Torrance's Creativity Skill Set
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The Problem: recognition or awareness of a situation; definition of the problem and commitment to deal with it; recognizing the essence of the difficulty and identifying sub problems that are manageable or can be solved.
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Be Original: moving away from the obvious; breaking away from habit bound thinking; statistically infrequent responses; the ability to create novel, different or unusual perspectives.
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Be Flexible: creating variety in content; producing different categories; changing one's mental set to do something differently; perceiving a problem from different perspectives.
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Produce and Consider Many Alternatives: fluency; amount; generating many and varied ideas.
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Be Aware of Emotions: recognizing verbal and nonverbal cues; responding, trusting and using feelings to better understand people and situations.
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Elaborate-But Not Excessively: adding details or ideas--developing them; filling in details for possible implementation.
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Combine and Synthesize: making new connections with the elements within our perceptual set; combining relatively unrelated elements; hitchhiking; making the familiar strange and the strange familiar.
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Highlight the Essence: identifying what is most important and absolutely essential; discarding erroneous or relevant information; refining are dealers, abandoning unpromising information; allowing a single problem or idea to become dominant and synthesizing all of this at the same time.
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Put Your Ideas in Context: putting parts of experience into a bigger framework; putting experiences together in a meaningful way; making connection between things; giving situations and ideas a history, and background, a story.
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Keep Open: resisting premature closure; resisting the tension to complete things in the easiest, quickest way.
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Visualize It-Richly and Colorfully: using vivid, exciting imagery; creating colorful and exciting images that appeal to all five senses.
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Make It Swing! Make It Ring: using kinesthetic and auditory senses; responding to sound and movement.
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Look at It Another Way: being able to see things from a different visual perspective; being able to see things from a different psychological perspective or mindset.
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Enjoy and Use Fantasy: imagine, play and consider things that are not concrete or do not yet exist.
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Visualize the Inside: paying attention to the internal dynamic workings of things; picturing or describing the inside of things.
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Breakthrough-Expand the Boundaries: thinking outside prescribed requirements; changing the paradigm or system within which a problem resides.
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Let Humor Flow and Use It: perceiving incongruity; responding to a surprise; recognizing and responding to perceptual and conceptual discrepancies.
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Get Glimpses of the Future: predict, imagine and explore things that do not yet exist; wonder and dream about possibilities; view events as open-ended.
Books to read:
Making the Creative Leap Beyond (1999) by H. Tammy Safter & E. Paul Torrance
Weaving creativity into every strand of your curriculum (2-15) by Dr. Cyndi Burnett & Julia Figliotti.
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