Course: Facilitating Creative Learning

Led by the PLIX Team and experienced public library professionals from the PLIX community, this 4-week online course ran from Monday, April 26th through Friday May 21st, 2021. The content remains accessible below.

🗓️ Our Four Weeks Together

After diving in with a brief overview and welcome, the four-week course was structured around PLIX's set of seven principles of facilitating creative learning and running hands-on STEAM workshops. Each week we covered up to three of these principles, heard from library leaders in the field, and reflected how these facilitation principles apply in our respective contexts. Along the way we introduced a number of PLIX activities and created space for all participants to develop their own facilitation practice. New content was posted each Monday.

🎯 Course Objective

This fully online course explored the fundamentals of creative learning and was tailored to public library professionals. With these four weeks of interactive professional development, participants gained the practical skills and confidence to start facilitating creative STEAM programming for their patrons. We dove deep into the design choices facilitators make when planning and implementing creative learning workshops, focusing especially on PLIX's Facilitation Techniques. With peers nationwide, participants developed their facilitation practice and left feeling prepared to offer patrons PLIX activities—and other creative learning activities of their own design. Find out more about about what participants could have ended up with at the end of the course.

🍏 PLIX's Commitment

We provided participants with engaging content to deepen their understanding of creative learning and its unique techniques of facilitation. We hosted a semi-private, casual community space to engage with peers in the library field alongside a public forum where participants could share ideas for all to see and make deeper connections. We sponsored weekly tinkering/co-making sessions tied to PLIX activities, all made by MIT Media Lab researchers working with librarian co-designers. We posted recordings of live events so that those who could not join synchronously were able to participate. We provided documentation of time spent on the course to those who needed it for continuing education credit.

〰️ Weekly Flow

Each week, we delved into a creative learning theme together, exploring some big ideas as well as practical facilitation techniques participants could implement with PLIX activities. We planned to spend about eight hours total — some in shared time together, but mostly asynchronous.

Things to Make with

While the first week's activity prompt is doable with household materials, the suggested materials for PLIX activities in weeks 2 and 3 are harder to find.

A critical element of the Facilitating Creative Learning course is making PLIX projects! Stock up and get prepared, and be sure to come to our weekly Make'n'Meet sessions (Thursdays at 3pm Eastern time).

This course is free to participate, but there are a few critical items that will allow you to participate fully. If you have some professional development funding, we hope you can use a few dollars of your budget to buy the needed materials. We can provide documentation to support the necessity of these materials to success in the course.

In the Recommendation column, the label "up to you!" in Weeks 1 & 4 indicates there is a lot of flexibility in what materials you use to do the project.

Note: Some electronics in Weeks 2 and 3 have been in short supply! We have identified a vendor, Jameco Electronics, who has some BBC micro:bits and other electronics in stock. Each item's Jameco part number is linked in the spreadsheet. We've arranged a discount: at checkout please use the custom code “MT2021” which should automatically apply 7% off your entire order.