Creativity and Concept - Facilitation

This Creativity and Concept lesson was all about facilitation. Now, what is facilitation? Well it is the process of enabling groups to work cooperatively and effectively. A facilitator is someone who leads the group in the right direction and stops any distractions or tangents from occurring. Facilitators are usually used in business settings where decisions need to be made or ideas need to be thought about. Groups of people come together when ideas need to be formed for new things (for example, toy companies). A facilitator can be an outside person who just simple directs the group to what they need; they don't even need to understand the companies work!

Here is the overview of facilitation:

For all of the group to experience facilitation, we were split into groups of 4. We were given a brief which was 'LJMU are having a festival to celebrate all of its achievements and students. What could they have at this festival?' After we had received the brief we all headed for a board each and one person was the facilitator at a time. We all took turns in being the facilitator; we had to be encouraging and stop anything that wasn't to do with the brief being spoke about. Also, nobody was allowed distractions such as mobile phones. We basically mind mapped (or brain stormed) about the whole festival. We came up with as many ideas as we possibly could; here are a couple of photographs of our work:

 We then had to decide what ideas we liked the most as a group and then pitch them to the rest of the class. We had a couple of great ideas but we narrowed it down to three.

We decided that the idea that we would probably use would be the student Olympics/camp out. This was one of our crazy ideas but we wanted to have something original that nobody else had done. The Olympics would be subject based so you could take part in any but you would have an  advantage when taking part in your own subject. The camp out was attached to this idea because after the Olympics it would be like an after party with fires and marshmallows for everyone. When it all settles down everyone could camp out with their friends for this one night only! We thought that the camping was good idea because the festival was going to be in the summer (we were told). I suggested Otterspool Prom because it would be beautiful by the water, but we could also do it somewhere like Sefton Park or Chavasse Park.


Of course this festival is fictional, but it allowed us to see what we were like as facilitators and also it gave each of us a chance to express ourselves.


Speak soon!