What is Creativity?
Additional Information
Common Characteristics of a Creative Individual:
- Has in-depth foundational knowledge
- Prefers complexity and open-endedness
- Contributes new concepts, methods, products, or performances
- Has extreme fluency of thoughts and a large number of ideas
- Is observant and pays attention to detail
- Uses unique solutions to problems; improvises
- Challenges existing ideas and products
- Connects disparate ideas (Johnsen, 2011)
Creativity is the process of developing new, uncommon, or unique ideas and is one of the highest forms of human expression. E. Paul Torrance spent more than 50 years examining correlations between intelligence and creativity, ways to measure creativity, and methods for unlocking the potential within all learners to apply their ingenuity, imagination, and inventiveness (NAGC, N.D.).
The focus of the Torrance Center at the University of Georgia is in the identification and development of creative potential across the lifespan. The overarching goals of the Torrance Center are to investigate, implement, and evaluate techniques for enhancing creative thinking across domains of human enterprise and to increase creativity literacy in the local, state, national, and international community (Torrance Center, Nov. 2020)
Read more about Raising the Creative Gifted Child by Dr. Courtney Crim.
Watch Professor Richard Foster, Yale University, explain creativity.
Watch Sir Ken Robinson's TEDTalk "Do Schools Kill Creativity?" (Feb. 2006)
Developed by Joseph Renzulli, the Three Ring Conception of Giftedness is a developmental approach. The Three Rings include: Above Average Ability, Creativity and Task Commitment. Students who possess the combination of these three traits exhibit gifted behavior (Renzulli Learning, 2020).
Renzulli's Three Ring Conception of Giftedness