Creativity and critical thinking are key skills for complex, globalised and increasingly digitalised economies and societies. While teachers and education policy makers consider creativity and critical thinking as important learning goals, it is still unclear to many what it means to develop these skills in a school setting. To make it more…

Creativity is increasingly valued as an important outcome of schooling, frequently as part of so-called "21st century skills." This article offers a model of creativity based on five Creative Habits of Mind (CHoM) and trialed with teachers in England by the Centre for Real-World Learning (CRL) at the University of Winchester. It explores…

The purpose of a "Critical and Creative" approach to literacy is not to place the burden of our responsibility on students, but rather to liberate them from the feeling of being trapped by unmalleable, self-defeating circumstances. Through actual demonstration and experience, teachers need to give students the confidence that they are…

"Nurturing Creativity in the Classroom" is a groundbreaking collection of essays by leading scholars, who examine and respond to the tension that many educators face in valuing student creativity but believing that they cannot support it given the curricular constraints of the classroom. Is it possible for teachers to nurture creative…

Techniques that a social studies teacher can use to help students develop imagination, understanding, and divergent thinking are discussed. Also examined are meanings attached to the creative process and traits of creative people. (RM)

How to deal with the absence of creativity and critical thinking in the educational setting is discussed. All efforts to improve education will be futile if we don't take into account the absence of relationship among the participants and between the participants and the content of education. Relationship--i.e., connecting with others and with…

This 9-week curriculum unit on trees is designed for gifted students in grades 1-5. The lessons are designed for 40-minute classes meeting two or three times a week and stress the development of creative thinking skills, creative problem solving and decision making skills, and critical and logical thinking skills. Each of the 12 lesson plans…

This guide encourages a learning environment that allows for creativity. Creative theory, assessment, and talent identification information is given. Student activities are presented to encourage creative problem solving, dispel myths and misunderstandings about creativity, provide exercises in brainstorming, creative thinking, and making cross…

This study explores the usefulness of a creativity construct for arts education. It is hypothesized that an arts orientation is a valid personality construct, that this orientation is correlated with contrasting cognitive skills, and that these skills are manifested in creative behaviors. Sixty-five high school seniors were given the ACT Interest…

The need for new thinking in the world, both official leadership and for all participating members of society has been a glaring reality in recent times. To Berenice Bleedorn, the idea of teaching students how to use the full potential of their thinking apparatus is not absurd--simply logical and timely. Creative expression is central to the…

This theme issue contains 17 articles which provide a diversity of views on the nature of creativity and how best to nurture it. Five initial articles are: "Creatively Gifted, disadvantaged Children: Their Desperate Need for Mentors" (E. Paul Torrance); "Creative Productivity: Understanding Its Sources and Nurture" (Donald J. Treffinger);…

This report reviews major theoretical and empirical studies concerning the process of creativity and the skills involved in creating art. Part I describes process studies with adult subjects engaged in activities such as poetry writing, editing, and critiquing a poem. Ten amateur and ten professional poets were subjects. These studies analyzed the…