Teachers’ thinking styles and creativity fostering behaviours

Abstract

R. Sternberg (1997) posits the basic thinking styles, namely, the executive style, the legislative style, and the judicial styles. Each of these styles describes a tendency for a person to think in one way more than the other that predisposes the person to be more suited for one kind of thinking task than the others. Sternberg’s scales for the three styles were completed by a group of 144 teachers who also responded to the Flexibility, Opportunities, and Independence sub-scales of the Creativity Fostering Teacher Behaviour Index (Soh, 2000). Correlations among the measures that can be meaningfully interpreted were found. The study also compares the normative and ipsative scoring of the thinking styles responses. Implications are discussed.