TALENT DEVELOPMENT AND CREATIVITY IN THE FRAMEWORK
OF THE CLASS: FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE
Georgios Papadimitriou, Hellenic American Educational Foundation – Athens College,
Psychico College Elementary School, Greece
gpap@haef.gr
Abstract
Nowadays, the unlimited access to information and the communication that is free of any restrictions
have incurred enormous changes to students’ beliefs about school and its role in their life. So, as
professional educators, we must direct our efforts towards creating a school that will intermittently
cultivate talents, skills and implement personal interest, that is, to promote creativity. To wit, we are
discussing a school of talent. Cognitive psychology has produced a lot of descriptions and conclusions
about talent development and its connection with creativity and our task is to transform this
knowledge into action. This, in turn, will provide us with the opportunity to map the talents, to
observe the way they are manifest in everyday life and establish methods of recognition. Mostly, to
help the total population of students to take advantage of programs that develop skills, awaken
talents and highlight creativity as indispensable tools of the future citizen. Under this prism, Psychico
College has established a club of Entrepreneurship with all students being participants, expecting,
however, talented students to undertake special roles according to their personal talent. During the
creation process from zero point to a fully functional start-up company, there are a lot of skills that
must be developed, and many different talents could emerge. The outcome is assessed for its
uniqueness, its inspiration and implementation which are elements of creativity. As the project is
well underway, we interview, observe, and collect data to reach conclusions about the correlation
between creativity, talent and other factors.
Keywords: talent development, creativity, classroom framework, skills
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1. Creativity meets High Ability
1.1 A definition for creativity
Looking for an appropriate definition of creativity, someone could ascertain that is a term
that is used in education but also by many people in various circumstances. So, we can meet
a creative scientist or a creative politician, artist, athlete, chef or teacher. According sir Ken
Robinson (2011) “people aren’t creative in something abstract. They are creative in
something – mathematics, engineering, writing, music, business, in something. Creativity is
related with applied fantasy…” According to this, creativity implements two main processes:
thinking (that includes inspiration, imagination, vision and more) and producing (knowledge
and skills).
According the Investment Theory of Creativity (Sternberg and Lubart 1991,1995) creativity
requires a confluence of six distinct but interrelated resources: intellectual abilities,
knowledge, styles of thinking, personality, motivation and environment.
1.2 High Ability
Creative, productive high ability “referring to the traits that inventors, designers, authors,
artists and others apply to selected areas of economic, cultural and social capital.
Intelligences outside the normal curve” (Renzulli 2012).
High Ability students noted inter-individual variation in behavioral, affective and cognitive
patterns (Hodge & Kemp, 2000) but there is a cluster of characteristics commonly cited:
 Early language development and reading
 Verbal and visual memory
 Intense curiosity
 Interest in investigative problem solving
 Capacity for abstractive thinking
 Extended attention
High Ability students are active learners and they have the trend to move beyond the familiar
and make connections between the known and unknown (Harrison,2004), and they are
looking for topics that engage their interest.
2. The education for creativity
2.1 The school improvement goal for creativity
As school improvement initiatives, move from theoretic to reality, we need to create
practical, cost effective procedures for improving the learning for all students. We can test
new ideas and experiment with educational programs in order to provide a broad range of
high-level enrichment experiences to all student. We need to incorporate high level of
challenging and satisfying learning across the full range of abilities, interest and learning
styles. Our aim is to enhance student’s capacity for creative productivity and not just for
knowledge acquisition.
2.2 The management of high ability in the framework of the classroom
If we want to explore “what causes some people to use their intellectual, motivational and
creative assets in ways that led to outstanding manifestations of achievement and creative
productivity” (Renzulli, 2012) we can understand that high ability and creativity can be
displayed in certain people, at certain times and under certain circumstances.
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Two assumptions will help us to determine how a suitable environment will be, in order to
meet the high ability students’ needs and release their creativity:
 High ability students were not all the same, with respect to their ability (CTY)
 Students “learn more by active learning. In all the courses transformed to active
learning course evaluation went up” (Reuell.2019)
2.3 The teaching method for creativity
The inductive model of learning serves the learning that take place outside the formal school
situations. This kind of learning process forms an environment that looks like artist’s studio,
business office, research laboratory etc. In a space like this there is inspiration, production,
services offered, and creativity could appear.
3. Entrepreneurship club at Psychico College: A case study
3.1 Introduction
Many researchers in education, like cognitive psychologists, and in other scientific fields have feed
us with a lot of useful conclusion about high ability education and the development of creativity.
Under this prism the entrepreneurship club program has as main goal to improve the total
educational outcome but particularly to create the environment where special needs of high ability
students could appear and creativity will be the requested goal.
In this program, which is realistic and not a stimulation, students must create a start-up company
from zero. They must do all the necessary in order to design, produce and sell unique products and of
high quality. Furthermore, students must take under consideration issues like recycle, energy
consumption, entrepreneurship ethics. All students are involved, but we are expecting high ability
students to reveal their talents and their creative thinking in various processes.
3.2 Description of the process
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We share students in groups of 5 or 6 and we ask them to form a company and make
decisions about their company and their products.
Companies are informed about prerequisites related to their company. Those are the use of
recycled material, the connection of the product with local production and raw material.
Entrepreneurs must decide about company names, logos, slogans both in Greek and English.
Each one gets a role, depending on his skills or interests.
Specialists outside the school stuff educate students about real life companies, marketing
etc. This is a continuous process.
They form their ideas about their products, and they construct models. They assess their
ideas and they make corrections and improvements.
They design posters, advertisements and marketing actions.
They are doing a market research and with the use of appropriate software they edit their
data in order to get the necessary information about their production.
They create a total plan about their company. This plan is presented to a commission which
assess their work for: uniqueness, creativity, performance and presentation. Also for the use
of tools like mathematics, software, design skills, use of language.
They product and they sell in the school. They must do everything needed to keep their
company in a high level.
After the sale period, they collect all the data and they present their final account.
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3.3 Conclusion
Through realistic and no simulated activities students could develop skills of 21th century. They
must be creative, decision makers and initiative. They must communicate, self-assess, regulate by
themselves processes, to use technology and tools, to solve problems under realistic circumstances
and to think “out of the box”. All these skills are core elements for high ability education and for
creativity. Furthermore, as educational but realistic process that occurs in real life students
creativity counts because the final product depends on that.
The research has given a lot of information about education for creativity. This program is a good
and applied sample
References
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Renzulli, J. S., & Reis, S. M. (2009). Enriching curriculum for all students. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Corwin Press.
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Robinson, K. (2011). Out of our minds: learning to be creative. Chichester: Capstone.
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Renzulli, J. S. (2012). Reexamining the Role of Gifted Education and Talent Development for
the 21st Century. Gifted Child Quarterly, 56(3), 150–159. doi: 10.1177/0016986212444901
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Reuell, P. (2019, September 5). Study shows that students learn more when taking part in
classrooms that employ active-learning strategies.
Retrieved from https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/09/study-shows-that-students-learnmore-when-taking-part-in-classrooms-that-employ-active-learningstrategies/?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=hu-facebookgeneral&utm_source=facebook&sfns=mo.
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MindShift. (2019, August 12). How Testing Kids For Skills Can Hurt Those Lacking Knowledge.
Retrieved from https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/54054/how-testing-kids-for-skills-hurts-thoselacking-knowledge?sfns=mo.
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University of California - Riverside. (2019, July 23). Teacher incentive programs can
improve student achievement: Programs that combine group and individual rewards can
have good results and be cost-effective. ScienceDaily.
Retrieved December 29, 2019 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190723104114.htm
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Flanagan, L. (2019, May 28). Going for Depth: How Schools and Teachers Can Foster
Meaningful Learning Experiences.
Retrieved from https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/53684/going-for-depth-how-schools-andteachers-can-foster-meaningful-learning-experiences?sfns=mo.
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www.cty.jhu.edu/talent
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