Professional Development

Thought Partner Consultations

Do you need a thought partner to help you or one of your employees:

• reframe or rethink a specific challenge? 
• strategize on your innovation plan?
• learn how to hire and retain innovative thinkers? 
• become a more effective problem solver?

It’s an easy investment with high return to hire us for one hour or many to help directly with your specific challenge or opportunity.

Clients have called us for:

• custom learning design;
• innovation strategy;
• help with employees who are stuck;
• understanding outlier thinkers;
• customized leadership support.

As specific needs arise, we will connect you with our international network of professional partners.

60-minute Skype/Zoom sessions

Leading Innovation

In the current high-stakes business climate, what does it take to develop a culture that fosters new, valuable ideas and solutions?

We know your schedule is hectic, so we’ll cut to the chase, apply strategies to your direct situation, and set you up to lead your team for innovation success in four 60-minute online sessions scheduled at your convenience.

You Will Learn: 

• How to quickly assess your current culture.
• The three key areas that support innovation leadership.
• Creative leadership tools to improve your team’s creative productivity.
• Your innovation leader profile.

Four 60-minute online sessions; Individual

How You Will Benefit:

• Strategically select key areas to improve innovation culture.
• Apply strategies to keep each employee operating at peak thinking capacity.
• Lead more powerfully with knowledge of your innovation strengths and growth areas.
• Continue to build your skills with a signed copy of The Non-Obvious Guide to Being More Creative by Kathryn P. Haydon, your personal creative thinking training manual with access to tools, workbooks, and dozens of helpful resources.

The Ultimate Creative Thinking Workshop

LinkedIn Learning revealed this year that creative thinking is the number one skill employers are looking for in employees, based on over 20 million job postings. Powerful creative thinking increases your ability to turn problems into possibilities, innovate to create new value, and leverage change to stay competitive in this fast-paced economy. 

It doesn’t take long to jump-start your creativity–it is teachable and improves with practice. Bring your team for three fun, action-packed hours to power-up your  thinking, effectiveness, and innovation capacity.

You Will Learn: 

• The proper way to brainstorm. 
• 16 creative thinking skills to power-up your thinking and enhance your agility and resilience in the face of change.
• Tools to turn good ideas into great solutions.
• Techniques to ask the right kinds of questions that lead to new thinking.

3 Hours; Team

How You Will Benefit: 

• Run more productive brainstorming meetings. 
• Find out which creative thinking skills you’ve already mastered and the ones you can more fully develop.
• Transform the way you see and solve problems at work.
• Know how to deliberately apply creative thinking to any business challenge.
• Build your arsenal of tools and techniques to out-think your competition and improve innovation outcomes. 
• Continue to build your skills with a signed copy of The Non-Obvious Guide to Being More Creative by Kathryn P. Haydon, your personal creative thinking training manual with access to tools, workbooks, and dozens of helpful resources.

Innovation Mindset

Are you trying to create a culture that encourages team members at all experience levels to contribute their diverse perspectives to develop valuable, innovative products and services?

Creativity fuels innovation through a universal thinking process. Research shows that people think about and solve problems in measurably different ways. Understanding your thinking preferences–how you think about and solve problems–can increase your capacity to innovate.

Based on the internationally acclaimed FourSight™ Thinking Profile,

You Will Learn:

• How you personally engage in the creative problem solving process.
• Strategies to strengthen your capacity to problem-solve, innovate, and get the job done.
• How to work with other people’s preferences to maximize outcomes.

2 Hours; Individuals across teams

Prior to the workshop, team members will take the 10-minute (or less!) FourSight Thinking preferences survey online.

How You Will Benefit: 

• Work smarter, knowing where your energy peaks and falls during the arc of a project.
• Develop strategies to collaborate, communicate, and solve problems more effectively.
• Learn to leverage your team members’ individual problem-solving approaches to achieve greater innovation.
• Run more productive meetings.
• Understand how the universal problem solving process drives innovation.

Building an Innovation Team

Do you want to transform your group into a team of innovation champions?

This half-day workshop is designed to engage the diversity of your team to collaborate more effectively and increase your capacity to problem solve. We will use the FourSight™ Thinking Profile to create Your Team Report, which shows team members how their individual thinking preferences to clarify, generate, develop, and implement ideas relate to team results when it comes to problem solving, collaboration, communication, and innovation.

Research shows that the awareness of the universal creative process and your individual problem solving preferences that you gain in this workshop helps you:

• gain self-mastery;
• grow empathy and respect;
• leverage diversity;
• build better teams;
• improve performance;
• achieve consistent, innovative outcomes.

1/2 Day; Teams

How You Will Benefit: 

• Discover how your personal thinking preferences can help you work more effectively.
• Understand when each team member tends to rev up or stall in the problem solving process to build a more effective team.
• Learn a common, intuitive language and process, which together bolster collaboration, communication, and productivity.
• Run more productive and effective meetings.

Do you want your teachers to integrate high-level creative thinking into the curricula they already teach?

Choose Workshop #1:

Minds-On Learning in Every Classroom

Hands-on learning is a bit of a misnomer. What really engages students and sparks their growth is “minds-on” learning, when their highest-level thinking skills are ignited and in operation.

Participants will:

• pinpoint your own creative thinking strengths and learn to spot them in students
• use the Torrance Incubation Model to make your lessons “minds-on”
• serve as a think tank for colleagues
• learn to tweak your assessments to spark individual student growth

This full-day immersive experience is designed to motivate your faculty through applied, meaningful learning that supports their best work.

Do your teachers need easy strategies to teach students to think creatively and personalize their learning?

Choose Workshop #2:

Power Up Learning with Cognitive Creativity

Teachers of all levels and subjects will find their thinking sparked during this active workshop. Each participant will walk away with several structures to develop student cognitive creativity skills like fluency, flexibility, abstract reasoning, and elaboration. Activities can be quickly and easily plugged into lesson plans across subject areas and grade levels.

Participants will:

• build your own cognitive creativity skills through energizing activities
• apply activities directly to your own curricula to help students develop key thinking skills
• learn easy strategies to ask powerful questions that take your lessons to the next level

This full-day immersive experience is designed to motivate your faculty through applied, meaningful learning that supports their best work.

Does your school need a new approach to teacher-student relationships, understanding a broad spectrum of learners, and mitigating behavior issues?

Choose Workshop #3:

Using Creative Strengths for Better Teaching, Learning, and Teacher-Student Relationships

The number one key to student learning is positive relationships with teachers. To create them we need a new lens to understand our students’ positive core–even in the face of behavior issues, deficits, and time constraints. This workshop is highly relevant for classroom teachers, advisors, parents, and administrators, and can help develop a truly growth-oriented school culture.

Participants will learn to:

• identify and reflect on their own creative strengths
• spot creative strengths in students
• recognize atrophied creative strengths when they show up as behavior issues, inattention, anxiety, etc.
• teach students to spot and activate their own creative strengths
• use Sparkitivity’s Catalyst Framework to facilitate student turnarounds

This full-day immersive experience is designed to motivate your faculty through applied, meaningful learning that supports their best work.

Would you like your faculty to enhance their best teaching practices to attain the deepest levels of student engagement and critical and creative thinking?

Grassroots Innovative Change

A new, in-depth approach to professional development and lasting creative culture.

Lasting change starts with a strong leader with a vision who is willing to take the long view and build from the ground up, to create a culture that incorporates practices and processes that support creative thinking at all levels. We always begin by assessing your goals and needs. Then we conduct key stakeholder interviews and develop a customized approach that builds on the strengths of your school’s people and culture. See how one school did it using the cohort approach.