The Indirect Effect of Teachers’ Creative Mindsets on Teaching Creativity

Understanding how teachers’ implicit beliefs promote and inhibit students’ creativity has important implications for fostering creativity in the classroom. This study investigated whether the effect of teachers’ fixed creative mindset on their self‐efficacy for teaching creativity was mediated by their perceptions of students’ potential and the degree to which this indirect effect varied by level of growth creative mindset. A sample of educators (N = 119) completed an online survey containing questions regarding creative mindsets, perceptions of students’ potential, self‐efficacy for teaching creativity, and a set of relevant covariates. A moderated mediation analysis indicated that the more teachers believed creativity to be innate, the less teachers tended to perceive every student to possess creative potential. Consequently, teachers’ confidence in their ability to teach for creativity was diminished. Results from the corresponding tests of simple indirect effects indicated that this negative indirect effect of a fixed creative mindset was lessened by teachers’ growth creative mindset. Taken together, the findings suggest the likely significant role of teachers’ fixed and growth creative mindsets for fostering creativity in classroom.     

Reconstructing Christian Ethics: Exploring Constructivist Practices for Teaching Christian Ethics in the Masters of Divinity Curriculum

This article reflects on an effort to incorporate constructivist pedagogies (learner‐centered, inquiry‐guided, problem‐based models of teaching) into an introductory class on Christian Ethics in an M.Div. curriculum. Although some students preferred more traditional pedagogies, the majority found that constructivist pedagogies better accommodated different life experiences, diverse learning styles, and other features of the M.Div. curriculum. Further, a qualitative assessment of one student exercise indicates that constructivist pedagogies have benefits over traditional pedagogies. Specifically, students' work on a learning‐group research project displayed creativity, depth, and breadth not found in individual research papers. Nonetheless, lukewarm student feedback also demonstrated the need to consider wider factors when attempting such innovations.     

The Sexual Identity Timeline: A Reflection Tool for Developing Competence in Counseling

Greater attention to sexual identity development from an inclusive and affirmative perspective must be incorporated into counselor education training. Counselors are well positioned to address issues related to human sexuality; however, without reflection across the spectrum of sexuality-related issues, counselors may rely on personal bias, or they may choose to avoid the topic altogether. In order to adequately train counselors, it is important to identify learning activities that counselor educators can utilize. Given the significance of sexuality across the lifespan, we propose that counselor educators actively guide their students through reflection about their own sexual identity development. This article presents the Sexual Identity Timeline (SIT) as a reflective learning activity to incorporate into the counseling curriculum.     

创造力投资理论在教学计划修ys中的应用与思考

创造力投资理论把影响个体创造力的因素归为五个内部系统和一个外部系统的相互作用。它提示护理教育者为培养护理创新人才,在充分利用大学和社会优质资源的前提下,应制定有利于开发学生自主的学习能力、可持续发展的知识结构、多元化的思维方式、健康积极的个性品质和职业成就动机等个体创新资源的教学计划与实施方案。     

小学教师的创造力培养观与创造性教学行为的关系:教学监控能力的中介作用

用创造力培养观、教学监控能力和创造性教学行为问卷对430名小学教师进行调查,考察三者之间的关系,并着重对教学监控能力在其中的中介作用进行分析。结果表明:(1)创造力培养观、教学监控能力及其各个维度对创造性教学行为都有正向预测作用;(2)教学监控能力的计划准备性、控制调节性、评价反馈性、课后反省性及作为一个整体在创造力培养观与创造性教学行为之间均具有显著的中介效应。这一发现提示教师培训工作应重视教师教学监控能力的实际增长,这样才能使教师已经接受的创造教育理念落实到创造性教学行为上。     

Assessing the Relationship Between Youth Sport Participation Settings and Creativity in Adulthood

This article presents an assessment of the relative influences of time spent participating in organized sports and informal sports during childhood with respect to the development of general creativity. In this study, 99 upper-division undergraduate and graduate students completed a comprehensive childhood leisure activities questionnaire and the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults. According to the results of the joint generalized least-squares regression analysis, hours spent in organized sport settings was negatively related to creativity as an adult; time spent in unstructured sport settings was found to be positively related to adult creativity. The findings also point to the importance of balancing participation across organized and unstructured settings. The most creative individuals in the sample were those who spent roughly half of their sport participation time in each setting, as opposed to individuals with below-average creativity, who spent upwards of 3/4 of their sport participation time in organized settings. Therefore, fostering creative development through sport may not require a dramatic reorientation from current youth sport development models, but only a shift toward a more balanced distribution of time spent playing in both organized and unstructured settings. Future experiments are needed to test this relationship.     

Teaching Creative Writing Skills to Primary School Children in Hong Kong: Discordance Between the Views and Practices of Language Teachers

Although creativity has been valued in ancient and contemporary Chinese literature, the degree to which creativity is valued and incorporated into teaching by Chinese language teachers is not known. This information is important given that creativity has been increasingly recognized in the education literature as a component of effective writing. The purpose of this study was to compare the views of Chinese language teachers in Hong Kong about creativity and the acquisition of creative writing skills by primary school children, and their teaching practices. A total of 449 Chinese language teachers, employed at primary schools throughout Hong Kong completed a survey questionnaire. The 14‐item questionnaire focused on teachers' views of creativity, their perceptions of how to develop students' creativity, their awareness of creative writing strategies, and teaching practices related to creative writing. With respect to the definition of creativity, teachers identified imagination foremost, followed by inspiration, and original ideas. Teachers identified developing students' confidence, and providing an open atmosphere as essential means of fostering creativity. Despite the apparent value of creativity expressed by the teachers and their familiarity with methods for enhancing creativity, the majority reported using traditional methods of teaching writing. Strategies are recommended for reconciling this discrepancy, and promoting creative writing skills by primary school teachers in Hong Kong and other Chinese speaking societies.     

Creativity inside out from theory to practice

Abstract:

A theoretical rationale is presented for a creativity program. This program targets the creativity of teachers, capitalizes on the intrinsic motivation of both teachers and students, includes elements of playfulness and fun, and utilizes multiple intelligences. It consists of a three volume spiral curriculum for kindergarten through the 8th Grade. This curriculum elevates creativity studies to a central position for organizing and demonstrating knowledge across the curriculum. Creativity is defined as self‐expression inherent in all children, predicated upon their ability to access and express a unique personal and cultural vantage point. Pilot work conducted in Lawndale, California, is also detailed. This included an intensive teacher in‐service training, with questionnaires about the program administered at the middle and end of the training. Results support the integration of creativity studies into the basic elementary school curriculum.     

Curriculum Making as the Enactment of Dwelling in Places

This article uses an account of dwelling to interrogate the concept of curriculum making. Tim Ingold??s use of dwelling to understand culture is productive here because of his implicit and explicit interest in intergenerational learning. His account of dwelling rests on a foundational ontological claim??that mental construction and representation are not the basis upon which we live in the world??which is very challenging for the kinds of curriculum making with which many educators are now familiar. It undermines assumptions of propositional knowledge and of the use of mental schemas to communicate and share. At the level of critique, then, dwelling destabilizes contemporary ideas of curriculum as textual, pre-specified content for transmission or pre-defined objectives or standardized activity. The positive claims of dwelling are equally challenging, for these are that the world is a domain of relational entanglement in which an organism can be no more than a point of growth for an emergent ??environment??, and meaning only inheres in these relations. The paper articulates how differentiation (of learner, salient meanings, knowledge, skill and place) are possible in such an ontology, and how curriculum making can be understood from this perspective as being the remaking of relationships between these.     

Indexing Creativity Fostering Teacher Behavior: A Preliminary Validation Study

Research on teachers' creativity fostering behavior has been much neglected in spite of the important role teachers play in developing student creativity. One possible reason for this is the lack of a suitable measure of teachers' creativity fostering behavior. A 45‐item self‐rating scale based on nine creativity fostering behaviors identified by Cropley (1997) was developed and validated with self‐describing adjectives checklist. Analysis shows adequate construct and concurrent validities. Specific teachers' creativity fostering behaviors were found to correlate with sex and ethnicity. Further work is suggested.     

A Psychological Education Curriculum for Immigrant Adolescents

This article describes a psychological education curriculum, “Cross-Cultural Experiences,” directed to immigrant adolescents. It was taught as one part of a doctoral research study that looked into immigrants' ego development, moral reasoning, and identity. The major underlying assumption was that the immigrant adolescents were no different from their American-born contemporaries in these developmental processes. It was hypothesized that the experimental curriculum would stimulate their psychological development. This article discusses implications of the findings for counselors, educators, and social scientists.     

教师的创造力内隐理论

创造力内隐理论是指一般公众（专家和外行人）在日常生活和工作背景下所形成的,且以某种形式存在于个体头脑中的关于创造力概念、结构及其发展的看法。教师的创造力内隐理论对学生创造力的培养和发展起着至关重要的作用。本文从教师对创造力的理解、创造性学生的态度和创造力培养观三个方面对该领域的研究进行综述,以期为我国开展此领域的研究提供一些借鉴。     

The Inclusion Inventory

Abstract

While several studies have investigated the effects of inclusive education on children receiving special education services, less effort has been directed toward assessing implementation of inclusive educational practices. This article describes development of the Inclusion Inventory, a 90-item tool designed to survey educators' perceptions of inclusive educational practices in their school. Administration of the Inventory to 2,763 respondents from 72 schools across a large southwestern state yielded internal consistency reliability coefficients of .72 and above for the seven subscales. Respondents with experience in inclusive educational practices and those from schools where teams implement inclusive education tended to have higher ratings on the Inclusion Inventory. Implications are considered for educators and others involved in inclusive education.     

Creativity and Cooperation in the Elementary Music Classroom*

The author examines attitudes towards, and the effects of focus on, creativity and cooperation in the elementary music classroom. First, elementary music teachers were interviewed regarding their values towards creativity and cooperation. Then, a curriculum was field tested that utilized cooperative learning and emphasized activities designed to encourage creative thinking and problem solving. A pretreatment-posttreatment study, with experimental and control group, was conducted to measure actual changes in student levels of creativity and attitudes towards cooperation. A follow-up of creativity measures was conducted four years later. Results indicate that elementary music teachers can adapt cooperative learning models to their teaching and can, short-term, influence students' levels of creativity and attitudes towards cooperation. Implications and opportunities for social-psychological creativity research and classroom educators are discussed. In 1983, Goodlad observed that, in general, there was a “gap between the rhetoric of individual flexibility, originality, and creativity … and the cultivation of these [things] in our schools” (p. 241) and that schools provided students with little opportunity to develop “satisfying relations with others based on respect, trust, cooperation, and caring” (p. 240). Goodlad encouraged teachers in the arts to provide opportunities for creative problem solving and to “boldly demonstrate the potentiality for doing through the arts what cannot be done readily through the other fields” (p. 238). His appeal to arts teachers is reminiscent of Maslow (1968):     

Developing a Peace and Conflict Resolution Curriculum for Quaker Secondary Schools in Kenya

In 2008–2009, a team of educators from George Fox University, in collaboration with a committee of teachers and administrators from selected Quaker secondary schools in western Kenya, developed the first draft of a peace and conflict resolution curriculum for Kenyan form one (ninth grade) students. This case study offers a model for developing a peace curriculum relevant to the identified needs of form one students in Kenya, supported by adult learning strategies for teacher training. In addition, the development of this curriculum project serves as an example of effective collaborative cross-cultural partnerships. The outcomes of this project offer specific insights gained from this collaborative effort.     

Psycholinguistics and education: Directions and divergences

The development of reading, foreign language competence, rhetorical and communicative skills, and symbolic thought processes differs from pure psycholinguistic research as horticulture differs from botany. Correspondences between educational psycholinguistics and pure psycholinguistics lie in how each views the learner on a continuum that ranges from docile to autonomous. Language can be characterized as arbitrary or derived from possible universal symbolizing processes, and curriculum in general can be characterized on a continuum ranging from opaque to emergent. Language acquisition can be viewed as the product of intentional socialization or an outgrowth of natural processes, and educators may be said to range from instructive to eductive in their approach to methods. The divergences between education and psycholinguistics in respect to their philosophical analysis of their research strategies and their views about individual variation and central tendencies seem to presage mutually supportive research programs.     

Contemporary Studies on the Concept of Creativity: the East and the West

This article reviews contemporary studies on the concept of creativity across two cultures—Eastern (Asian) cultures and Western (American and European) cultures — by examining two bodies of literature. One is on people's implicit theories of creativity across different cultures and the other is on cross‐cultural studies of creativity. Studies on implicit theories of creativity in the East suggest that many Asians have similar but not identical conceptions of creativity to many people in the West. Cross‐cultural studies of creativity reveal that Easterners and Westerners differ, on average, in their divergent‐thinking performance and creative expressions. A view of creativity as relatively culture‐specific is presented and the appropriateness of using divergent‐thinking tests to measure creativity is discussed.     

Fostering Creativity in Philosophy

The American Philosophical Association suggests that studying philosophy can have an important impact on one's creative thinking ability. This paper abstracts from the empirical research on creativity a reasonable model of creative thinking, and discusses what the account implies about fostering creative thinking in philosophy courses. Given the empirical research on creativity and the nature of philosophy, studying philosophy can have an important impact on one's creative thinking ability, but faculty need to focus on it in their courses.     

Differences between Art and Design Education—or Differences in Conceptions of Creativity?

The principles and techniques of design education have begun to influence art education in the United States, but their effect so far has been modest, primarily because of a gaping divide in beliefs about creativity and how to stimulate it. With K–12 art education on the chopping block of a culture awash with budget cuts and testing fever, this is a particularly a significant time to examine these disparate conceptions. The argument here is that the division that exists today between pre‐K–12 art education and design education in the United States is not justified and ignores historical perspective. After describing and comparing the two approaches, we examine how conceptions of creativity in the visual arts may have led to this artificial separation of similar disciplines. Because educators in many countries grapple with defining and implementing creative art education curricula, this article will consider international perspectives that offer insights for American art educators.