o   Coined by Millar (1995) as “The Creativity Man”

o   During WWII, Torrance, the psychologist, investigated how people coped with dangerous situations.  He found the answer to be creativity.  This is the event that leads him to a lifetime of creative research.

o   Creativity defined as “process of becoming sensitive to problems, deficiencies, gaps in knowledge, missing elements….  Searching for solutions, making guesses, formulating hypothesis…., and finally communicating the results”. (Torrance, 1965 ps 663-664)

o   In fact, in most of my own studies, the high creativity/not-so-high IQ group achieved better than any other group. Thus, we should make one of our missions that of getting research findings into practice. (Torrance, personal communication, May 24, 2002).

o   believed that the focus of education should be on what students can do with what they learned and not necessarily what they have learned.  Children needed to see links between what was learned din school and their current and future lives outside of the school. 

What is creative giftedness?

·         (Renzulli, 2012. 1997) Three-Ringed Conception.  These traits produce curiosity, originality,   Talk about the conception and how gifted behaviors are exhibited when all three circles interact.

·         (Sternberg, 2009) WICS- Sternberg defines creativity as having the skills and attitudes that help to produce ideas that are novel, high quality, and appropriate.

·         Figural and Verbal: focus on figural

·         (Kaufman, Plucker, and Russell, 2011)  Objective: Torrance constructed tests that focused on assessment of divergent thinking which he believes was the basis for creativity.  Divergent thinking is the ability to produce novel and useful responses to answer open-ended questions.

·         Torrance originally planned to use them as a basis for individualizing instruction for different students based on the test scores. Torrance discouraged interpretation of scores as a static measure of a person’s ability and, instead, argued for using the profile of strengths as a means to understand and nurture a person’s creativity Thus, the purposes of the TTCT are for research and experimentation, for general use, for instructional planning, and for determining possible strengths of students. 

·         Figural TTCT The five subscales are listed as follows, with descriptions of each subscale and information about scoring and the content measured (subscales based on Kauffman and Kim)

o   Fluency: number of responses to a given stimuli

o   Originality: The uniqueness of responses to a given stimuli

o   Elaboration: The extension of ideas within a specifid category of responses to a given stimuli.

o   Abstractness of Titles: Measurement of the degree to which a title is more abstract/ moves beyond a labeling of a picture.

o   Resistance to Premature Closure: The degree of psychological openness; based on the belief that creative behavior requires a person to consider a variety of information when processing information and to keep an “open mind.” 

·         Alabama identification recognizes the TTCT.  Pursuant to the matrix, a student who scores in the 97^th percentile on the test is automatically qualified for gifted education services. (Alabama Administrative Code, 2009) 

·         Short time needed for administration, and the ease of its administration

·         It has fewer limitations and cautions to apply, and it is more researched and analyzed than any other creativity instrument

·         The TTCT-Figural can be fair in terms of gender, race, and community status, as well as for persons with a different language background, socioeconomic status, and culture and in some cases, the TTCT favors Black children and children of low socioeconomic backgrounds. 

·         It also may be less biased for those who speak English as a second language because the test is not based on a student’s ability to use the English language.

o   Omission of demographic characteristics is not outlined perhaps because it is seen as fair.  This information could lead to a greater understanding of nature of creativity and how to encourage it. 

o   norms are not established for each population which could provide misleading results. 

If a teacher asked me, "How can identify gifted characterisitcs, what would I say?"

·         open to experience- receptive to the new, different, irrational thoughts, actions and products of others and self.  Curious and willing to take both mental and physical risks, uninhibited.  Aware of detail and are willing to react to their personal ideas and feelings as well as external stimulation (Renzulli, 1997)

·         (Kim, 2008) youth who are creatively gifted, especially highly gifted, have difficulty in the traditional school classroom environment where obedience, rote memorization, conformity to the social norm is expected.  Therefore, creatively gifted students can be viewed as disruptive and as nonconformists.  The creative nature of the child might be discouraged by teachers and the child is unwilling to be creative.  This can result in underachievement.  (Kim, 2008)

What are strategies we can teach them to nurture their creativity?

§  All people have the potential to be creative.  Therefore, instead of looking for a test that labels a student as “creatively gifted”, we need to focus on designing effective programs that recognize and nurture a student’s creative strengths and talents.  (Treffinger, 2009)/

• this model wil help you solve any personal or professional problem and also can be used to stimulate creatiity within the classroom
• each step first uses divergent thinking- generates lots of ideas and a convergent- deciding on the which ideas need to be explored further
• 5 steps involved

1.  fact finding- listing what you know about the problem; who, what, when, when, where, why, and how

2. problem finding- use IWWMI

3.  idea finding- incorporates divergent thinking and brainstorming where ideas are uninhibitedly proposed

4.  solution finding- 3 steps: select a criteria for evaluated, evalute the ideas, select 1 or more of the best ideas

5.  acceptance finding- put your idea into action.  could be done by making an action plan

social and emotional needs of the creatively gifted and what must be done to meet those needs

·         Risk taking- they must be willing to take risk in order to become innovaters.  However, taking risk may lead to failure.  Therefore, these student need to learn about resilence. (Davis, 1999)

o   Resilience serves as a protective mechanism for gifted students when they experience failure (Ozturk & Debelak, 2008)

o   What failure can teach kids (Ozturk, et al)

§  Face it: someones work is better and just because they did not win does not mean they lost

§  Learn from failure

§  Intellectual and emotional growth

§  Performance improved