Teacher training: The relevance of creativity in school

Abstract

Some social and educational dissatisfaction occurs when the school focuses almost exclusively on the development of the convergent thinking of the students, forgetting the creativity in a divergent and contextual sense. In this debate there is always some tension that occurs under the difficulties of the experts to reach consensus on a definition of creativity, and then to point out guidelines for their evaluation and training. The controversy that surrounds the evaluation of the construct of creativity has justified the search for alternatives, by some authors, to the similar tests of Torrance, in the fluidity, flexibility, originality and elaboration, resorting to stimuli essentially unfamiliar to the individuals (Lubbart, Besançon, and Barbot, 2011). It is assumed a theory of evaluation of the creative potential of the students of basic education, based on verbal and graphic subtests that evaluate the main forms of creative cognition: - Divergent exploratory and convergent integrative thinking. Assuming that creativity is a phenomenon that involves higher levels of consciousness and complexity (Cabrera, 2009); considering the work of Sternberg and Lubart as a theoretical foundation and arguing the results of Costa-Lobo, Coimbra and Almeida (2017), are addressed and epistemologically based didactic options for the pedagogical training of teachers and for the organization of curricular and extracurricular activities of the school, in order to develop creativity in educational contexts.