Creative teaching, which involves creating innovative lessons, games, materials, and assignments to challenge students, can be stimulated in teacher education students by stirring up their thinking and encouraging them to explore different paths. Two thematic concepts which underlie creative teaching are "reflective teaching" which attempts to guide the development of thinking professionals who continually reflect upon their teaching, and "lateral thinking" which advocates moving from side to side when dealing with any problem and digging new holes rather than digging deeper and deeper into the same hole. Both theories may be used by teaching methods classes to engender professionals who are reflexive and flexible. Two techniques which have proved effective in methods classes are: (1) to pass out a collection of "junk mail" to teacher education students and ask them to build a lesson concept from it, and (2) to use word games which require students to develop creative definitions for a list of words. (A copy of the word game "Pun Fun" which includes a scoring guide to evaluate creativity is attached.) (NH)