Brainstorming is a good start but experience has taught me that it needs more steps to make it more effective. This is particularly apt with middle school students who sometimes need more guidance when developing ideas. For purposes of clarity I want to define brainstorming as writing words and phrases freely, without editing or even stopping. I often tell the students they must write no matter what, even if it's nonsense, for a given amount of time. I limit this to writing because words usually work in concepts. Images are also good but I believe they are thinking in a different method and I treat that as another creative thinking exercise.
I have serval starting points. The first is to allow the students to just have at it and see where their ideas take them. The next is to give the students the unit question and/or significant concept to think about and again go at it. While some students will naturally take to this the results I have seen in the classroom are as follows: About fifty percent of the students get right to it and the other fifty percent are stymied and may write one or two things down but spend the rest of the time looking at their paper. Of the writing fifty percent only about 25 percent will have something that is a good representative of their ideas and the other 25 percent get off task. Not that getting off task is entirely bad, but in the classroom setting where the teacher is guiding the students to a goal centered around a certain topic, it is ultimately unproductive, but I reiterate, still valuable.
These observations have lead me to construct the 'plus' method. Break the concept down into more simple themes and have the students brainstorm along a certain theme. The brainstorm may deviate as work progresses but it makes the work categorical. From here I may take another aspect of the concept and have them brainstorm along those lines as well. Or instead of brainstorming along another line of the concept, have them run the first brainstorm and use another aspect of the concept as a lens to view the brainstorm. Perhaps my writing is not clear but it is far more straight forward when actually conducting the exercise. I will illustrate with a couple of examples:
Concept: Artists can combine unlike ideas together in a work of art - credit to Richard Todd who wrote this concept.
The students will create two brainstorms they like in separate columns in their workbooks. Then randomly draw links between these columns and see what ideas generate. (This moves onto a different idea of concept association that I will discuss in another blog entry) As I mentioned earlier this stymies some students and others get quite off task. In my opinion it is a little too broad for students. So my remedy has been to give the students more guidelines. For this particular unit (once again credit to Richard Todd for planting the seed of this unit) I give the students two concepts to brainstorm, one of my choosing - furniture and another of their own. Here I encourage the students first to brainstorm nouns and then to pick some of the nouns they feel attracted to and brainstorm those further. When the massive brainstorming is complete then it's time to combine the concepts.
Typical instructions may sound like this:
1. Open your books and on the next blank page write 'Furniture' then take two minutes and write as many different types of furniture you can think of. Don't worry of you get off of the furniture idea just keep writing for the entire two minutes, even made-up words are ok.
2. Now go to the next page and for two minutes brainstorm as many nouns as you can.
3. Pick three nouns you find most interesting and brainstorm them on separate pages.
Now comes time for concept association, which is another exercise I will discuss in future blog entries.
Here is an alternative example:
Concept: Humans made tools to make life easier and they make objects attractive to improve quality of life.
1. Brainstorm objects for use.
2. Take three objects from your brainstorm and describe each object looking pretty.
Ok I am going to leave it here. In reality, many of the exercises are not isolated and please keep in mind that after the ideas are generated there is still a lot of work to do. Refining the idea, designing and executing. The goal of these exercises is to access the idea. There is still a lot of creativity involved but I have found getting the idea makes the next steps more successful and more fulfilling for the students and teachers.
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