Developing Creativity in Adolescents

About this chapter

Developing Creativity in Adolescents is the chapter behind the inclusive-education portion of the CDP paper. It defines creativity as the ability to give novel responses, build new relationships and solve problems with originality, and contrasts it sharply with imitation and rote learning. It traces five steps of creative thinking — preparation, concentrated attention, withdrawal from the problem (incubation), flash and verification — illustrated by the Archimedes story, and lists the 4 P approaches that psychologists use to study creativity: product, process, person and press (situation). For an upper-primary teacher of Classes VI-VIII, the chapter is heavy on classroom strategies — brainstorming (Alex Osborn's four ideation rules), attribute listing, divergent and provocative questioning, mystery plots, consequences situations, story and poem writing, and ICT tools — together with Guilford and Torrance's six creative abilities (fluency, flexibility, originality, inquisitiveness, persistency, elaboration) on which Passi's Indian test of creativity is built. CTET Paper 2 tests adolescents-and-creativity through definitions, the 4 P labels, the five steps, named techniques, and pedagogy items on teacher behaviour. Practice 15 + Quiz 15 + Hard 15 + Mastery 30 cover all of this at CTET depth.