Creativity is never the result of one individual's action and mind alone; the social and cultural contexts in which he or she works are also critical elements. For teachers, teams that comprise a group of instructors working cooperatively play important roles in stimulating creativity. However, information on the entry and process levels of generating creativity in a teacher team is scarce. Drawing on data from video observations and interviews over eight months, six factors were identified, including high team diversity, adaptive team schedule, balanced team goal/complex team mental models, flexible leadership, limited team conflict, and positive team climate.
Introduction
Creative teaching is a process whereby teachers provide innovative curricula and teaching strategies according to their students’ needs, the characteristics of knowledge, and the teaching situations to achieve learning goals. This innovative approach to teaching and learning is core to prepare 21st-century learners to live and work in a challenging world (Schleicher, 2015). The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development further stated that collaboration and communication between teachers is a critical means to improve teachers’ professional development. Though the benefit of teachers’ teamwork has been demonstrated, information on how to generate innovative instructions through teacher team interactions is scarce. The system approach to creativity posits that creativity involves not only the individual's mental processes, but also the social and cultural contexts (Csikszentmihalyi, 2006). In this model, Csikszentmihalyi (2006) pointed out that creativity is inherently social and can be found when the following three elements interact: a field, an individual who produces a novel and appropriate change, and a domain of knowledge (i.e., the cultural context). Specifically, a field is a social group that often consists of individuals who possess domain knowledge. Sawyer defines the field as “a complex network of experts, with varying expertise, status, and power” (Sawyer, 2012). Furthermore, the field is also responsible for stimulating and filtering innovation. Applying this model to schools, a field would be the teacher team, consisting of teachers with varying domain knowledge. As a gatekeeper, the teacher team stimulates the teachers’ or team's creativity and makes decisions on what should or should not be included in the domain of education. Thus, we suggest that the field is especially critical for team creativity. This study specifically focused on the team, as reflecting the meaning of “field” in this context, and examined how a team generated team creativity.
In the past, most research explored the team creativity in work teams of firms (Hu, Erdogan, Jiang, Bauer & Liu, 2018; Mahmood, Uddin & Fan, 2019; Zhang, 2016); only a few studies have investigated the teaming process of teacher teams (Crow & Pounder, 2000; González & Deal, 2019). Work teams and teacher teams have distinct structures and processes. Work teams often have a hierarchical structure. In addition, work teams usually set the team goals for members, who must be committed to working together. In contrast, teacher teams are usually horizontal organizations with very few formal leader teachers. In teacher teams, members often voluntarily work together to learn, share, and analyze pedagogy and lesson content, and practice refinement would occur in each teacher's classroom. Furthermore, studies often adopted an in vitro approach to explore the process of generating team creativity (e.g., Santos, Uitdewilligen & Passos, 2015). As proposed by Dunbar (1997), the in vivo approach, which is related to qualitative research methods, could reveal complex cognitive mechanisms within a real-world context, and can be the foundation for further in vitro studies. Thus, we believe that it is necessary to adopt an in vivo approach to understand the creative team's properties, and its creativity-generating processes in an authentic context.
Several researchers have proposed frameworks to clarify the group phenomena. These frameworks commonly comprise three elements: team composition, their operating processes, and their output (Ellis & Fisher, 1994; National Research Council, 2015). Ellis and Fisher (1994) identified three levels in developing a team, including the entry level, the process level, and the outcome level. The entry level involves the conditions beneficial for constructing a team. There can be both individual aspects (e.g., team members’ personalities, skills, and attitudes) and organizational aspects, including intangible factors (e.g., team size or goal) and tangible factors (e.g., equipment or financial resources). The process level impacts teams through various activities involving such factors as leadership or communication. For instance, a good leader could facilitate productive interactions within a team. The outcome level is the team's product, which could be a new design or the team members’ interpersonal growth. The National Research Council (2015) identified three team components similar to Ellis and Fisher's (1994) three levels. These components were based on McGrath's (1964) input–process–output (I–P–O) approach: the factors that shape group processes (e.g., team members’ job-related knowledge), their interaction for achieving team goals (e.g., managing conflict and emotions within a team), and the types of outputs the processes produce (e.g., team cohesion).
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