Creative Facilitation

The Creative Facilitation course offers an in-depth experiential learning laboratory in the use of creativity techniques and the facilitation of creative processes.

Facilitation in this context relates to someone whose role it is to work with a diverse group of people to ensure that a creative journey/process leads to innovative and implementable results with a high degree of consensus.

The course starts with building a shared science-based vocabulary through literature and guided exercises and then moves on to hands-on experience through experiments and cases, each followed by presentation of results and reflection, in other words: experiential learning and reflective practice.

During the course, we will look at the creative person, explore a wide range of creativity principles and techniques and develop methods to design processes for innovation teams.

Creativity is not an end in itself, it is always applied to something; therefore, we will invite real clients with real problems: ranging from design challenges to new business opportunities to problem solving.

This course was designed to focus on learning, understanding, and mastering the skills for facilitating creativity in groups, inspired by Beghetto (2005). To create optimal "creative press", any creative output in this course will be assessed formatively only.

The summative assessment is focusing on whether students will take the chance to experiment, how well they understand the principles and vocabulary, and how they capture what they have learned from their own and their peers' experiments.

Formative assignments on which the students will share and receive peer evaluation are:

• Learning contract (individual): an artefact, representing your personal learning objectives for this course and your commitment to achieve this.

• Practice sessions and creativity techniques (in duo's): various rounds of sessions will be facilitated by students, on which they will reflect together.

• Draft session plan (in duo's): before submitting the summative deliverable, students will get the chance to share and receive peer feedback on their session plan.

The summative assignment (pass/fail) of this course is:

Organize and facilitate a creative session for a real client (individual). This assignment will consist of 3 deliverables:

Session Plan + substantiation of 2 activities (individual): to demonstrate that you can compile a session plan and know how to select relevant techniques.

2-pager Reflection (individual): demonstrating how well you reflect and integrate your knowledge and experience regarding Creative Facilitation, using the right principles and vocabulary.

Client Report (individual): which is about properly and professionally communicating the session output to your client.