Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to define gifted practitioners, to describe how they develop, and to show how their development can be fostered. Gifted practitioners are teachers who have continued to grow in their practice until they have become widely recognized as extraordinary teachers. The authors begin by examining the creative process, then showing how the creative process and teacher development are very similar processes. Both involve tacit learning through experience, the discovery of new ideas by making tacit knowledge explicit, and the further development of those ideas through design and evaluation. These ideas will be used as a basis for fostering giftedness in teaching. A case example will be used to provide an illustration of the gifted practitioner, followed by a discussion of the implications for the profession of teaching.
TopThe Creative Process
To begin our discussion on giftedness in teaching, we first turn to the interdisciplinary work on the creative process. Most interdisciplinary accounts of the creative process typically describe four different stages. Generally speaking, these include a long period of preparation involving the development of expertise in a field, followed by a deep level of engagement with a problem that ultimately leads to a spontaneous insight, which is gradually reworked during a longer period of implementation (Weisberg, 2006). Based on his review of the literature on creativity, Sawyer (2003) summarized this four-step process as described below.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Intuition: Holistic thinking process that relies on tacit cognitive processes.
Analysis: Systematic thinking process that relies on explicitly known reasoning steps.
Teacher Development: The professional growth of teachers through experience and reflection over time.
Experiential Learning: Learning through cycles of experience and reflection.
Giftedness: Significantly above average talent or intellectual ability.
Creative Process: The process of developing original thoughts, actions, or products.
Teacher Thinking: The thought processes of practicing teachers.
Innovation: The implementation of new processes or products.
Design Thinking: An iterative approach to design that involves pilot testing products or processes.
Instructional Design: The development of instruction that promotes student learning.
Creativity: The development of original thoughts, actions, or products.