FETC Roundtable: Creative Problem-Solving
Five educators' strategies for teaching creative problem solving from a 2020 FETC roundtable, updated with 2022 PISA creative thinking results and a term plan.
Creative problem solving activities for students work best in small steps. PISA 2022 findings and a term plan follow the FETC roundtable.
In January 2020, Andrew Arevalo, Michelle Moore, Dr. Jennifer Williams, Jeff Glade and Dr. Monica Burns shared creative problem-solving strategies in this Future of Education Technology Conference roundtable. A new section after their answers adds what an international assessment found about creative thinking in 2022 and gathers the activities into a plan teachers can use.
Edtech experts share their top strategies for teaching creativity
In this expert roundtable article, presenters at this week’s Future of Education Technology Conference (FETC) share their top recommendations for teachers, in response to the following question:
What is one strategy or classroom activity teachers can try in 2020 to encourage students to engage in creative problem-solving?
Participants also shared their responses to the following bonus question: What is one free tool you’d encourage teachers to check out?
Andrew Arevalo (@Gameboydrew)
Better known as Gameboydrew, Andrew is an educator, game designer, and 2019 CUE Emerging Teacher of the Year from Southern California. He is passionate about leveraging blended learning, the power of play, and design thinking to support and ignite student curiosity.
You may be familiar with a traditional design sprint, but are you familiar with a “mini” sprint? . . . I didn’t think so! Instead of allocating the typical five-day format to map, sketch, ideate, prototype, and test, combine these aspects into one 20-minute session to get the creative energy flowing with a unique design prompt from Protobot. This platform generates random products with constraints to be considered for development.
For instance, students can “Design a skateboard that leaves kind messages for strangers.” During the “mini” sprint, students can sketch out a detailed blueprint of their solution, discuss how it works via Flipgrid (this link no longer available), and give feedback to their peers for product improvement. The final product (e.g., the sketch/blueprint) doesn’t necessarily matter as much as engaging in the actual iterative process does. When students get this exposure, it builds their capacity to problem-solve and you can gradually scale up into longer and more complex, cross-curricular sprints.
Andrew’s bonus recommendation: Protobot
Michelle Moore (@Michelle4EDU)
Michelle is an ELL and STEM Specialist for Hillsborough County Public Schools in Tampa. Before leaving the classroom to grow teachers in their technology integration, she taught High School English, Reading, and Journalism courses. Michelle also supports customer success efforts for Nearpod.
Model Eliciting Activities (MEAs) provide students with an authentic space to not only engage in creative problem-solving through design thinking, but also practice decision-making through the lens of different audiences. MEAs aren’t just for STEM teachers! It’s a multidisciplinary approach to problem-solving. They allow students to practice close reading skills, find evidence from different sources, and ultimately justify their decision-making.
What are MEAs? They ask students to solve authentic, real-world problems in groups of three or four students. There is never a ‘right’ solution. Students are given limitations (just like in real life) and have to be creative in their problem-solving and explain their decision-making to peers. They also get to critique other students’ solutions. When students practice using skills from different content areas cohesively, learning makes sense. We don’t problem solve using one skill at a time, we bring our whole toolbox to the table! Students should engage in the same type of creative problem-solving at school.
Michelle’s bonus recommendation: Nearpod
Dr. Jennifer Williams (@JenWilliamsEdu)
Williams is a globally-minded educator that works with classrooms of the world to connect learning and experience through meaningful uses of technology. As an educator and author of the ISTE book, Teach Boldly, she champions teachers to use educational technology for social good. She is a professor at Saint Leo University, co-founder of TeachSDGs, and co-founder of Edcamp Tampa Bay and Edcamp Literacy.
Bringing focus to creative problem-solving in teaching and learning in 2020? A “must try out” activity from my instructional design toolkit is incorporating opportunities for students to request feedback on their plans or work.
An intentional feedback process invites students to consider responses to the questions: 1) who to ask, 2) how to ask, 3) how to record feedback, 4) how to develop and grow from feedback, and 5) how to offer appreciation for review and feedback.
This past year, I have been working to seek out individuals who offer different perspectives or new ways of approaching ideas based on their experiences and understandings of the world. By prioritizing feedback as a needed component in the human-centered design process — one that is grounded in empathy and iteration — I find that ideas take shape, develop, and move in unexpected and exciting new directions. If you try it out, I’d love to hear how it goes!
Jennifer’s bonus recommendation: Adobe Spark now Creative Express
Jeff Glade (@GladeJeff)
Jeff is an Instructional Technology Consultant with Heartland AEA.
As we begin the work of facilitating creative problem solving with our students, I feel it is valuable to start small. TEDEd has a fantastic library of short (usually between 3-6 minutes) videos to spark creative problem solving. With most of the videos being brief, they are great for a warmup, but can also be used as practice for small groups of students to strengthen their skills as they engage in conversation, proposing solutions that they can compare to the solutions suggested within the videos. While most of the videos in their “Problem Solving” library are structured as riddles, students can also expand their problem-solving skill set with videos that teach critical thinking skills and give context to real-world problems. The Problem Solving library is just one section of a large database of wonderful videos offered by TEDEd that cover nearly every content area!
Jeff’s bonus recommendation: Arc GIS Story Maps
Monica Burns (@ClassTechTips)
Dr. Monica Burns is a curriculum and educational technology consultant, Apple Distinguished Educator and founder of ClassTechTips.com.
To encourage creative problem-solving this year, ask students to determine an issue in their community and develop a community awareness campaign. They can create public service announcement videos that use images, voice, icons, and music to communicate their message. Students can visit or video conference with a community organization to interview local leaders and conduct research on their topic using online sources. This type of activity asks students to craft a clear call to action and use both informational and persuasive writing techniques.
If students make a public service announcement video, they can send the links to an organization that tackles this issue. Your students might even create a social media campaign with accompanying graphics and copy. When designing this creative problem-solving activity, having a clear audience is key!
Monica’s bonus recommendation: Adobe Spark
In Conclusion
A simple and effective technique to spur creative and critical thinking is to ask “What if..”, or counterfactual, questions. Asking a “what if” question can shine the spotlight on hidden aspects of a problem which, depending on the context, can open up new sets of ideas or deepen understanding of the problem. Counterfactual thinking has been shown to improve both creative thinking as well as reasoning skills, and is easy to incorporate in what students are learning. For example, if you are reading a novel in class, ask students how the story would change if the main character was different or if an event hadn’t occurred. In history, a counterfactual question like “What if the Boston Tea Party never happened?”, can force students to think critically about the historical conditions, resulting in an improved understanding of the topic.
The 40th anniversary Future of Education Technology Conference (FETC) will take place January 14-17, 2020 in Miami, Fla. Registration is now open at Future of Education Technology Conference (FETC)
Editor’s note (2026): The FETC 2020 conference promoted on this page has taken place.
Creative problem solving activities for students: what the research suggests and how to choose
The five educators above each offer a creative problem solving activity: a short design sprint, a model-eliciting activity, a structured feedback process, a set of brief problem-solving videos, and a community awareness campaign. Teachers who want creative problem solving activities for students can use any of them as written. This section adds what the first international assessment of creative thinking found in 2022, explains what that evidence can and cannot say about teaching, and shows how to combine the roundtable’s ideas into a plan for a term.
What the 2022 assessment measured
The Programme for International Student Assessment, known as PISA, added creative thinking to its 2022 round. A summary published by the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada, Outside the Box: The Performance of Canadian 15-Year-Olds in Creative Thinking, explains that 64 countries and economies took part. PISA defines creative thinking as the competence to engage productively in generating, evaluating and improving ideas that can result in original and effective solutions, advances in knowledge and impactful expressions of imagination. The OECD average score was 33 points, and the summary reports that 78 percent of students across OECD countries reached the baseline level of proficiency.
That definition fits the roundtable closely. Arevalo’s mini sprint asks students to generate ideas, test them and improve them in one 20-minute session. Moore’s activities ask students to justify a decision to other students, which is the evaluation step. Williams’ feedback process supports the improvement step.
What the results suggest about teaching, and their limits
The Canadian summary reports that, in Canada, students’ scores were positively related to four of five survey measures: creative self-efficacy (confidence in their own creative ability), openness to intellect, pedagogies that encourage creative thinking, and peer and family environments that encourage creative thinking. Participation in creative activities at school was one of the five measures but was not among the four reported as related to performance in Canada. The measures come from student questionnaires, and the assessment was taken once by 15-year-olds, so the results show associations and cannot show that an activity caused a higher score. A reasonable reading for a teacher is that students who feel able to be creative and who are taught in ways that invite creative work tend to score higher, which supports the roundtable’s emphasis on small, low-risk tasks and on feedback.
The summary also reports that girls outperformed boys in creative thinking in all but 3 of the 64 participating countries. That is a reason to watch who volunteers ideas in a sprint or a discussion, and to ask for ideas in writing before speaking aloud.
Putting the roundtable’s activities in order
The five contributions work at different scales, so they can be sequenced across a term. This sequence is a planning suggestion based on the answers above and not a research finding.
- Start small. Jeff Glade recommends short videos of three to six minutes as a warm-up, with students proposing solutions and comparing them with the solutions in the video.
- Add a time-limited design task. Andrew Arevalo’s 20-minute mini sprint uses a random design prompt, a sketch and peer feedback. As Arevalo notes, the process matters more than the final sketch.
- Build in feedback. Jennifer Williams lists five questions for students: who to ask, how to ask, how to record feedback, how to grow from it, and how to thank the reviewer.
- Move to group problems with limits. Michelle Moore’s model-eliciting activities give groups of three or four students a real-world problem with constraints, no single correct answer, and a requirement to explain their reasoning and critique other groups.
- Finish with a public product. Monica Burns suggests a community awareness campaign, with students interviewing local leaders, writing a clear call to action and sending their work to an organization that cares about the issue.
The roundtable’s closing suggestion of asking "what if" questions can be added to any of these steps. The article says counterfactual thinking has been shown to improve creative thinking and reasoning, but it names no study, so a teacher who wants to cite it should look for the research first.
Practical notes for 2026
- Several tools named in the roundtable have changed since 2020. The Flipgrid link in Arevalo’s answer is marked as no longer available, and the Adobe Spark link points to an archived page about its move to Creative Express. Each activity can be done with paper, a shared document or a recording tool the school already approves.
- Sketch-and-explain tasks and the "what if" questions need no technology and suit schools with limited devices.
- Students who ask for feedback need a classroom where criticism of ideas is kept separate from criticism of people, which a teacher sets with a short norm discussed before the first task.
For the reasons given for teaching creativity at all, see edCircuit’s Why Creativity Should Be Taught In Schools.
Further Reading
- edCircuit – Why Creativity Should Be Taught In Schools
- edCircuit – EdTech Made Easy Through a Podcaster’s Tips
- Gameboydrew – Bring on the Future!
Related reading
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