Running a creativity workshop for 100 high school students
Four parallel workshops, and an honest look at why the first exercise did not work
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Workshop materials laid out for the NEXT snack workshop: coloured sticky notes, printed scoring sheets for innovative, tasty and healthy, and a storage box
- Client
- NEXT, upper secondary school
- Context
- Kreativitet og Innovation, DTU
- Year
- 2020
- Role
- Co-facilitator and school contact
- Team size
- 19 planning, 5 reporting
- Tools
- Workshop facilitation · I DO ART framing · Brainwriting · Heuristic ideation technique · Observation and video analysis
- Contribution
- One of 19, co-facilitator and the contact person for the school
A design and innovation workshop run for four first-year classes at NEXT, with 25 to 30 students in each, on the brief of developing new healthy snack ideas. Nineteen of us planned it and four workshops ran simultaneously, and the report then examined why the first exercise produced weaker material than we had designed for.
The setup
NEXT wanted a workshop that left the students with an idea bank they could carry into their own snack project, and the theme, Snack på farten, was given to us in advance. In order to prepare it we split the group of 19 into a facilitator group responsible for planning and running the workshop and a materials group responsible for producing everything the exercises needed, and on the day itself everybody was present, since those who were not facilitating were recording video and audio and observing in the four different classrooms. This means the empirical material we later analysed was collected by us while we were running the thing we were analysing.
What I did
I was one of the co-facilitators, since we were split into facilitators and observers rather than having a single lead, and I was the contact person towards the school, which meant handling the practical coordination with NEXT before the day. Furthermore the report itself was written in a smaller group of five, where we chose to zoom in on the first exercise specifically.
What went wrong, which is the useful part
The framing was not sufficient. We had made one I DO ART for the workshop as a whole and it was too broad, and had we made one for each individual exercise the outcome would have been clearer, since the students never fully understood what the first exercise was actually for. Furthermore we had rewritten the brainwriting method so far from its original form that it stopped working properly, and the exercise was then followed directly by picking the five best ideas, which skips the emergent phase where you would normally work on the ideas before selecting between them. This produced very abstract ideas that the later exercises then had to build on. Here the conclusion that generalises beyond this workshop is that if the output of one exercise is the input to another, then the quality of that output decides whether the second exercise can be run at all, and we had not quality-assured how our exercises fitted together. Testing the sequence on a focus group of similar students beforehand would have caught it.
What I took from it
Time spent explaining the frame, the context and what is being delivered is worth more than time spent on the exercise itself, since without it the parts do not connect. An exercise has to be formulated so that the facilitators and the participants reach a shared understanding of what it is for, and that is a considerably harder thing to write than it looks. Furthermore facilitating well means visiting the groups while they work and asking what they think they are doing, which is how our own teachers check that a room is on track, and it takes practice rather than intention.