UKRAINIAN TEACHERS' BELIEFS ABOUT THE NATURE OF CREATIVITY

Creativity is one of the top skills in today’s flat and global society, so creativity development should be one of the priority goals of education. In formal education, the effectiveness of creativity development significantly depends on teachers' beliefs about creativity. This study surveyed 394 Ukrainian teachers to explore their beliefs about creativity. The findings revealed that creativity development is insufficiently integrated into Ukrainian teacher education, with over one-third of respondents reporting no mention of creativity during their pre-service training. Although Ukrainian teachers reported high creative self-efficacy and expressed generally positive attitudes toward creativity and its development, they also demonstrated common misconceptions, such as underestimating the importance of usefulness as a criterion for a creative product and exhibiting a certain degree of Art Bias. Teachers' perceptions of creativity are influenced by gender, teaching subject, and work experience. Male teachers demonstrate less positive attitudes towards the ideas of fostering creativity compared to their female counterparts. Teachers of primary education and humanities subjects exhibit a higher interest in developing creativity than those in other disciplines. Additionally, educators with greater teaching experience tend to be more skeptical about initiatives aimed at promoting creativity. Our study revealed that participating in creativity training programs positively influences teacher creative self-efficacy; however, they have little or no impact on creativity beliefs and sharing common misconceptions. This finding highlights the importance of assessing the effectiveness of existing and future creativity training programs in altering teachers' creativity beliefs. Furthermore, there is a critical need to develop valid and reliable measures of teachers' creativity beliefs to consistently evaluate changes over time and determine the efficacy of such training programs.