Creativity Fostering Teacher Behavior

This book deals with teachers' behaviors that promote the creativity of students. It includes a rating scale for measuring a teacher's creativity fostering behavior — a scale known as the CFTIndex — and a series of conceptualization and research papers, including a lead article by Professor Authur Cropley, whose original ideas served as the basis of the CFTIndex. The other papers in this volume are by international authors who have used the scale in their research and who can now share their experiences using it in this volume.There is a dearth of measuring instruments that cover teacher behaviors where creativity is concerned, but the CFTIndex fills this vacuum, as evidenced by the many articles using this index in the international arena of creativity research.

Innovation is universally recognized as key components of first world economies that is vital for continued prosperity. This book presents a highly differentiated model which is capable of serving as a practical foundation for diagnosing, analyzing, optimizing and fostering creativity and innovation in a variety of organizational settings.

For years the research on creativity has been divided into person, process, product and press (environment) foci. However, the field is now much more extensive and diverse than it was when this scheme was proposed, and these four categories no longer catpure its essence. ""The Creativity Research Handbook"" shows how extensive and diverse the field has become. ""The Handbook"" contains extensive reviews and is intended to provide a comprehensive review of creativity research, first by the breadth of coverage of the chapters and second, by the depth and coverage within each chapter. ""The Handbook"" is divided into two parts, the first disciplinary and the second topical. The approach is a comprehensive one - authors do not focus on their own models or theories but instead give complete overviews. The disciplinary structure allows a more sensitive and accurate placement of research. The disciplinary framework also facilitates exchanges with the wider scholarly community - research on creative thinking, for example, shares assumptions with the cognitive sciences, and the disciplinary assignment can help individuals studying creativity to benefit from those sciences. Several of the contributions demonstrate how creativity research has benefited from such disciplinary connections. Part 2 contains six topical chapters; each of them focuses on one critical topic.

Current conceptualizations of children's thinking tend to be unneccesarily narrow, and to focus on what might be called convergent thinking. As a result, invention and innovation are often underemphasized in schools. This text aims to encourage a broad understanding of intellect, and attempts to help teachers to recognize and foster more varied forms of intellectual activity in their students. It offers a review of recent theory on creativity, conceptualizing this as a matter of getting ideas, trying the new, branching out and the like, rather than of producing artistic or scientific products. It discusses the factors in the classroom which block this more divergent kind of thinking and suggests practical ways through which teachers can promote bolder and more innovative intellectual activity in their students. This involves not merely cognitive factors (thinking, remembering, reasoning) but also motivation (courage and willingness), personality (openness to the new, self-confidence), and social factors (nonconformity, ability to communicate ideas). The text is applied in orientation, contains a large number of examples and case studies, and aims at providing practicing teachers with guidelines.

With few exceptions, scholarship on creativity has focused on its positive aspects while largely ignoring its dark side. This includes not only creativity deliberately aimed at hurting others, such as crime or terrorism, or at gaining unfair advantages, but also the accidental negative side effects of well-intentioned acts. This book brings together essays written by experts from various fields (psychology, criminal justice, sociology, engineering, education, history, and design) and with different interests (personality development, mental health, deviant behavior, law enforcement, and counter-terrorism) to illustrate the nature of negative creativity, examine its variants, call attention to its dangers, and draw conclusions about how to prevent it or protect society from its effects.

Creativity: A Handbook for Teachers covers topics related to creativity research, development, theories and practices. It serves as a reference for academics, teacher educators, teachers, and scientists to stimulate further dialogue on ways to enhance creativity.

Examines and responds to the tension educators face while trying to nurture creativity within the curricular constraints of the classroom.