What Is The Torrance Incubation Model of Creative Teaching and Learning (TIM)
and How Does It Work?
The Torrance Incubation Model (TIM) for creative teaching and learning is one of the few models in the
domain of creativity whose major purpose is the design and delivery of creativity content. It was
designed by E. Paul Torrance (1979) as a model for integrating creativity content into other disciplines or
content area. Effective use of the model presupposes a "skill base" of pertinent concepts that are basic and
necessary to teach as creativity content. Using TIM requires a clear understanding of the distinctions
between the creative process of using the model itself and the creativity content it seeks to deliver. In
fact, these dynamics between content and process form the unique meta-cognitive framework that makes
the model so effective in integrating creativity into other content areas.
A Closer Look at a 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.
Produce and Consider Many Alternatives: fluency; amount; generating many and varied ideas.
Be Flexible: creating variety in content; producing different categories; changing one's mental set to do something differently;
perceiving a problem from different perspectives.
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.
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.
Elaborate-But Not Excessively: adding details or ideas--developing them; filling in details for possible implementation.
Keep Open: resisting premature closure; resisting the tension to complete things in the easiest, quickest way.
Be Aware of Emotions: recognizing verbal and nonverbal cues; responding, trusting and using feelings to better understand
people and situations.
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.
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.
Visualize It-Richly and Colorfully: using vivid, exciting imagery; creating colorful and exciting images that appeal to all five
senses.
Enjoy and Use Fantasy: imagine, play and consider things that are not concrete or do not yet exist.
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.
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.
Taken from Torrance, E. P. & Safter, H. T. (1998). Making the creative leap beyond. Buffalo, New York: Creative Education
Foundation Press.
Current TIM Initiatives
Current work in the development of the model includes a dissemination initiative at the International
Center for Studies in Creativity (Keller-Mathers & Burnett, 2010) including a updated book on TIM
(Keller-Mathers, In progress), an edited collection on practitioner’s experiences (Keller-Mathers &
Burnett, In progress), a formal “TIMer’s” network and a research agenda.
Some TIM Sources
Murdock, M. & Keller-Mathers, S. (2008). Designing and delivering training for creative thinking using Torrance Incubation
Model of Teaching and Learning. In Puccio, G., Burnett, C., Cabra, J, Fox, J.M., Keller-Mathers, S., Murdock, M. & Yudess,
J.(Eds.), Integrating inquiry and action: International conference on creativity and innovation management second
community meeting conference proceedings Book Two (pp. 70-96). Buffalo, NY: International Center for Studies in
Creativity, Buffalo State.
Murdock, M. & Keller-Mathers, S. (2008). Teaching and learning creatively with the Torrance Incubation Model: A research and
practice update. International Journal of Creativity and Problem Solving, 18(2), 11-33.
Torrance, E. P. (1979a). An instructional model for enhancing incubation. Journal of Creative Behavior, 13 (1), 23-35.
Torrance, E. P. (1979b). The search for satori and creativity. Buffalo, NY: Bearly Limited.