Growing and fixing: Comparing the creative mindsets of teachers and artist practitioners

Research indicates that teachers holding fixed creative mindsets limits the potential for students to develop creative thinking skills due to judgments teachers make about their students' creative potentials (Paek and Sumners 2017). Set against the context of the importance of creativity for economic development (OECD, 2022) and personal wellbeing (Carson, 2019; Forgeard, 2019), this paper explores UK primary school teachers' creative mindsets by comparing them with the creative mindsets of Artist Practitioners. A two-phase explanatory sequential mixed methods research design is used. In Phase 1, 50 participants completed the Creative Mindset Scales (Karwowski 2014) to explore the creative mindsets held by the two groups; in Phase 2, 6 participants (3 from each group) undertook semi structured interviews to help explain trends from Phase 1. An integrative analysis found that primary teachers held more polarised beliefs of fixed and growth creative mindsets than Artist Practitioners. We hypothesise that this is due generic growth mindsets being mandated in UK primary schools and being adopted without deeper understanding by primary school teachers. In order to facilitate students developing creative thinking skills, the paper recommends that teacher-centred professional development is needed to develop whole school communities of creative practice where conceptualisations of creativity are actively explored.