Toward Sustainable Creativity-Oriented Instruction: Prospective Teachers’ DT/CT Dynamics Across Critique–Design–Microteaching

Mathematical creativity is positioned as a key competency for sustainable development, yet its classroom enactment often remains episodic and teacher-dependent. This qualitative study examines how prospective teachers conceptualize and organize the dynamics between divergent thinking (DT) and convergent thinking (CT)—analyzed through continuity, complementarity, and interaction—across a semester-long course involving textbook critique, task design, and microteaching. Twenty-seven prospective teachers critiqued textbooks, transformed tasks, and enacted microteaching lessons on five middle-school topics. Data included recordings, lesson plans, transformed tasks, and reflection journals. During textbook critique, participants diagnosed an authoritative CT bias and emphasized inquiry/DT, but rarely articulated how DT should transition into CT for justification and generalization. In task design, inquiry and content goals were listed in parallel, yielding a role split between teacher and students and weak complementarity. In enactment, added CT prompts remained largely teacher-directed; DT episodes were more multi-authority, whereas CT episodes concentrated authority in the teacher, producing monotonous continuity and unrealized complementarity. Findings suggest teacher education should explicitly scaffold goal-bridging routines, DT–CT transition prompts, and mechanisms for distributing authority—contributing to ESD aims by enabling creativity-oriented instruction to operate continuously rather than episodically in everyday mathematics classrooms.