Tag: CPD

Ideas for Encouraging Collaboration and Creativity Part II: how to brainstorm properly

If you are looking to start an innovations group either in your school or across county and you want to focus on a particular issue then you probably need to thrash out some ideas before you decide. A good old-fashioned brain-storming session will be great starting point for your collaboration. We also mentioned a few ideas about brainstorming and collaborating online in this post: How to collaborate virtually. Here follows a set of ideas which we use to work and plan together on projects, books or workshops and we feel they work very well.

Alien Worlds

The key to a successful brainstorming session is what you and other people bring to the table. So, let’s see what you have! Take out a piece of paper, a comfortable pen and list or map out your thoughts about this question for 3-5 minutes (be as specific as possible – you may need to break down ‘my experience’ to smaller chunks for example) :

What will I bring that will benefit the brainstorming session/planning meeting?

Now think about this question:

What will other people bring?

The aim is of course to have a varied group of people with different experiences but that is not possible all the time so what do you do then?  If you want to ensure that there is a constant flow of creativity within the group try to:

  • Read different literature e.g. books that indirectly have little to do with your area of expertise (see the end of the post for suggestions that will encourage creativity and innovation).
  • Subscribe to an inspirational magazine e.g. WIRED UK
  • Investigate new music and art e.g. try iTunes Essentials, Live365 or Spotify for new music, visit Banksy’s website to get inspired with street art, learn something new at LifeHacks or discover how almost anything works at How Stuff Works.
  • Give each member of the group a new persona, or role to play based on Tom Kelley’s Ten Faces of Innovation to really push yourselves to become more innovative (read this post about using Ten Faces of innovation with students).

Building up a portfolio of ideas takes time and a lot of hard work so it is important get into a sort of routine of collecting and recording as you go along. List books you want to buy, rip out magazine articles, save online using tools like EverNote or Awesome Note, note down quotes and words of wisdow or interesting websites. These might be invaluable one day.

The Idea Board

The idea board is a place where you add not only your ‘light bulb’ moments but also what may seem like minor ideas at the time. One such way could be to keep stickies nearby, adding notes to a Moleskin sketch-book, use your mobile phone to save thoughts or keep a washable mini-whiteboard in your office. Most of our ideas have come from some of these fleeting thoughts, and this plays a crucial part in the creative process.

Dumping Ground?

There are different ways of brainstorming, some structure their chaos by adding, ‘dumping’, all their ideas and suggestions on a long list – the more words the better. ‘Dumpers’ then organise their additions on a mind-map and can therefore categorise and group ideas more easily (this method is explained in more detail in the book Thinking Skills and Eye-Q).

Another way is to assign a scribe and everyone throws suggestions at them to write down on a flip-chart or similar. The key thing here is that there is no order except from the fact that the scribe ensures that all voices are heard – quantity is important here, not quality (well at least not yet!). Don’t be put off if all your ideas seem impossible or even stupid, because they are not. Think of each suggestion as a stepping stone to the team’s final idea and without these initial thoughts none of you would have got anywhere, so keep thrashing out ideas but leave the devil’s advocate outside (at least for a while).

Distance and Fuel

If you prepared well by stimulating your mind and recorded your thoughts of inspiration on the Idea Board as well as filled your dumping ground, or not, with lots of interesting (and let’s face it, not so interesting ideas), now is the time to take a well deserved break. Distancing yourself from all the suggestions, ideas, solutions and problems as well as refueling on coffee, water, biscuits and food is crucial if you are to come up with a truly innovative idea. This may only involve going for a brief walk, ordering a decent espresso or ‘sleeping on it’, you know what works best for you. But don’t skip this bit, you might regret it.

North or South?

This is the time to decide which way to go or what idea to run with and it might take some time. We have found that running with one seemingly obvious idea sometimes leads to the actual idea, perhaps one that was mentioned at the start of the process. Yet, this is not wasting time as without this creative activity we wouldn’t have thought of the end product and it’s always different to what we thought – but very exciting!

Creative Books

Here follows a list of books we have read and used often when we meet up to work. Some are just for inspiration whilst others have become great guides for us both.

The Ten Faces of Innovation: Strategies for Heightening Creativity

Dan Pink: Drive The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Harris, Caviglioli, Thompson: Thinking Skills and Eye Q: Visual Tools for Raising Intelligence

Banksy: Wall or Piece

Steve Jobs: The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience

Alain de Botton: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

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Planning GCSE with a smile

GCSE is a bit like going to the dentist for a check-up: you know that it is good for you in the long-run, but it leaves such a horrible taste in your mouth. Every so often it is worth going back to basics and designing a course from scratch. In this way you can ensure that it is enjoyable and contains learning that has real worth. The TEEP cycle can offer assistance when trying to achieve this not just for lessons, but in planning a whole scheme. Outlined below are six easy steps for creating a scheme of work that challenges students and makes GCSE much more rigorous:

 

1.       Prepare for Learning

The Big Picture is essential – both for teachers and students. Without it, the learning becomes a series of virtually independent chunks that bare no relation to each other. Planning without the big picture tends to produce a scheme that is heavy on content and light on memorable learning. From the perspective of the students, there is little to hang on to.

Firstly, a big idea or question is needed that will guide students through the work and offer them a line to pin their new learning on. Questions work well, because they encourage an answer and this in turn leads to better engagement. A unit on Crime might be approached with the following question:

 

Is Britain more violent and crime ridden than it has ever been?

 

The first lessons in the scheme – your way of grabbing them and getting them to think as soon as they came through the door – might focus on creating a debate or dilemma. For example, cutting out reports from newspapers about crime and creating a class montage helps to establish how the topic is viewed by the Media. This can then be analysed for dominate themes, e.g. crime is violent, on the increase, involving more children, more sexual in nature, etc. Offering an alternative viewpoint to this forces students to think about the following content and filter it through the debate. They will need to ask questions of and engage with the materials you provide.

When students see Steven Pinker providing an argument that the world is less violent than it has ever been and saying he can prove it, the reaction is always one of shock (see the film at http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html). This approach establishes a real problem that students will want to spend the unit investigating.

 The students will now be thinking about the topic and actually caring about its contents – for a moment they might actually forget it is a GCSE exam unit.

  

2.       Agree Learning Outcomes

The next step should be to establish how the question is going to be tackled. In lessons teachers discuss the content, process and benefits, and extending this to a whole scheme helps to increase understanding. The content is easy, you have a Big Question and the specifications state the boundaries. The process might take a little longer, but agreeing on a logical framework in order to answer the question is needed to assist understanding. Equally vital is identifying the skills needed and tools at hand. Now for the benefits. Exam preparation is a clear one, but then unpicking other benefits can lead to greater motivation among students. This is substantially easier if the big question is rooted in a real and genuine problem.

 

 3.       Present New Information

Before launching into the content proper, overview activities encourage students to make links and tease out the key words and ideas in the topic. This process allows students time to familiarise themselves with the topic before they begin. It is a chance to embed the main ideas of the unit. It could essentially be seen as an early revision opportunity.

 ‘Chunked up’ learning and creating mini-enquiries, each with a question and a relevance to the main enquiry will also help to aid understanding and maintain interest. Tackling the smaller parts makes it more manageable for students and allows for regular review of the Big Question. These reviews can be linked to exam question practice that will allow staff the track and monitor performance.

 

4.       Construct Understanding

Content should be delivered through a range of activities that engage students with problems to solve and hypotheses to test.

For example, mystery activities can not only deliver new information, but provide dilemmas that engage students in the process of analysis. This Billy the Kid Pardon Activity gets students working on a real life dilemma from 2007.

 

5.       Apply to Demonstrate

Each section of the course can be concluded with activities to extend thinking and help students piece together information to answer the Big Question. One strategy for this is model making. The models can physically represent the information in a way that was easy to remember. It could be as simple as making a hat for each part of the course, where the inside, outside and brim all represent something different. Another strategy is to use concept maps and get students to make links between the key facts within the section. Links help with memory and develop understanding.

 

6.       Review

Starting the year with a blank display board and gradually added work, evidence and models under the Big Question is a great way to keep track of learning and develop a clear approach. Reviews in each lesson should be easy to plan as teachers can refer back to the Big Question and discuss whether an answer is anywhere near being established. Answers can be unpicked to see how students have come to their conclusions. The strategies they used can be recorded for future use, creating a kind of GCSE toolkit for them to refer to and use.

A unit can seem like a long time, but sandwiched together it is only about twenty four hours (of teaching). However, leaving students with an activity that is creative and exciting will help with positive feelins aout the work. The tendency can be to assess at the end of the unit, but this does not always provide students with an opportunity to look at a unit in its entirety and make sense of it. Neither does it provide a natural high with which you would want them have. No actor would want to go through weeks of rehearsals only to find they were writing the programme notes. It doesn’t have to be grand, just fun and cover the whole unit. Making a song about the topic set to an appropriate tune would be simple and not very time consuming, but it would also be memorable. 

The process of learning at GCSE should engage students and focus them in a way we expect from Key Stage 3. They must feel part of the learning and care about the final outcome.

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