1. Introduction

Just as 'innovate or die' has become one of the mantras of today's economy, innovation in education is increasingly recognized as fundamental to equip new generations of students for the changing society. Educating for student creativity and innovation has become an indispensable task of educational institutions (Kilicer, 2009). And teachers’ innovative teaching is a main source to nurture students’ innovation. But in many cases, educational innovations produced unsatisfactory results. Changes in teaching practices are extremely difficult to accomplish (Sharan et al. 1999). Some research points out that many teachers are lack of competencies for innovative teaching in general (Lin et al. 2009). More importantly, there seems to be no consistent views about what are the key competencies of innovative teaching of teachers. Although some previous studies have examined the features or qualities of innovative teachers (Rogers, 1995; Ha and Stoel, 2004; Sahin and Thompson, 2006; Jin, 2008; Chen ,2002; Zhang, 2000), there is a lack of research in this area, and both theoretical and empirical base is not sufficiently developed to be able to define the core competencies of innovative teaching from the views of teachers.  

1.1.Theoretical background

Competency is generally defined as the level of integration of knowledge, skills, and attitudes (Stoof, Martens, & Van Merrienboer & Bastiaens, 2002; Tigelaar et al., 2004). Previous research describes some features and qualities of innovative teachers, such as forward thinking, the ability to improve student interest and inspire student innovative thinking by using diverse, innovative teaching skills in teaching, the ability to change the their teaching methods based on individual differences of students, the ability to use multiple evaluation methods and the ability to utilize multimedia and life materials to enrich teaching content (Uzkurt, 2008; Rogers, 1995; Chen, 2002).

1.2. Research problems

The basic research question of this research is: what are the core competencies for innovative teaching as perceived by secondary school teachers? Based on the theoretical base, we hypothesize that innovative teachers represent some common competencies that lead to innovative teaching. Building on qualitative research methods this research aims to explore which competencies are critical for innovative teaching of secondary school teachers. We also aim to estimate the weight indexes of each competency that contributes to the overall core innovative teaching competencies. 

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