Brainstorms in the classroom

Watch out! Today the weather forecast specialist (me) wants to warn you about the storms – brainstorms to be precise. You’ve certainly heard about them, you’ve probably used them already, but have you really used their potential to the fullest? If not – I have some ideas on how to make sure that brainstorming activity will be something more than enjoyable chaos.

Brainstorming is one of my favourite exercises from the deep stash of Design Thinking tools. As you might know, I’m really into Design Thinking, as it joins creativity and joy, the values I really appreciate, and that’s why I want to share some of the DT activities you will find useful in your teaching practice.

What is brainstorming and how you can use it in the classroom?

Brainstorming is a tool to find a conclusion to a problem. To achieve the goal of this activity, a group of people generates new ideas and solutions. The most enjoyable part of this exercise is that participants are supposed to think more freely and suggest as many spontaneous new ideas as possible. All the ideas are noted down without criticism and after the brainstorming session the ideas are evaluated.

You can organise short brainstorming sessions in order to make your students find new solutions to the old problems connected with the topics you will always encounter on a language course: money, environment, family, society etc.

For example: you teach teenagers, the topic of the class is money, and you decide to run brainstorming on a topic How can a teenager earn good money? You divide students into groups, give them 10 minutes and ask to write 30 ideas – the don’t have to be innovative, they may look silly etc., but what’s important here is the quantity, not the quality. Remember, if you agree to consider both legal and illegal means, students will not only revise vocab connected with money, but also with crime. Plus, they will have more fun.

Golden rules of brainstorming

The key to a good brainstorming session is sticking to the rules, otherwise you could indeed end up with an uncontrolled chaos of people shouting, arguing etc. – and that’s something that will easily discourage you from the activity.

You will find more on the rules on IDEOU page (click!) – you can also download the poster below and make sure your students can refer to it while brainstorming:

So, what’s important for you is simply:

• let ideas flow, don’t criticise
• think out of the box, sometimes an idea that looks ridiculous may turn out to be brilliant
• if you want to say “but”, try saying “yes, and more!” to add something extra
• focus on the problem
• one person talks at a time
• visualise ideas – use various markers or post-it notes

These simple rules will help you maintain some order during brainstorming.

Remember about the goal of brainstorming

The most common problem with brainstorming is that people generate the ideas, share them, have a laugh – and that’s all. In educational sense your students have revised vocabulary, so you might think your job is done – but that’s not true!

Now’s the time to reverse “quantity over quality” approach. You have a list of ideas – some are good, some are bad, some are brilliant, and it’s important to decide which is the one that actually makes some sense, looks innovative and could really work. In case of a teenager trying to earn some extra money, the result may actually inspire your students to find some summer work. And even if it won’t happen, you’ll make the topic far more relevant to the students!

Variations of brainstorming

If you get bored with regular brainstorming, you may decide to choose a more challenging variation of the exercise:

Reverse Brainstorming: in this version problem is turned around and considered from a different point of view (e.g. How can parents stop teenagers from earning money?)

Stop-and-Go Brainstorming: it’s a time-bound activity, where students go brainstorming for 5 minutes, then they have 5 minutes to evaluate what they’ve come up with, and then another 5 minutes for brainstorming followed by 5 minutes of evaluation and so on.

Phillips 66 Brainstorming: here, students brainstorm in groups for 6 minutes and then a group spokesperson presents either the best or all ideas to the whole class

Brainwriting: that’s the best solution if you teach individual classes. Student individually brainstorms ideas and documents them, then shares them with you to further push their thinking.

Benefits of brainstorming in the classroom

I find brainstorming really educational, as it works on so many levels!

• Vocabulary revision: a great thing during collecting ideas is that students need to revise a lot of words
• Communication and negotiation: when it’s time to decide on the best idea proposed, make your students speak English, that will make them work not only on their soft skills but also language
• Creativity: brainstorming is the activity where even weird and silly ideas are fine, and that will help your students open up with their funny and truly innovative ideas
• Relevance: even if you run the activity on the same problem with 10 different groups, you will have 10 different results, and that’s just brilliant, because it will make the whole lesson much easier for your students to remember
• No preparation: last but not least, you don’t need to prepare for brainstorming, you can do it whenever you feel like it, which makes the activity one of the jewels in your teaching treasure chest

I hope you’ll enjoy your brainstorming sessions – of yes, share your impressions in the comments!