Creativity and Problem Solving with Early Childhood Future Teachers

Abstract

This chapter explores the ideas of future preschool teachers relating to arithmetic problem-solving school activities, in the Spanish Educational Formation Program, focusing on creativity issues. The results of some professional tasks were discussed in order to identify initial content knowledge, noticing the perspective of creativity traits observed by future teachers when they analyse early childhood arithmetic problem-solving situations for the first time. Future teachers spontaneously identify some traditional problem-solving strategies and increase their observational perspective about what can be an interpretation of children’s behaviour, when some theoretical and methodological tools of analysis are incorporated. After group discussions, more future teachers talk about some traits of creativity. The main result relates the role of counting strategies and the stability of the use of representations and visualization processes needed to solve the problems.