Teaching about and for Creativity in Higher Education: Coaching as a Methodology to Cultivate Creative Thinking Habits for Doctoral Researchers

Can students’ creative thinking be developed in a course and beyond? Educational institutions, from early childhood education to continuing education and professional development, find it important to teach students for creativity. Yet, there are multiple approaches and views on defining and developing it in a course. In this chapter, I discuss how to design a creativity course for doctoral researchers in varied science domains by reflecting on the teacher’s role, the type of creativity selected to be taught, and the pedagogical tools. How do teachers’ knowledge of creativity theories influence what is taught about creativity? How might students be supported in getting in touch with the creativity that they will develop later in their professional lives? In the end, I discuss coaching as a pedagogical methodology. To address these questions, I showcase the creativity course I taught as part of a doctoral research programme in health sciences and humanities at the University of Helsinki. The goal of the course was to guide participants in forming creative thinking habits for problem finding. The chapter highlights the relevance of courses that emphasize creative metacognition. Students get the chance to reflect on their creative thinking strengths. They are thus more likely to adopt new creativity habits and generate meaningful interpretations and engaging perspectives on the subjects of interest. I hope that more discussions will follow on why and what creativity courses would be useful to add to the curricula provided by universities.