Creativity and achievement: Words and wishes, waste or wisdom

Abstract

The raison d'etre of this paper is to encourage support for our gifted learners so that they have a better chance to emerge as our visionaries, our thinkers, our inventors, and our innovators. For those well in advance of their peers, what we can do as educators to optimize their vision and its application are the concerns of the paper. It urges that we make innovative opportunities real, both in professional learning and in the classroom. Its emphasis is on creativity through imaginative solutions to problems or challenges as a way to optimise gifted learners' achievement. To help make this happen, the writer's past and current research projects are outlined, including evaluative and action research. Creativity, its meaning delineated in the paper, is often misinterpreted or overlooked in its significance as a motivating and facilitating factor in true inventiveness. The paper invites a response from fellow researchers to be more active and collegial in our research of the complexities of creativity that necessarily stems from imagination applied in investigations that can lead to advances in many domains. It is not the intention in this paper to explain one specific research initiative but rather to aggregate some of the research in the field, the writer's previous and ongoing research and their place in furthering opportunities for creative thinking that might lead to innovation.