What is it?

Brainstorming is an effective way to encourage students to generate creative ideas and solutions to a specific issue or question in a safe and supportive environment. It can be used with a large or small group of students either at the beginning of the unit to introduce a topic, gain an understanding of students’ prior knowledge or throughout a unit to help evaluate student progress.

Why use it?

• Encourages all the students to participate and work collaboratively to contribute to the session.
• Helps generate a large quantity of ideas.
• Allows students to respects each other’s views and build on their knowledge based on the contributions of the group.
• Promotes creative thinking and listening skills.

How do I do it?

1. Ensure everyone understands the purpose of the session and the guidelines such as:
   • Importance of quantity of ideas over the quality – there is an element of ‘knowledge construction’ in brainstorming activities so it is important for students to feel that they can contribute any ideas that they might have.
   • One idea at a time and build on the ideas of others.
   • No interruption or evaluation to happen until the ideation phase is complete.
   • Set a time limit.
2. Define the problem or idea to be brainstormed.
3. Allow the students to offer their thoughts and categorise them accordingly.
4. If the activity is broken into groups, encourage the students to share their lists and this can be followed by a class discussion to wrap up the brainstorming session.

For online brainstorming, see this resource for a list of technologies that can be used – https://gitmind.com/brainstorming-tools.html

Considerations

• The sessions should be well planned to achieve the desired learning outcomes.
• Can be used by individuals to pre-organise ideas for class assessments/assignments.
• Can also be used as an activity in various learning approaches such as problem-based, team-based, inquiry-based, authentic learning etc.
• You can use tools such as Google Docs to record brainstorming sessions (especially useful for small group work).