Creativity and Innovation in Teaching and Learning

Creative thinking and innovation are indispensable elements that are a must in both personal and professional lives. However, many people feel they are lacking in innovation and creativity. What most of you do not realize is that you are creative on a daily basis, whether it’s selecting what clothes to wear in the morning or managing family time with a tight budget at work. While such tasks are not normally associated with creativity, there is a great deal of creativity involved to get these jobs done.

You keep on hearing the statement ‘Think out of the box’ while you are at work. It can be a difficult thing to do: after all, your modes of thought are fairly well ingrained when you enter the workplace, and opening up new channels and ways of thinking might be a hard task for some. There are many people for whom a job is not need much of creativity. But for industries, where a good idea is worth ten bad ones, being able to think outside of the box will help a career go further. Fortunately, creativity and innovation and creativity training are available for businesses and employees that need new ways to think about and approach any problem at hand.

The Need for Creativity and Innovation and Creativity Training

Most people do not pay attention to learning creativity and innovation during school time or during the other management training programs. You need a training experience that is engaging and impactful. Leaders need to develop their innovative leadership skills and respond to the challenges that are always emerging. The need for creativity and innovation and creativity training is:

• Create, develop, and launch new idea, strategies, products, and services.

• Respond to the rapid pace of advancement.

• Such training programs help you develop creativity & innovation skills and learn what you didn’t in school.

• Learn to utilize advancing technologies instead of just getting disorganized by them.

Employee moral in any workplace can be elevated with creative training. Training, like team building exercises, is better helped with creative hosts than with a impassive manager. But, again, it is not about just the person who is teaching, but is about how it is being taught.

Just by setting up an inspirational environment, supporting creative thought, and offering the right accolades, you can get the creative juices of your team members flowing like never before.

Here are some examples to get started:

1. Creative environment: First, create an environment that boosts creativity. You could brighten and dress up one area of your office and designate that area to your employees, giving your team some sense of ownership.

2. Work hard, play harder: Allow your team to play with creative thoughts. You can have flip charts, Lego, play dough, colored markers, paint, music and anything that sparkles the creative process during brainstorm sessions.

3. Brainstorming: Set a meeting every biweekly where you can brainstorm and work on a project or any problem. This gives the employees the right objective before entering your meeting.

4. Goal board: Create a board where you have goals or strategies that your company is striving for and each week you can focus on one goal or problem to solve or work on.

5. Homework: You may assign the employees some pre-work where you have one agenda for the meeting and the employees have to come into this meeting with one good idea to company’s goal or problem.

6. Reward creativity: Of course, if the best suggestion or solution is given a reward, will eventually encourage employees to think creatively. A reward could be in the form of movie tickets, a Thai massage, a bottle of wine, a voucher or money.

Thinking outside the box is what Mad Men is all about (well, that and a tragic character). Don Draper shows the advertising industry, what it is like to be on top of popular culture while remaining classy. Creative training comes from advances in culture, popular or not, and if the thinkers do not take heed of what is new and exciting, someone else, possibly a rival, will.

Professionals who take care to attend creative training on a regular basis are able to stay on top of their game, teach their teammates or coworkers in an engaging way and offer new solutions to problems within the business.