What started as a mission to help the author's journalism students develop employability skills, opened up their practice to the area of 'mindful play'. From this, the author started to develop a creative, holistic and student-centred teaching and learning strategy, using simple, workable interventions to stimulate dialogic learning, strengthen trust, enhance creative confidence and transform the student experience on individual modules. The subsequent interventions that the author developed are adaptable and transferable, cost effective and designed to complement regular teaching practices, not to replace them. In this companion (intended to be creative in itself) the author explains the theory behind their design, outline the activities and share the interventions, evaluations and outcomes of this creative practice. Creativity has been the cornerstone of the author's working practice as a journalist and media professional. Employability was already a buzzword when the author began teaching journalism, but there seemed to be fundamental discord in the way this was interpreted. Compared to Fashion Journalism and Fashion History classes the author taught in previous years, which had included sporadic creative exercises, but nothing as carefully designed or theorised as the mindful play, the author's bond with the students, and their bonds as a group, were much stronger. The author saw significant leaps in terms of innovation in students' assessed work, with more originality, risk taking and confidence evident in their writing and use of visual media. Marks were higher compared to previous cohorts in the same modules and, while these sessions may be playful and creative, the students' regard for the structure of the author's classes was actually strengthened: in module evaluations, the students scored highly against questions such as, 'is the module well organised and running smoothly?'