How Middle School Teachers With Different Creative Personality Types Cope With the Challenges of Online Teaching: A Typological Approach

Teachers worldwide, including those in Taiwan, were compelled to transition from traditional classroom settings to online teaching because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This abrupt shift created numerous challenges. The ways in which individuals cope with such difficulties are closely related to their creative personality traits. Unlike conventional correlational analyses that examine relationships between specific dimensions, a typological approach emphasizes differences among distinct groups across particular variables. This study explored the perceived difficulties and coping strategies of middle school teachers in Taiwan with different creative personality types when adapting to online teaching. A typological approach was first employed to classify various creative personality traits. Subsequently, the problems that teachers encountered during the online teaching were examined across four dimensions, as well as the strategies they used to cope with these challenges in relation to their creative personality type. Through cluster analysis, nine creative personality traits were categorized into four types: extremely low, weakly low, weakly high, and extremely high. The findings indicated that teachers with extremely low and weakly low creative personality types were more likely to experience difficulties in classroom management and teacher–student interaction. These teachers tended to engage in peer communication or participate in professional development workshops to enhance their information technology skills. They also expressed a greater willingness to apply online teaching technologies in physical classrooms to foster students' motivation to learn. Conversely, teachers with weakly high and extremely high creative personality types were more proactive in implementing and refining their IT skills.