Educator, researcher and creativity scholar E. Paul Torrance developed a framework of instructional design to help teachers imbed the teaching of creative skills in any content area. His three-step sequence will come as no surprise to many teachers who use it either intuitively or by training.

Step 1: Heighten Anticipation – get the student’s attention, ignite curiosity and inspire motivation to learn

Step 2: Deepen Expectations – lead students to create meaningful learning

Step 3: Extend the Learning – give students fuel for incubation to carry the learning far beyond the lesson

Torrance identified 18 teachable creativity skills, listed below. The Torrance Incubation Model provides a methodology to imbed the teaching of those skills in any content, and to harness the power of incubation to support learning.

Journal Article, An Instructional Model for Enhancing Incubation, by E. Paul Torrance, in the Journal of Creative Behavior, 13(1), pages 23-35 (1979)

Book The Incubation Model of Teaching: Getting Beyond the Aha! by E. Paul Torrance and Tammy Safter (Bearly Limited, 1999)

Torrance's Creativity Skill Set

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.

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.

Be Flexible: creating variety in content; producing different categories; changing one's mental set to do something differently; perceiving a problem from different perspectives.

Produce and Consider Many Alternatives: fluency; amount; generating many and varied ideas.

Be Aware of Emotions: recognizing verbal and nonverbal cues; responding, trusting and using feelings to better understand people and situations.

Elaborate-But Not Excessively: adding details or ideas--developing them; filling in details for possible implementation.

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.

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.

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.

Keep Open: resisting premature closure; resisting the tension to complete things in the easiest, quickest way.

Visualize It-Richly and Colorfully: using vivid, exciting imagery; creating colorful and exciting images that appeal to all five senses.

Make It Swing! Make It Ring: using kinesthetic and auditory senses; responding to sound and movement.

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.

Enjoy and Use Fantasy: imagine, play and consider things that are not concrete or do not yet exist.

Visualize the Inside: paying attention to the internal dynamic workings of things; picturing or describing the inside of things.

Breakthrough-Expand the Boundaries: thinking outside prescribed requirements; changing the paradigm or system within which a problem resides.

Let Humor Flow and Use It: perceiving incongruity; responding to a surprise; recognizing and responding to perceptual and conceptual discrepancies.

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.

Teaching the Universal Language of Creativity_ A Guide to Trainin.pdf