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Creativity is sometimes seen as irrelevant to educational practice. With an increased focus on standardized test scores, creative teachers and those who encourage creativity in the classroom often are accused of being idealists or missing the big picture.
But we believe instead that creativity brings valuable benefits to the classroom. In this Resource Review, we provide answers drawn from the literature to the four questions most often asked about creativity.
Scholarly work on creativity first was stimulated in 1950 when J. Paul Guilford used his presidential address at the American Psychological Association (APA) to call for more research on the topic. Since then, research in this area has blossomed, and several recent books provide a solid overview of the field.
One of us (Sternberg) published the Handbook of Creativity in 1999 containing essays on the subject from a wide variety of scholars. In Understanding Creativity (2004), Jane A. Piirto creates a model of what she calls the seven I’s of creativity—inspiration, imagery, imagination, intuition, insight, incubation and improvisation. R. Keith Sawyer’s Explaining Creativity (2006) takes a socio-cultural focus, arguing that creativity can be understood only in the social and cultural contexts in which it occurs. Mark A. Runco’s Creativity: Theories and Theme (2006) is designed to be a textbook for the field.
Question One: What is it?
Most definitions of creative ideas comprise three components. First, those ideas must represent something different, new, or innovative. Second, they need to be of high quality. Third, creative ideas must also be appropriate to the task at hand. Thus, a creative response to a problem is new, good, and relevant.
But the word can be applied not just to ideas: a person can be creative and so can a classroom or a piece of music. One way to organize research on creativity is by using the “four P’s” model, which distinguishes among the creative person, process, product, and press (i.e., environment). Studies of the creative person may look at the personality, motivation, or intelligence of a creator. For example, in Sternberg and Todd I. Lubart’s Defying the Crowd (1995), the writers propose the theory that creative thinkers are like good investors—they buy low and sell high, with ideas as the currency.
Other lines of research examine whether creativity is a generalized construct. In other words, is it more sensible to talk about the creative person in general or to talk about creative poets, mathematicians, and architects in particular? Essays that discuss this question can be found in Creativity Across Domains (2005), published by James C. Kaufman and John Baer, and in Creativity: From Potential to Realization (2004), by Sternberg, Elena L. Grigorenko, and Jerome L. Singer. In their 2005 work, Kaufman and Baer use deciding to go to an amusement park as a metaphor for being creative. The model begins with initial requirements (conditions necessary for any type of creative act) and moves down to microdomains (conditions necessary for writing short stories versus writing plays, for example). Just as one needs money, transportation, and the desire to go to an amusement park, so too does one need a (very) basic amount of intelligence, environmental support, and motivation to be creative.
James C. Kaufman is an associate professor of psychology and director of the Learning Research Institute at California State University, San Bernardino. Robert J. Sternberg is a professor of psychology and dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University.
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