Transform Your Students into Creative Leaders
According to the World Economic Forum, creativity is a top skill needed for the 21st Century workforce to succeed. As Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “We may not be able to prepare the future for our children, but we can prepare our children for the future.”
Creative Problem Solving (CPS) unlocks creative thinking and teaches critical thinking processes that transform creativity into action. The CPS process also builds confidence, resilience, and tolerance for ambiguity because once learned, students know that whatever they face, they have clear steps to apply to get through any challenge.
CEF trains educators from K through College in the mindset, tool set, and skill set of CPS. A creative mindset improves communication, fosters positive engagement, and is fun. The tools and skills of CPS easily overlay any other initiative or curriculum because they enact a way of thinking and processing. Further, CPS fosters effective collaboration and team-building — all skills students need to have as part of a 21st Century workforce.
Bring Deliberate Creativity to Your School
To schedule your CPS Professional Development Training or to inquire about bringing CPSI to your school or campus, contact us today for more information.
CPS Professional Development for Educators
Custom CPS Educator PD Programs
CEF can design workshops for your teaching teams as short as 90 minutes or for multiple days. We can provide virtual workshops, live workshops, one-on-one teacher coaching, and we can work with hundreds of teachers at once. Let us customize a CPS Educator PD program for you that fits your needs and budget.
Click below to learn more or schedule your CPS Professional Development Training or to inquire about bringing CPSI to your school or campus.
CPSI Conference
The Creative Problem Solving Institute (CPSI, “SIP-see”) is our signature, 4-Day creativity, innovation, and leadership conference held each June. We can also take our CPSI show on the road and bring it to your school for students, faculty, and administrators. We will design and run a virtual or on-campus CPSI conference for one day or multiple days and can include CPS and other creativity and innovation workshops.
Click below to learn more or schedule your CPS Professional Development Training or to inquire about bringing CPSI to your school or campus.
Foundations in CPS session descriptions
Session 1: Setting the Stage
- How we solve problems everyday
- How we might solve problems faster
- Developing the mindset for deliberate creativity
Session 2: Introducing Creative Process
- Foursight preferences
- Introduce Clarify stage of CPS
Session 3: Formulating Challenges
- Gather data
- Formulate challenge statements
- Identify problem owner
Session 4: Exploring Ideas
- Ideation tools and methods
- Seeking outside perspectives
Session 5: Developing Solutions
- Convergence
- Find and formulate solutions
Session 6: Formulating a Plan
- Action planning
- Ownership of action steps
- Debriefing experiences
Session 7: Reviewing and Implementation
- Review of CPS process
- Teachbacks
Session 8: Coaching
- Unstructured time with course facilitators to review, practice, and personalize the learning
Creative Problem Solving generates break-through ideas, improves teamwork, and energizes the classroom. CPS professional development will help you and your students:
- Recognize and overcome blocks to creativity.
- Identify attitudes and behaviors conducive to creative thinking.
- Apply core concepts of creative thinking.
- Use a variety of divergent and convergent thinking tools.
- Apply the CPS method to many simulated or real situations.
- Consciously be creative when facing problems and opportunities.
Register today and complete continuing education hours that will inspire you for the new school year!
Why Is Creative Problem Solving Important for Students?
The world is changing at breakneck speed, and we must prepare students for this reality. In fact, we need to prepare children to be the inventors of this new and fast-changing world.
According to Forbes, people will change jobs 15-20 times and have as many as 7 careers. The US Department of Labor predicts that 65% of students will become adults holding jobs that don’t exist yet. Schools that teach deliberate creativity prepare students for the imminent unknown.
We work with schools that recognize the creativity gap and that seek to reclaim teachers’ and students’ natural creativity to develop integrated and dynamic systems that improve school culture and community, all while fostering breakthrough academic success.
Why should teachers and students learn Creative Problem Solving?
CPS fosters skills and abilities that represent an array of 21st Century outcomes. Educators and students will learn to:
- Value inquiry and curiosity, and how to use the tools and techniques to develop these intuitive inclinations.
- Embrace creativity, risk-taking, and imagination – qualities essential to revealing new ideas and solutions.
- Couple creative thinking with critical analysis to both unlock possibility and to define actionable activities.
- Collaborate as part of a team and communicate complex ideas.
CPS is an essential practice that helps students become nimble, fluent, and innovative thinkers.
Thinking Inside the Educational Box
Creativity often flourishes within restricted environments. CPS can cultivate creativity no matter what restrictions or barriers you may have. Our professional development generates break-through ideas, improves teamwork, and energizes participants. Learn to:
- Recognize and overcome blocks to creativity.
- Identify attitudes and behaviors conducive to creative thinking.
- Apply core concepts of creative thinking.
- Use a variety of thinking tools.
- Apply the CPS process to simulated or real situations.
- Make deliberate creativity a regular way to engage the world.
What educators have to say about our professional development:
Creativity and problem solving are essential skills for students in this century. We use these skills in a variety of ways in our school. First, the CPS process is an excellent tool for students to understand, and implement, as they engage in and lead a more complex and demanding world. Second, at our school, we use the process to define and implement growth!
Creative Education Foundation is providing teachers in Stamford Public Schools ways to think differently about instructional practice; to allow students to understand there are many ways to solve problems and different answers to the same questions. As we educate in the 21st century and beyond and prepare students for college and careers we need to continue to reflect on how we teach but also on how students learn.
In education it is imperative that we consider not only the what (CPS) but the why and the how. Creative thinking and Creative Problem Solving foster and promote metacognition. Creative thinking enables a student to come to awareness. After teaching a very short unit on Learning Styles to a fourth-grade classroom, one student went home and told his Mom, “Mom, I am not stupid! I’m kinesthetic!”. That student went from a learning challenged student in elementary school to an honor student when he graduated from high school. He was able to learn and process information in his learning style without interfering with the teacher’s teaching and promote metacognition. Creative thinking enables a student to come to awareness.
As an academic, I have found that the CPS process provides a well- researched, grounded process to facilitate creativity and innovation. At our Center, we use the CPS process and tools to help students, faculty, and businesses identify new solutions to challenging problems in their communities and beyond. The CPS tools and techniques provide flexibility and structure for those we work with and help give them permission to bring their ideas forward, create new ones and approach their challenge from a different perspective.
The challenges within Higher Education demand that universities and colleges control costs, Increase completion rates, and address inequities within institutional resources. Creative Problems Solving (CPS) provides a framework for identifying opportunities and solving problems when conventional thinking has failed. The mindset of CPS encourages you to adopt creative thinking in order to find fresh perspectives and come up with innovative solutions.
Whether deploying CPS within the academic or administrative divisions, CPS pulls on the strengths of teams by engaging the team in clarifying the challenge, generating potential Solutions and executing the action plan.
Bring Deliberate Creativity to Your School
Contact us today to schedule your CPS Professional Development Training or to inquire about bringing CPSI to your school or campus.