How Collaborative Creative Thinking Emerges Through Dialogic Reading in a Preschool Classroom

This study examines how young children demonstrate collaborative creative thinking during dialogic reading in early childhood education settings. Although dialogic reading has been widely studied in relation to language and literacy development, its potential to support collaborative creative thinking remains underexplored. Grounded in sociocultural perspectives that view creativity as a socially situated and co-constructed process, the study focuses on how creative thinking emerges through peer interaction and shared meaning-making. The research was conducted in a public preschool classroom in Istanbul, Türkiye, with 16 children aged 52–72 months, using a qualitative single-case study design. Over five weeks, dialogic reading sessions were carried out using picturebooks selected for their potential to support imaginative engagement. Thematic analysis of approximately 180 minutes of classroom interaction identified five recurring patterns of collaborative creative thinking: responsive elaboration, dialogic flexibility, distributed fluency, transformative thinking, and narrative reasoning. The findings show that creative thinking is expressed individually and emerges through interaction, as children build on, reinterpret, and transform one another’s ideas within shared storytelling. These patterns highlight dialogic reading as a context in which collaborative creativity becomes visible in classroom practice and contribute to understandings of socially situated creativity in early childhood education.