Research On Teachers' Views Of Creativity And Related Teaching Actions

At present, creative education is developing in China. Creative education is an educational system whose objective is to bring up students' creative spirit, creative capacity and creative personality. As the direct executants of creative education, teachers have responsibility to help students to develop their creativity undoubtedly. In deed, nurturing creative students is mostly dependent on the teachers ultimately.In this research, teachers' views of creativity not only includes the teachers' views on creativity and the creativity related factors, but also includes the teachers' attitude to creative students. In addition, "related teaching actions" refers to creative teaching teachers show in class.Four studies were conducted in this research:Study 1: In this study, a questionnaire, which was designed to explore the conceptualization of creativity, was administered to 224 teachers. By open questionnaire survey, we understood the teachers' view on "What is creativity?";Study 2: By questionnaire survey, we investigated how the teachers' viewed the relationships between creativity and the factors that experts always mentioned in their creative researches, such as intelligence, prior knowledge, achievement, domain, personality, environment, and so on;Study 3: By comparing the words that reflect high/low creativity and the words representing students' characters that the teachers appreciated, we acquired the teachers' attitude to creative students.Study 4: The purpose of this study was to understand whether different views of creativity from teachers would correlate to the creative teaching they executed in class.Through the four studies, we got conclusions as following:1 .In general, the teachers' views of creativity were not good.(1)From the teachers' answers to "What is creativity?", we found most of the teachers only mentioned creative person, but the other three important parts ofcreativity--"creative process, creative product and creative environment" wereseldom mentioned. These findings indicated that teachers could not hold the meaning of creativity completely.(2)The results of study 2 indicated that although teachers had correct understanding to many factors related to creativity, they had some vague understanding about creative personality and the relationship between creativity and intelligence.(3) The results of study 3 revealed a significant negative correlation between the words reflecting high creativity and the words representing the students' characters that the teachers appreciated. The personalities of creative students did not conform to the characteristics preferred by most teachers. That is to say, in real teaching, high creative student who were fertile in curiosity, imagination and open mind were always unpopular for teachers. It revealed that teachers conflicted with the classroom behaviors demonstrated by creative students.2.From study 4, we found the correlation between teachers' views of creativity and their creative teaching. Teachers who had proper view of creativity would show more creative teaching in their class.The innovation and significance of this research is that: First, although the importance of facilitating creativity in educational settings has been recognized, little attention has been paid to teachers' views of creativity in China before. Our research initially explored this problem by questionnaire survey. It might shed useful light on the situation of the creative education. Second, there are a lot of research concerning about how to develop students' creativity, but little is known about the relationship between teachers' views of creativity and their creative teaching. In this research, we initially investigated the relationship between teachers' views of creativity and their creative teaching, which is not only a breach, but also throws a sprat to catch a whale for later researchers.