In postindustrial society, flexibility and creativity become more valuable in the work place. "Artists" of every stripe are people who share qualities such as imagination, capacity to work hard, and personal vision. Arts are a necessity in curriculum, not a frill. Cutting arts denies students a learning avenue that promotes the kind of…

Structure limits available options and imposes set modes of learning, responding, and demonstrating achievement. To promote maximum success, teachers must attend to students' preferences. In a typical high school classroom, some students need considerable structure, some need minimal structure, and the rest may operate either way. Providing too…

Suggests that homes and educational settings must become true celebrations of options and choice that allow children to appreciate the beauty of individual styles, especially their own. This helps children not just to tolerate diverse thoughts and styles but to value them as vital elements in a free society. (TJQ)

Examines collaboration as a unique category of human performance. Discusses benefits, including motivation, free thinking, wider access to information, and skills sharing. Offers guidelines for setting up partnerships, rules for effective collaboration, and expectations. (AEF)

Based on the author's experiences, this article presents approaches to aid in developing interactive presentations. Galaxy and funnel methods offer more room for creativity when compared to metaphors such as step, line, and road models. Highlights include diagrams, personal narratives of advantages, disadvantages, and steps taken in creating an…

This special section on the spirit of play discusses (1) characteristics of adult play; (2) styles of playfulness; (3) the creation of environments that foster children's sense of wonder; and (4) strategies for training teachers to be playful and to be attentive to children's play. (HOD)

Interviews with 30 Ontario (Canada) elementary teachers revealed that teachers were aware of many characteristics of gifted, learning-disabled (LD), and gifted LD children and were aware of similarities in cognitive and creative abilities in gifted and gifted LD children. They were less aware of creative thinking characteristics of LD children.…

Presents concepts from von Wodtke's book, "Mind over Media," to suggest ways to teach thinking skills important for the electronic information age. Topics covered include how to use media interactively, navigating information environments, developing cognitive maps of media space, visualization, creative thinking, and collaboration. (KRN)

Reanalysis of the data from a 1984 study on making and breaking problem-solving mental sets with 50 children found that gifted subjects who failed to initially form the set made the most errors of any group and were least likely to recognize their own errors. Results suggest that motivational reasons may underly this inferior performance by some…

Discussion of indexing focuses on the possibilities of fully automated indexing. Topics discussed include controlled indexing languages such as subject heading lists and thesauri, free indexing languages, natural indexing languages, computer-aided indexing, expert systems, and the need for greater creativity to further advance automated indexing.…

Describes how parents can teach children to be creative problem solvers, providing information from the University of Michigan's Future Problem Solving Program (FPSP). The FPSP model involves brainstorming subproblems, identifying important problem areas, brainstorming solutions, brainstorming criteria for evaluating ideas, evaluating solutions,…

Creative projects, whether in the arts, literature, or social aspects of education, demand a mixture of the "subconscious" (imaginative) and "intellectual" (rational), not the rejection of one in favor of the other. Rationality and imagination are complementary in speculative research. An advocacy approach may be appropriate in certain cases. (20…

Marshall McLuhan and George B. Leonard saw the world of 1989 as a place where "children can learn far more, far faster in the outside world than within schoolhouse walls." Their dream of graduates as enlightened explorers and researchers has not been realized. Education in the future must embrace both values and factual knowledge.…

Argues that the cognitive mechanisms in human creativity are, for the most part, sighted rather than blind. Reviews attempts to apply evolutionary ideas to psychology and argues that these ideas do not apply to the psychology of human creativity. An alternative sighted-variation framework is then proposed. (Author/CR)

This study examined the impact of three conditions on how subjects (105 college students) generated ideas about imaginary extraterrestrials. Results are discussed in terms of constraints on innovation, ways of overcoming those constraints, and the general tendency for new ideas to preserve many of the central properties of existing concepts.…