Fostering student creativity through teacher behaviors

•Three approaches to foster student creativity are social modelling, reinforcement, and classroom ecology.•Classroom ecology is an important and more practical approach to foster student creativity.•The Creativity Fostering Teacher Behavior Scale (CFTIndex) is a widely used self-assessment for teachers.

Fostering student creativity has become an added responsibility of classroom teachers. Teachers therefore need to be aware of possible ways to foster student creativity. Student creativity can be enhanced through social modelling, reinforcement, and classroom ecology. It is argued that teachers' own teaching behaviors play a critical role in fostering student creativity and the CFTIndex serves both as an instructional and measurement tool of creativity fostering in the classroom context.Advancement of research depends on the availability of relevant measurement instrument. The Creativity Fostering Teacher Behavior Scale (CFTIndex) was designed to meet the need of researchers working in this specific area of creativity. Since it first appearance in 2000, it has been used extensively over the world and translated into several languages. This article summarized the studies and discusses its further development.