A Mentoring Approach for Developing Creativity in Teaching

Abstract

Creativity has been flagged as an essential 21st century skill. The move in the 21st century teaching and learning environment, is the development of skills supporting the creation of knowledge and innovation. As a result, creativity in education has become an international concern that has led to a greater emphasis of promoting and rewarding creativity of teachers. Teaching through creative practices ensures that classroom approaches are interesting and thus, is a more efficient way of fostering learning and personal growth. However, the key question to raise is therefore how to ensure successful creative teaching takes place in the classroom. Here, we discuss the development and use of a mentoring tool that may be used to nurture English language teacher creativity. The paper also makes a critical differentiation between teaching creatively and teaching for creativity. The mentoring tool serves as a training framework for teachers and covers key professional development areas as instructional planning, observations and discussions aimed at systematising teachers’ efforts and procedural knowledge in creativity. Through a careful and extensive review of literature and theorising, this paper reconciles the fundamental elements of creativity and collaborative mentoring to develop a framework to enhance teachers’ creative practices.