Intellectual Creativity and the Teacher

Abstract

ABSTRACT Teachers must be trained to recognize the creative student, and we now have some useful materials for this purpose. Four characteristics of intellectual creativity are universality, diversity, its nature as a process, and its dependence on large inputs of information. The creative person is as complex as the creative process, and often possesses contradictory or inconsistent traits. We can encourage creativity through subject‐matter instruction, but this requires that teachers be trained to recognize and develop creativity, and be innovative themselves. Teachers need freedom to experiment with the involved concepts of divergent thinking if these are to be developed more fully in school classrooms.