“Creativity is almost infinite. It involves every sense – sight, smell, hearing, feeling, taste and even perhaps the extra-sensory. Much of it is unseen, nonverbal and unconscious.”
- E. Paul Torrance, PhD
Purpose
The Freddie Reisman Center (FRC) for Translational Research in Creativity and Motivation addresses the disconnect between teachers' knowledge of creative and motivated students and teachers’ beliefs that affect how they stifle rather than nourish creative students. The medical translational research model -- referred to as Bench to Bedside -- serves as our prototype for the FRC's model, Lab to Learner, where relevant research hidden in journals not accessible to educational end-users will be available to teachers. The FRC also will address translational research for corporate trainers and talent managers. The FRC advances the prototype of translational research and applies it to education, significantly decreasing the lag time between excellent research findings and their access to teachers and corporate trainers. Thus, the impact of research to benefit education end users can now occur.
The FRC Team and a stellar group of researchers from the creativity and motivation fields comprise the FRC Advisory Board. The Team collaboratively gathers worldwide research and practices with end-users (e.g., teachers, doctoral students, parents, instructional designers, college faculty, school principals, business leaders) that focus on creativity and motivation and disseminate these jewels to the teachers for use with their students. This includes providing tested, teacher-developed lesson plans and related strategies that educators can immediately implement in the classroom with the ultimate end goal of advancing human possibility through education.
Why Creativity and Motivation Emphasis?
The spotlight on creativity and motivation purposely delimits the Center's initial work to these two areas that affect learning. Years of research have not yielded a change in teachers' ability to recognize their students' creative strengths. Teachers believe their creative students agree with them, do not question the teachers' statements, are not behavior problems, smile at the teacher (Getzel & Jackson, 1972; Torrance, 1975; Aljughaiman & Mowrer-Reynolds, 2005). Teachers described students whose creativity they do not acknowledge as nonconformist, disruptive, and troublemakers (Dawson, 1977). Research has suggested that teachers who recognize their own creative strengths may recognize and appreciate the creative strengths of their students (Whitelaw, 2006; Robinson, 2018) with the result of higher quality learning.
Motivation is vital in almost every aspect of human behavior. When you make a decision, your choice is often influenced by your motivational state. When you study mathematics, your motivation to study mathematics clearly affects the way you learn it. Historically, empirical research on motivation has been segregated in different areas, making it difficult to establish an integrative view on motivation. However, more recently, researchers have recognized the importance of a more unified and cross-disciplinary approach to study motivation (Braverm et al., 2014). This multidisciplinary, multimethod pursuit, called Motivation Science, is now an emerging field (Kruglanski et al., 2015). Motivation researchers now take an integrative approach, drawing from multiple disciplines (e.g., cognitive, social and educational psychology, cognitive/social neuroscience) and various approaches (e.g., behavioral experiments, longitudinal data analysis, neuroimaging, meta-analysis, statistical simulation/computational modeling, network analysis).