Featuring The Creative Impact Group, a training firm that was formed to address the gap in quality professional development and support, focused on creativity as a tool for increased learning, connection and agency. They help schools strengthen the way adults engage, teach, lead, and build community through culturally responsive, trauma-informed, and creative practices.
Why should teachers and students be excited about your programming?
Teachers should be excited about our programming because we make professional learning feel relevant, energizing, and immediately useful. At The Creative Impact Group, we believe creativity is a powerful tool for teaching, connection, reflection, and change. Our programs are designed to help educators strengthen their practice through interactive, arts-based, culturally responsive, and community-centered learning experiences. Rather than simply presenting information, we invite teachers to participate, reflect, create, collaborate, and explore new ways to engage students. Educators leave with practical strategies they can bring directly into their classrooms to strengthen relationships, increase student voice, foster belonging, and make learning more meaningful. Our work also creates space for teachers to reconnect with their own creativity. We encourage educators to think beyond traditional approaches and consider how storytelling, movement, visual art, discussion, reflection, and other forms of creative expression can support both academic learning and classroom community. Most importantly, our programming honors teachers as professionals, leaders, and creative thinkers. We want every educator who learns with us to leave feeling inspired, equipped, and reminded of the impact they have the power to make. At the center of everything we do are creativity, justice, and joy.
Is there a particular program you’d like to highlight? What makes it special?
Building Anti-Racist Arts Educators is an interactive professional learning residency designed to support arts educators in examining, strengthening, and transforming their practice through an anti-racist lens. Grounded in culturally responsive, culturally sustaining, and abolitionist approaches to teaching and learning, the residency explores the connections between identity, culture, creativity, power, belonging, and the arts. Participants engage in reflection, dialogue, collaborative learning, arts-based activities, and practical application as they consider how curriculum, instructional choices, classroom culture, and relationships can either reinforce inequities or create greater opportunities for students to thrive.What makes this experience unique is that participants do not simply learn about anti-racist teaching—they practice it, question it, create through it, and apply it directly to their own work. The arts provide a powerful entry point for conversations about identity, history, voice, justice, and belonging, and the residency intentionally uses creative practice as both the content and the method of learning. Participants may examine works of art, engage in storytelling and creative reflection, collaborate with peers, analyze existing lessons, and redesign learning experiences with greater attention to student voice, identity, agency, and cultural knowledge.
The residency model also allows educators to move beyond the limitations of a one-time professional development session. Participants have opportunities to reflect between sessions, experiment with new approaches, return with questions, learn from one another, and continue developing their practice over time. Rather than treating anti-racist education as a checklist or a collection of strategies, Building Anti-Racist Arts Educators supports educators in developing an ongoing practice of reflection and action. Participants leave with concrete tools they can apply in their classrooms and programs, along with a deeper understanding of how their choices as educators and artists shape the experiences of young people.Most importantly, the residency honors educators as artists, professionals, and designers of learning. It invites them to bring their own creativity fully into the work and to use the unique power of the arts to create learning environments where students are seen, heard, challenged, affirmed, and empowered.At its core, this is professional learning rooted in creativity, justice, reflection, and action.
Anything else teachers should know about you or your programs?
We offer a 10% discount for Title 1 schools.
Learn more about The Creative Impact Group’s programming on their website and follow them on social media!
Instagram: @dana_createsimpact
Facebook: Dana Carr
