Unlocking teacher creativity: how organizational support sparks innovative work behavior

Creative competence, defined as the knowledge, skills, and dispositions required both to act creatively and to cultivate creativity in learners, is increasingly framed as a core professional capability for teachers, yet initial teacher education rarely addresses it systematically. This brief research report examines whether a game-based instructional module embedded in a standard pedagogy course can strengthen pre-service teachers' creative competence. Using a quasi-experimental, nonequivalent-groups pre-test/post-test design, two intact cohorts of undergraduate pre-service teachers ( N = 118) completed either a 12-week game-based module (“Creative Pedagogy Lab”; n = 61) or a conventional seminar covering the same syllabus ( n = 57). Outcomes included creative self-efficacy and creative personal identity (Short Scale of Creative Self), teaching-for-creativity competence, divergent thinking (Alternative Uses Task), and blind consensual ratings of an authentic lesson-design product; reflective journals and focus groups captured participants’ experiences. Covariate-adjusted analyses showed significant advantages for the game-based condition in creative self-efficacy ( η p² = .10), teaching-for-creativity competence ( η p² = .12), originality of ideas ( η p² = .06), and rated creativity of lesson designs (d = 0.82). No significant effect emerged for ideational fluency, and the effect on creative personal identity was small and did not survive correction for multiple comparisons. Qualitative findings offer contextual insight into these patterns rather than independent evidence of causal mechanism: participants described the games as low-stakes “safe-fail” spaces that granted permission to experiment, while time pressure and coverage anxiety constrained engagement. The results provide preliminary evidence that game-based approaches can be integrated into professional preparation without displacing core content, and they point to organizational conditions—curricular space, facilitator development, and assessment alignment—needed to sustain such approaches in teacher-education organizations. As a single-institution study with a predominantly female, elementary-track sample, these findings are preliminary and may not generalize to other subject areas, institutions, or more gender-balanced cohorts.