7 Summary

This unit has explored ways of giving you and your students a technique that supports creative thinking skills, and helps you to find out about your students’ thinking and prior knowledge. This technique is known as brainstorming.

Brainstorming can be used to support science learning in any topic. It is particularly useful as a way of revising previous topics. It is also a good way of involving all your students in the lesson and of promoting 'talk for learning'.

The key elements of the technique are:

• thinking of a suitable prompt
• planning how to record the responses
• planning what to do with the responses to support further science learning.