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.

Nurturing the Creative Potential of Your Students

Audience: All

Are you an educator looking to bring out the best in your students? ‘Nurturing the Creative Potential of Your Students’ is just what you need! This highly informative and engaging workshop will help you understand creativity and why it is valuable, how to recognize the creative potential within your students, and ultimately maximize creativity in your classroom.

You’ll gain valuable knowledge during this interactive session, including the skills needed to foster creativity, strategies to promote creativity within their daily activities, and the benefits of creating a creative classroom environment. At the completion of this workshop, you’ll be armed with ideas that will help stimulate creative thinking in each and every one of your students.

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

Educators as the Creative Leaders of the Classroom

Audience: All

If you want to inspire creative thinking in your students, you must lead the way. In this workshop, we will take a dive into open-mindedness, curiosity, and inventive thinking, the core skills for creative thinking. We will provide you with exercises, tools, and techniques to reflect on yourself as a creative leader and how to foster these skills in your students. The workshop will also include hands-on activities and group discussions to provide you with the opportunity to collaborate with your peers. You’ll walk away with a better understanding of creative leadership, as well as real strategies to improve learning outcomes in your classroom.

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

Integrating Creative Thinking into Every Strand of Your Curriculum

Audience: We are happy to host these workshops for Pre-K-12 grade educators and university professors.

Educators frequently approach us eager and excited to bring creativity into their classrooms, 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 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
• Work with your own content to integrate creativity into your classroom
• Walk away with simple strategies you can employ immediately in your classroom

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

Fostering a Culture of Creative Thinking

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 to flourish.

In this interactive workshop, we will identify the environments that cultivated your creativity.  We will explore the dimensions of the creative environment and create a plan of how to integrate this into your 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.

Creative Problem Solving for Educators

Audience: Educators

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.

Striking the Work/Life 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.