Primary teachers’ creativity in art lessons

The master's thesis explores artistic creativity of teachers in the first cycle of primary school. Its goal was to determine the impact of teachers and their artistic creativity on the creations of their pupils. It also searched for a connection between their artistic self-esteem and the results of the creativity test, and explored the link between the characteristics of a creatively planned lesson, the lesson plan and the final creations made by pupils. The theoretical part focuses on defining and measuring creativity and looks into creativity in primary school. Creative development at school mainly depends on a creative teacher. Furthermore, the thesis contains guidelines promoting creativity in class that can help teachers improve the quality of the lessons and stimulate creativity in their pupils. The empirical part of the master's thesis consists of three parts and involves a case study on eight teachers in the first cycle of primary school. The teachers first completed an artistic creativity test and then lead a lesson with an artistic task called "painting a motif by mixing colours". They were asked to prepare a lesson plan that was analysed in line with pre-defined criteria. The creations of the pupils were also analysed according to a grading scale. In the final part the teachers filled in an assessment scale that was used to assess their self-esteem in teaching art. The results pointed to certain teachers and their impact on pupils. The connection between the artistic creativity test and final creations is very strong (0.84) Therefore it can be concluded that pupils guided by more creative teachers create more original pieces and vice versa. The artistic creativity test and the artistic self-esteem of a teacher are negatively correlated, which is also the case in the connection between the lesson plan and pupils' artistic creations