6 Different approaches to brainstorming

Read here a teacher’s account of how he used the brainstorm technique with his class.

Case Study 2: Mr Prashad reflects on running his first brainstorming session

Mr Prashad was about to start teaching forces to his Class IX students. He decided to adapt some of the ideas he had read about in this unit to run a brainstorming session.

I organised my students into their usual groups. I gave each group a small ball, which was placed on the desk in the middle of the group. I also gave each group a large piece of paper and asked for a volunteer in each group to act as scribe. In the middle of the page they wrote the word ‘Force’.

I asked three groups to think of as many ways as they could to start the ball rolling. I asked the other three groups to think of as many ways as they could to stop a rolling ball. They got into discussion very quickly, brainstorming lots of ideas and using the ball to demonstrate to each other and think about new ideas between them. I was pleased to see that even the quieter students offered suggestions and often there was laughter at some of the more bizarre ideas.

After ten minutes I paused the discussions and asked them, ‘What is your favourite idea, how might you demonstrate it to the rest of the class and who will your demonstrator be?’ Each group then came and demonstrated, so we had three very different examples of how a ball might start rolling and what could stop it.

Back in their groups I then told them, ‘Look at your brainstorm list, think about the demonstrations and decide what all your suggestions have in common.’ I asked each group what conclusions they had come to and then linked their responses (that the ball only started moving or stopped moving because of a force) to the forces diagram that I had on a poster.

This brainstorming activity was now over, but I was confident that they really understood Newton’s first law of motion. I asked students to bring their pieces of paper and their balls to the front and we put the brainstorm lists on the wall in case we needed to look at them again. I was really impressed with how creative their responses were.

Mr Prashad took an idea from this unit and adapted it. Many successful teachers have this ability to ‘borrow’ or adapt teaching techniques they see being used in other lessons or contexts for their own class. The discussion following a brainstorm is very helpful for learning because the students work with each other to construct the answers rather than being told the answer by the teacher.

5 Running a brainstorming activity in your classroom