Abstract:

Evidence suggests that creativity is among the most important factors that influence learners‘ motivation. Creative learners need creative teachers. Rinkevich (2011, p. 220) highlights that “increasing creativity in teaching begins with teacher education.“ It is a necessity to introduce courses of creativity at teacher training programmes that would focus also on how to develop creative student and student-centred teaching rather than teacher-centered teaching.

Experiential learning, field training, teaching practice, and authentic tasks should be a regular part of all teacher-oriented study programmes. Teaching practice is often the first encounter of the teacher-to-be with formal education and can significantly influence the student’s decision to become or not to become a teacher. Having carefully selected supervising teachers they often come back to their universities with higher self-esteem and are motivated to continue in their studies. Whatmore, they claim it was very motivating they could and were challenged to use supplementary materials.

The article describes the EFL course on material creation and offers the results of the analyses of the CLIL materials prepared by pre-service teachers (n=34) and students’ experience with the use of such materials in authentic classes. The article presents both, quantitative and qualitative data. Quantitative data are based on the analysis of handouts created by the students where Taxonomy of creative design was applied. Qualitative data were collected using a semi-structured interview with the selected group of pre-service teachers (n=6) comprising structured and open questions. The aim of the interview was to identify and explore pre-service teachers’ experience with using teacher-prepared supplementary materials as learners and teachers.

Keywords:

Creativity, material development, pre-service teacher.