Good teaching is creative teaching, yet there is little research focusing on creative teachers themselves. In this article we report a synthesis of 13 qualitative case studies and 2 quantitative studies of teachers who demonstrated everyday or local creativity in their work. Themes and categories were identified through constant comparison and interrelationships among themes were explored. Four themes are described: personal characteristics, community, process, and outcomes. Teachers' creative processes emerged from the interaction between their personal characteristics, including personal intelligences, motivation, values and the communities in which they worked and lived. These processes resulted in a wide variety of outcomes. The findings suggest that cooperation between teachers and administrators is essential for teachers to succeed in creating positive change.

Effective teachers are often creative ones, yet an examination of creative teaching is largely invisible in the North American creativity literature. Even within education there is little about teachers' own creative practice. Nonetheless, there are benefits to studying creative teachers: in education it can explicate ways of enhancing teachers' creativity and enriching praxis; and in psychology it can extend our understanding of social and interpersonal creativity, as well as everyday creativity. This paper reviews 12 Canadian case studies of creative teaching conducted by a creative teaching research group. An in-depth elaboration of two themes, creative person and community, is presented.