Learning Outcomes:
1. Knowledge and Understanding: Demonstrate understanding of the foundations of creative thinking,
collaborative creativity and design thinking, and recognise how mindset, belief systems and personal narrative
shape an individual's approach to creative challenge. Identify how creative problem solving can be used to bring
diverse people together to tackle complex, real-world challenges, and recognise the role of personal reflection
in developing self-awareness as a creative practitioner.
2. Applying Knowledge and Understanding: Apply a range of ideation techniques, decision making tools and
design thinking frameworks to real professional challenges, and use structured approaches to facilitate creative
collaboration within diverse teams.
3. Making Judgements: Critically reflect on personal creative confidence, collaborative tendencies and facilitation
practice, and make informed judgements about which tools, techniques and approaches are most appropriate
for a given context or group.
4. Communication and Working Skills: Work effectively and openly in multidisciplinary teams, navigate creative
conflict constructively, and communicate ideas with clarity and confidence across a range of collaborative
settings.
5. Learning Skills: Engage in regular and meaningful reflection as a core professional practice, identify
opportunities to apply new learning within their own institutional contexts, and demonstrate a disposition
toward iterative, experiential learning and ongoing professional growth.
Indicative Module Content:
1. Foundations of Creative Thinking: Theories of creativity, psychological safety, creative confidence and identity, growth mindset, and the relationship between mindset and creative risk-taking.
2. Creative problem solving frameworks and methods: Structured approaches to identifying, framing and reframing complex problems, moving from symptoms to root causes, generating powerful questions, and working productively with uncertainty and wicked problems.
3. Design thinking and human-centred design: An iterative, human-centred process for understanding problems deeply, synthesising insight into clear design briefs, generating and testing ideas, and learning from low-fidelity prototypes before committing to solutions.
4. Ideation and Imagination Techniques: Principles and practices of generative ideation, expanding possibility through divergent thinking, building on the ideas of others, and selecting and developing promising concepts through convergent thinking.
5. Creative collaboration and facilitation: Conditions for collaborative creativity, facilitation as creative leadership, co-creation and participatory design approaches, navigating group dynamics, and leading creative change within educational institutions.
6. Systems and complexity thinking: Understanding educational challenges as systemic rather than isolated, working with complexity and interdependence, adaptive approaches to persistent problems, and attending to equity and power in how problems are framed and solved.
7. Reflective practice: Frameworks for critical reflection on experience, reflective journaling as a professional development practice, and building the habits of a reflective creative practitioner over time.