EFL Teacher Creativity and Cognition about Teaching Profession: A Survey Study

Creative teachers can provide opportunities for their students to develop to their greatest potential. The instructional decision and creativity that teachers use in their classes may be influenced by different cognitive and contextual factors. One of those cognitive factors which is hypothesized to be correlated with teacher’s creativity is their cognition or what they know, believe and think about teaching profession. The purpose of the study was to investigate the correlation between teachers’ creativity and their cognition about teaching profession among 135 male and female Iranian English language teachers who have been teaching English in different Iranian state schools and private language institutes in two cities of Karaj and Tehran. Their age ranged from 20-48 years. They ranged from 2 to 28 years in terms of their teaching experience. All of the participants had university education in different English-language related fields. The participants were required to fill out two questionnaires of EFL teachers’ cognition and creativity questionnaire. Having collected the data, the researcher employed the Pearson-product moment correlation and detected a moderate but significant correlation between the EFL teachers’ creativity and their cognition about their teaching profession. Also, the results of an ANOVA showed that the EFL teachers’ years of teaching, age, gender and university degree made no significant difference in their creativity and cognition about their teaching profession.