Although the development of creativity is an oft-stated goal for students, it is seldom infused into school curricula, nor are teachers explicitly trained on how to promote it within their classrooms, even in the context of selective programs. We have several goals for this chapter. The first is to describe our view of the current status of creativity education for advanced pre-university students, noting its minimal presence except in artistic domains. Second, we differentiate the concepts of gifted education and talent development, favoring the latter as the direction of the future for enhancing the role of creativity. Third, we address some challenges for applying creativity in the gifted and talented classroom.

The development of creativity is simultaneously possible and impossible. It is impossible because creativity is very domain specific, which means there is no general, all-purpose creative-thinking skill or set of skills that is applicable across domains. Just as there is no such thing as domain-general expertise – one can be an expert in one or many domains, but one cannot be an all-purpose expert in all domains – there is no domain-general creativity. There being no such domain-general skills, there are no domain-general creativity-relevant skills to be nurtured. On the other hand, the nurturance of creativity domain by domain is quite possible. This chapter explores the issue of how domain specificity affects the development of creativity.