Instructional design	73

Affective behaviours

1.curiosity – willingness to explore and question

2.risk taking – courage to take a chance

3.complexity – facing the challenge of building order out of chaos

4.imagination – visualising and fantasising ideas.

It is worth noting that the four cognitive behaviours of fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration are also to be found in the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (Torrance, 1966).

Williams originally intended his model to be used in elementary schools, but it seems to have found more resonance with those delivering programmes for gifted and talented pupils. In 1986, Williams developed the ‘cognitive–affective intervention model for enriching gifted programs’, but this appears to vary little from his original work. He has also produced an assessment tool, the Creativity Assessment Packet (CAP) (Williams, 1980).

Evaluation

Williams realises his intention to develop a cognitive–affective intervention model of learning and a range of strategies and roles which enable teachers to place equal value on cognitive and affective aspects of learning and help them to move students towards higher levels of creative thinking. He shows how teachers can plan to teach a curriculum subject in such a way as to develop creative thinking as well as positive dispositions to support learning. While he speaks of cognitive and affective behaviours, this serves largely to help teachers focus on the need for pupils to act, not simply to be passive recipients.

Williams achieves a balance between the need for pupils to demonstrate qualities such as willingness and courage and the need for teachers to provide them with a wide range of opportunites to do so. However, gaps can be detected in his lists of pupil and teacher behaviours. For example, he downplays the need for care in the planning and execution of creative work and does not explicitly refer to design or to drama. Despite this, there is a reasonable match beween his desired pupil behaviours, the critical thinking dispositions identified by Perkins and others (1993) and the creativity ‘mindsets’ of Petty (1997).

74 Frameworks for Thinking

Some of Williams’ categories of teaching behaviours and pupil behaviours are very general and certainly overlap. Nevertheless Williams’ model and detailed lesson plans still provide a useful template for teachers interested in developing the creative thinking abilities of their students. His contribution is significant in its laudable attempt to represent the multi-dimensional nature of thinking, feeling and learning; and in the pragmatic way, through the use of actual examples and detailed lesson plans, in which he genuinely endeavours to make his work of use to teachers.

Friedman and Lee (1996) field-tested three gifted-education models and claim that Williams’ cognitive–affective interaction model demonstrated the best results for increasing the cognitive complexity of classroom interactions and on-task behaviour of high-achieving pupils.

Summary: Williams

				Relevance for teachers
Purpose and structure		Some key features		and learning
Main purpose(s):		Terminology:		Intended audience:
•	to encourage	•	clear	•	teachers
	creative teaching	•	fairly simple
	and learning
	across the
	curriculum
Domains addressed:		Presentation:		Contexts:
•	cognitive	•	easily understood	•	education
•	affective	•	addressed to
•	conative		practitioners
Broad categories		Theory base:		Pedagogical stance:
covered:		•	Guilford’s Structure	•	development of
•	self-engagement		of Intellect model		individual talents
•	productive thinking	•	Torrance’s work	•	interest in gifted
•	building understanding		on creativity		education
•	information-gathering			•	cross-curricular
					emphasis