5 Running a brainstorming activity in your classroom
The next step is to consider the practicalities of doing brainstorming in your classroom. There are three key issues:
- What will you do to ensure that the activity supports learning?
- How will you use the ideas from the brainstorm?
- How will you organise the classroom? Will you work with the whole class or put your students in groups? How will you organise the groups?
Usually, for brainstorming the groups should be as varied as possible in terms of gender and attainment, but you can also think about sometimes grouping students by attainment and giving them prompts of differing complexity, just to vary the activities for your students.
Activity 3: Planning a brainstorming activity to introduce a difficult part of the ‘force and laws of motion’ topic
This activity will help you to prepare a brainstorming exercise with your class on a difficult part of the ‘force and laws of motion’ topic.
Choose one particular aspect of the forces and motion topic that your students find difficult. For example, it could be ‘inertia and mass’, ‘conservation of momentum’, or any of Newton’s three laws of motion.
Write down the learning outcomes that you want from the brainstorm. There should be one learning outcome related to the science that you want them to learn, and one linked to the skills you are trying to promote. For example:
- to find out what your students know and understand about mass, based on the work they did at elementary school
- to give students the opportunity to listen to each other and work collaboratively in a team.
Think of a prompt that you can give to your students. You could use one of the ideas that you thought of in Activity 2. Make sure your prompt will interest them and start them thinking about what they already know. Decide how to record and structure your students’ responses. Will you use large paper? Their books? The blackboard?
Plan how to group your students. You will need to think about how you will explain to your students what they are required to do and what the rules are. Put these rules for brainstorming on a poster so that you do not have to mention them every time.
Finally, think about what you will do next to move their learning forward. Then carry out your plan at the first opportunity.
 Pause for thought
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Brainstorming is an activity in which all students can participate. It gives you an opportunity to notice individuals; it can give students confidence and it is a technique that can be used flexibly. You may want to look at the key resource 'Involving all [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] '.
4 Completing a brainstorm