Professional Development Programs

Design Thinking for Educators

Audience: Classroom Teachers and Education Leaders

In this workshop, educators will use design thinking principles to address an instructional problem impacting their learning environment. Participants will learn about creativity from a design-based perspective, focusing on how this approach can increase teacher agency and generate outcomes for impact, equity, and long-term professional growth.

As a result of this interactive experience, educators will:

• Learn and apply the core principles of design thinking to their classroom environment.
• Identify or develop a technological solution to address an instructional problem impacting a group of students in the classroom.
• Learn to use their classroom knowledge to assist divergent and convergent thinking.
• Create a framework to prototype, test, and evaluate their idea.

For more details please contact us at hello@creativityandeducation.com or use the form below.

Understand Creativity

Audience: All

People often use the word “creativity;” however, they do not know what it means.  In this interactive workshop, we will break through the myths of creativity, explore your views, and discuss how they fit into a framework of creativity as a multi-faceted phenomenon. Finally, we will show you why creativity is an essential life skill.

In this session, you will:

• Understand creativity as a multi-faceted phenomenon
• Create your definition of creativity
• Explore the reasons why creativity is essential in your life, with your children/students, and in your home/classroom
• Outline the next steps needed to bring creativity into your world

For more details please contact us at hello@creativityandeducation.com or use the form below.

Embody Creativity

Audience: All

With all of the benefits derived from living a more creative life, why not begin enhancing your creative abilities now?

Choose your own creative adventure here! This workshop is designed for YOU! We believe if you want your children and students to be more creative, you must begin by modeling the way.  This workshop will explore your creative strengths and opportunities for growth through a series of interactive exercises.

In this session, you will:

• Uncover your creative strengths and areas of opportunity
• Explore what has helped and hindered you in the past
• Design a plan to continue developing your creative strengths

For more details please contact us at hello@creativityandeducation.com or use the form below.

Integrating Creativity

Audience: All

Teachers and parents frequently approach us eager and excited to bring creativity into their classrooms and homes, but they often have two pressing questions.

1. How do I actually do it?
2. How do I do it when I am already pressed for time?

Fortunately, we have numerous ideas and strategies to help you weave creative thinking into the classroom and home without adding  more hours to  the school day!  And even better, you are likely implementing  some of these in your classroom.

As a result of this interactive workshop, you will:

• Explore a creative thinking skill set to use in your classroom or home
• Work with your own content to integrate creativity into your classroom or home
• Walk away with simple strategies you can employ immediately in your classroom or home.

For more details please contact us at hello@creativityandeducation.com or use the form below.

Support an Environment for Creativity

Audience: All

Have you heard someone exclaim, :

“That won’t work!”

“I don’t like that!”

“We don’t have the money for that!”

Unfortunately, people are often quick to judge new ideas, which doesn’t create a positive environment for creativity.

In this interactive workshop, we will identify the environments that have cultivated  your creativity.  We will explore the dimensions of the creative environment and create a plan of how to integrate this into your home or classroom. As a result of this workshop, you will:

• Understand the dimensions of a creative environment
• Design your creative environment
• Develop a plan to execute a creative environment.

For more details please contact us at hello@creativityandeducation.com or use the form below.

Teaching Creative Problem Solving

Audience: Educators

How do you design a Creative Problem Solving course??

This interactive workshop will provide you with a simple framework to introduce Creative Problem Solving to your students.  We will explore different divergent and convergent thinking tools and strategies and provide you with resources that will help you integrate these tools into your classroom.

As a result of this interactive workshop, participants will:

• Become familiar with the Creative Problem Solving Framework
• Understand the importance of divergent and convergent thinking
• Learn how to use creative thinking tools
• Leave with many options for including these tools in their lesson plans.

For more details please contact us at hello@creativityandeducation.com or use the form below.

Finding Balance

Audience: All

Do you recall a time when you felt pulled in two different directions? Perhaps you felt compelled to choose between family and friends, work and home, or between personal time or social time. The dilemma you experienced is created by polarities and arises when we have to choose between two equally important options but cannot co-exist. To complicate matters further, ignoring one polarity to pursue the other can only result in significant detriment to your well-being over the long term.

Polarity Thinking is a method that teaches us to find balance and navigate the polarities we cannot escape in our lives. By recognizing these polarities and learning to map them out and chart your course to find the right balance, you will find yourself on the path to a more mindful and satisfying life.

In this workshop, we shall use the polarity thinking approach to understand, map, and navigate the polarities that are currently hijacking our lives.

This workshop will be interactive, and you will have an opportunity to work in small groups on your polarity challenges. Some of the personal polarities that we will work with will include:

• Activity and Rest
• Care for Self and Care for Others
• Stability and Change
• Work and Home
• Planned and Spontaneous
• Individual and Community
• Access and Boundaries
• Candor and Diplomacy
• Tough Love and Gentle Love

Participants will be encouraged to work on building maps and a plan for action that they would like to implement as soon as possible.

For more details please contact us at hello@creativityandeducation.com or use the form below.

Raising Adults: Workshop Series

Audience: Parents

Parenting is a journey that is equal parts joy and frustration.  While it can sometimes feel like an uphill struggle, it is possible to tip the balance and make small changes that can create hope and success. For example, one small change requires reframing the objective of parenting from raising children to “Raising Adults.” The modules in this series are designed to introduce simple tools and a framework for “Raising Adults” which is based on more than 30 years of personal research and experience, confirming that even though one size does not fit all in parenting – it is possible for parents to take charge and creatively craft the solutions that work for them.

Workshop One: How do you measure success or progress without a goal? Do you even know that you are lost if you never had a destination in mind? This session offers tools that help with visioning and goal setting within the context of parenting.

Workshop Two: Wouldn’t it be great if someone would hand us a “How to” parenting manual written specifically for our family? While this module cannot provide that manual – it will introduce a flexible and adaptable framework that any parent can use to create their own plan for reaching their parenting goals.

Workshop Three:  Learning from our experiences is the best way to develop and hone our parenting skills. This session is dedicated to learning from our experiences and highlighting the importance of recording, debriefing, and celebrating the experience regardless of whether the outcomes were successful or not.

Workshop Four: Sometimes parenting seems to be a series of challenges and more often than not we find ourselves struggling with the same set of problems repeatedly. Wouldn’t it be great if we could find a solution that actually eliminates the problem? This session will introduce a simple 4-step process for assessing the challenge, generating options, crafting solutions and taking action.

Workshop Five: Life and parenting often require us to make difficult choices. For example, we may struggle with balancing work and family, rest and activity, caring for self and caring for others. Parenting also presents us with polarities such as freedom and control or tough love and gentle love.  Finding and maintaining the right balance is easier when we recognize and learn to navigate the polarities in our lives. This session will introduce the essential skills of polarity thinking and mapping.

For more details please contact us at hello@creativityandeducation.com or use the form below.

Finding Joy

Audience: All

As a parent or educator, have you ever felt like you were facing an uphill battle alone perhaps being pulled in many different directions? Did you have to choose between family and friends, work and home, or between time for yourself and time for others? The dilemma you experienced is shared by many people, and we each have stories to share. These stories open the doorway to learning from past experiences. Fortunately, we can mine our stories for wisdom and insight by deconstructing and learning from them.

In this workshop, we will share and learn from each other’s past experiences. We will study what works and apply the principles of Appreciative Inquiry to discover ways  to address the following challenge: How might we find joy in our lives as we navigate these uncertain times?

This workshop will be interactive, and you will have an opportunity to work in small groups to share your stories and design new strategies built on past successes.

For more details please contact us at creativityandeducation@gmail.com or use the form below.

Making Better Decisions

Audience: All

Have you struggled with  decision-making? Weighed the pros and cons of a decision  and still felt uncertain about your final choice? If you worry about missed opportunities or find yourself second-guessing your decisions –  you are not alone! We all struggle with making decisions.

In this workshop, we will provide you with  a step-by-step process that will help you think through your options deliberately and effectively. You will walk away with a “yes” or “no” decision, leaving you feeling comfortable and confident. This interactive workshop will:

• Take you through a decision-making process that is comprehensive, but not onerous.
• Help you consider how to adapt and refine your options to make them work for you.
• Provide you with a tool that will help you evolve and make better choices in the future.

For more details please contact us at hello@creativityandeducation.com or use the form below.

Going Beyond: Creativity in Education

This 10-week asynchronous online course is a resource for educators who wish to weave creativity into education. It introduces the five pathways from the Creativity and Education Star framework:

• Understanding Creativity
• Embodying Creativity
• Supporting Creativity
• Integrating Creativity
• Teaching Creativity

The course is designed to serve as a stand-alone or as part of a more comprehensive course, which includes a face-to-face training following the completion of this online course.

The lesson activities are based on best practices for creative approaches to education and are designed to engage and spark curiosity and learning. The objective of this course is to present opportunities for educators to embrace new ways of thinking about creativity, their creative leadership, and ways to ignite creativity in their classrooms. This course also serves to create a community of practitioners who will continue to support and motivate each other.

For more details please contact us at creativityandeducation@gmail.com or use the form on the left.