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| r•w•t™ Magazine
| Learning Styles, Talent, & Creative
Thinking
For several decades, educational theorists, researchers, and practitioners have been engaged in the quest for one kind or category of individual or another: the special needs student, the gifted student, the creative person. We have invested a great deal of effort and time in seeking to determine the particular set of characteristics that set people in one category apart from others outside of that group. We have struggled to determine what tests, rating scales, or check lists might best be used to assess, classify and place people most accurately into one group or category or another. Long lists of characteristics and traits abound in the literature that supports these efforts. Some of the students who worked with me developed a list of every characteristic they could locate in published sources which defined the attributes of gifted or creative people. In each case, the list included more than 300 entries, with considerable overlap to be sure. One striking finding occurred: a good number of entries were inconsistent or incompatible with each other; that is, if a person was described in one way, it was not possible to describe him/her with certain other traits that also appeared in the overall list. This was puzzling, of course, but for several years, we dismissed the paradox as arising from definitional problems or inconsistencies about our understanding the concept... *** At first, it was disappointing that no single, uniform set of preferences could be isolated to describe every person equally well. Eventually, we began to explore a very different—and much more exciting—possibility: that there are, in fact, many ways to behave creatively, or many ways for one's giftedness to be manifest in daily life. Our redirected thinking led to a much more intriguing and challenging realization. Rather than searching for a single set of "creative" or "gifted" learning styles, we needed to think about learning style as a powerful set of tools to help individuals understand their strengths and interests, and then use these tools to enable creative productivity and talent.
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Notes Donald Treffinger, Ph.D., is president of the Center for Creative Learning in Sarasota, Florida, and serves on the board of the International Learning Styles Network. He is the co-author of VIEW: An Assessment of Problem Solving Style. References |
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