A Study on Developing the Teacher Education Program to Support Young Children's Creative Play using Creativity Techniques

Abstract

The study was aimed to develop the teacher education program to support young children’s creative play using creativity techniques and examine the effectiveness. The program was developed to help teachers to promote knowledge, skills, and attitudes related to creative play support. To verify the effectiveness of the program, 70 child-care teachers were included for the study and 35 teachers of the experimental group participated in the program for 9 weeks. The results of the study were as follows. First, it was found to be effective in factors of flexibility, originality, imagination, and openness, which are sub-factors of teacher creativity. Second, the program has been shown to be effective in teachers' creative teaching efficacy in the experimental group. Third, the program has been shown to be effective in the play teaching efficacy. The experimental group's post-scores showed significant improvement over pre-scores in the belief in play teaching efficacy and expectations for play teaching efficacy, which are sub-factors of the play teaching efficacy. Therefore, teacher education for promoting creativity is needed for supporting children’s creative play.