Teacher Views on The Providing Creative Thinking to Students

In the changing world, important developments are taking place in many areas, especially in education. In order to keep up with the changes, it is necessary to acquire and apply 21st century skills in order to understand, adopt and use developments effectively. 21st century skills are the abilities necessary for individuals to be successful in a global world. These skills are "learning and innovation skills", "information, media and technology skills" and "life and career skills". The learning and innovation skills category consists of "creative thinking", "critical thinking", "problem solving", "communication" and "collaboration" skills. Creative thinking, one of the learning and innovation skills, is a skill that is rarely mentioned in daily life but enables individuals to use their potential effectively. Creative thinking, which is becoming increasingly important in today's world, can also be defined as a flexible and innovative thinking process to generate new ideas and solutions. The aim of this study is to reveal the views of teachers about the "creative thinking" skill, which is one of the 21st century learning and innovation skills, and the practices they make students acquire this skill, the problems they face and the solutions to these problems. The study group of the research consists of 10 teachers working at different levels of education in Aydın province in the 2022-2023 academic year. The participants were asked the questions in the semi-structured "creative thinking interview form" prepared by the researchers and the data obtained were analyzed by content analysis. According to the findings of the study, the participants (i) stated that creative thinking is important, (ii) preferred brainstorming, mind mapping, collaborative and problem-based learning activities in teaching creative thinking to students, and (iii) were concerned about student and parent apathy, lack of self-confidence and motivation in teaching creative thinking to students (iv). In order to overcome the difficulties encountered in the process of teaching creative thinking to students, teachers try to solve these problems by implementing practices aimed at giving students a positive attitude towards creative thinking and increasing their self-confidence and trying to organize learning environments in a way to encourage creativity.