a short list of general suggestions will be offered as possible solutions to the problems found in the data.

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