Planning creative tasks in Croatian language teaching as part of a creative teacher’s portrait

Аннотация

In recent years, much attention has been given to creativity as a value and its promotion as a key indicator of not only successful teaching and learning, but also of personal fulfillment and progress. It is a quality based on the teacher’s knowledge and lesson-planning and it is aimed at achieving fundamental learning outcomes. The purpose of this paper is first to present the portrait of a creative teacher (their main characteristics), then creative teaching and school context, and finally to investigate whether Croatian language teachers plan creative language tasks that encourage challenge, personality, intrigue, fantasy, individual choice and original thought. The research material consisted of 30 written preparations for a Croatian language lesson collected via e-mail during 2020 and 2021. The results showed that the teachers do plan creative tasks, but not enough of them. It was also visible that the analysed written preparations for the Croatian language lesson mostly contain creative tasks which encourage original thought and that in designing these tasks teachers pay great attention to the students’ personal response, connecting new information with prior knowledge, as well as promoting cooperation and social competence.