teachers’ emotional intelligence, creativity, and reflection as predictors of teaching persian to non-persian speakers

Creativity is one of the key factors that affect not only the teachers’ performance, but also the students’ performance and their motivation in a persian language classroom. creativity is “as much a decision about and an attitude toward life as it is a matter of ability” (sternberg, 2006, p.93). the operational definition of teacher creativity can be its manifestation in reality. in spite of the fact that creativity is of high criticalness in today’s world, the word is not unmistakably characterized (moran, 2010). creative teachers can approach problems in different ways and act more appropriately and effectively. in recent years, teachers’ creativity has attracted the attention of various researchers and scholars, meanwhile, many arguing that teacher creativity plays an important role in performance and job satisfaction. therefore, among various factors that influence the creativity of persian language teachers, emotional intelligence and reflection are considered as the most important ones. the present study seeks the relationship between emotional intelligence, reflection, and creativity in persian language teachers. to this end, 15 persian language teachers completed reflection (akbari et al., 2010), emotional intelligence (bar-on, 1997), and teacher creativity (soh, 2000) questionnaires. for data analysis, two pearson product-moment correlation coefficients and two multiple regressions were calculated. the results showed that there were significant positive relationships between teachers’ creativity and their emotional intelligence and teachers’ reflection and creativity. the findings of the present study, also, revealed that applying special strategies to improve teachers’ creativity can be result in gaining better performance.