Ideas | Eat.Sleep.Teach.

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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Ideas for Encouraging Collaboration and Creativity Part I: how to collaborate virtually

How to collaborate virtually

If you are working in different geographical areas and struggle to meet regularly then you need to find easy yet effective solutions to ensure that your collaboration does not suffer. Also, these ideas work well if you simply wish to kick-start the collaboration before meeting. Here follows a series if ideas that could help maintain a continuous creative working relationship:

Wallwisher: the creative wall

Wallwisher.com: great for sharing ideas – click to view example

Wallwisher.com is an online notice board where you create the content by adding interactive stickies to the board. This online tool is superb to use get the creative flare sparked up amongst colleagues. Sign up and start your own wall, then your co-workers can upload images, share ideas and links. Wallwisher is ideal to use a couple of days before the big planning meeting as it gets everyone thinking, then you start the meeting by going through the team’s examples.

The Creative Blog:

Blogs are commonplace nowadays and the list of blogging software is growing steadily and it’s fairly straightforward to set one up having little or no coding experience. The idea behind the creative blog is to keep a running discussion on a key issue, and change the issue regularly. For example, one school comes up with the topic for discussion and the teachers share ideas by adding comments. One particularly good way of keeping the creative flow going is to have regular times when staff or departments add their thoughts e.g. at Department Meetings. At the end of the set time frame, e.g. every half term, the post is printed to PDF or Issuu /ZinePal for easy sharing and to put the creative thoughts onto paper.

Simple Video-Conferencing:

You might have tried to do video-conferencing but you found it slow with poor audio and video quality? Although some methods are still annoyingly poor, some tools are in fact very good e.g. MikoGo.com . This service is not only free but also very straight forward and all you have to do is to register and download the MikoGo widget which you use to meet online.

Each time you want to start a session simply launch MikoGo and copy the session ID and then email/phone whoever you are meeting with and they enter the session ID – done! If you are doing vid-conf individually then inbuilt or basic webcams are fine. However, if you want to capture more than one person you’d benefit from a Point Tilt and Zoom video camera. They can be pricey but there are cheaper alternatives. The PTZs are great as they enable you to involve people around the room by ‘Pointing’ the camera and then zooming in on the person.

Collaborative Mapping:

This process is simple and only requires the people involved to sign up to a mind-mapping website that allows for sharing and collaborating on the same mind-map. There are many such tools available like for example:

CoMapping.com $25/year (approx £15): This is a superb tool as it gives users the possibility of collaborating on the same map at the same time.

Bubbl.us Free: Another solid application where people can work together on the same maps although not at the same time.

The strength of these types of online tools lay in the opportunity to sketch out rough ideas whilst at the same time build on each others’ thoughts. Many of such mind-mapping websites also give users to possibility of uploading images, adding links and even documents of various kinds. These more powerful features tend to involve a nominal charge, like with CoMapping (or MindMeister.com), but it is worth the money spent as you can lead, develop and collaborate on very large projects quickly and easily without much delay or complications. We have worked with both teachers and students on different projects and everyone agrees that it made collaborating more engaging and efficient – students benefited greatly during group work particularly when it involved a longer independent learning project spanning across a half-term as they could continue to work from home or simply just uploading documents, images and audio files to use when they returned to school.

If you haven’t tried any if these ideas yet then why not use one or two of the examples with a current collaboration, you will not regret it.

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Getting creative with SEN

Today my Year 9 low ability / SEN class made this:

Collage created by Year 9 at Copleston High School

It was the result of a lesson that started by analysing current adverts for their message. We then went on to look at the story of Kitty Eckersley and why her husband joined the Army.

Next, we brainstormed (properly – in fours and in silence, then sharing!) why men might volunteer to fight. With a little help, we came up with four ways that the government might try to persuade people to ‘join up’:

– Patriotism
– Anti-German messages
– Heroism
– Shame

Students then looked at six posters from WWI and identified one of the four elements within them, choosing specific parts and not whole posters.

As an extended plenary, students used the free form capture tool on the whiteboard to cut out the areas for their theme and designed new posters using the bits they had selected. We were able to save it as an image and print it out.

For homework, the students are comparing the posters they created to the Kitty Eckersley story and identirying which of the four methods most influenced her husband.

What was really good to see was students making informed choices and debating whether certain sections could be included under two headings. By allowing the creative task to come to the forefront of the lesson we unlocked a new set of thinking: students were thinking about the interplay of images and text, as well as how to create an overall effect. They got an end product and were willing to invest time in making it look good. Also, they wanted it to work.

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Educational Mashups part two: The 30 Circle Test

This post refers to an previous post added in July on educational mashups.

Students need to see how units of work tie together, link up, sequence and that there are recognizable patterns across what they have learned. It is of course our job to do this well but sometimes it can be very hard to make it concrete so that students understand. This is when the 30 Circle Test can help. We have adapted this activity for education from a task invented by IDEO, an innovative design company in the US (please watch Tim Brown’s talk on TED.com to see how they use it).

The 30 Circle Test

The key behind this activity is to get students thinking about the bigger issues and how they link together.

Print off a copy of the image/worksheet for every learner. Give them a Unit or Course area e.g. Surgery in Medicine through Time and give them 60 seconds to draw everything they know about the topic or unit. Students are not allowed to write anything just draw. Notice that quantity not quality is key here, so sketches rather than Monet will work better. Then get them to compare with each other and talk through what sort of items they have added to their 30 Circles – probably not many… Allow them time, round 7 minutes, to finish their drawings. Then in pairs ask students to compare with each other and give them a new 30 Circle sheet and get them to produce a new piece using their (can also be three students involved) previous ‘circle drawings’. It is important that they have established what the core of the topic or Unit is and what the key issues are for the activity to work so it needs to be guided by the teacher.

Works every time.

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Don’t allow Devil’s Advocates.

Wikipedia defines Devil’s Advocate as:

“…someone who takes a position he or she disagrees with for the sake of argument. This process can be used to test the quality of the original argument and identify weaknesses in its structure.”

This is of course an essential part of any successful collaboration and the process of innovation. However, if you “test the quality of the original argument and identify weaknesses in its structure” before having explored the idea fully and to its natural end, you run the risk of destroying a remarkable opportunity and a potentially innovative idea in a flash of a second. How can this happened one might wonder? You have heard the words before: “Do you mind if I play Devil’s Advocate for a second?’. This phrase does three things well: it will give the ‘Advocate’ in question the possibility of thinking in a non-productive fashion; take no responsibility for their words as they have taken on this new persona; and stop the creative process.

If you work in a successful team that brainstorms often and effectively you will notice that ideas, the good ideas, appear after lots of suggestions, tweaking and discussion. New ideas will also appear which can be listed and explored at a later date. When we write together or prepare for workshop sessions, we always start with a blank canvas and then thrash out thoughts and ideas on the page. After a few hours of serious ‘mapping’ we eventually begin to see something concrete, worthwhile and interesting. If one of us started playing the dreaded ‘Devil’s Advocate’ then we would never have come up with the books, websites and workshops like we have today.

Also, let’s not forget that a successful mapping/brainstorming session ends with a good idea which has been created by the team not the person. You have probably heard someone utter those words “That was my idea”. This completely undermines the whole creative process of collaboration and brainstorming. The idea of course appeared as a consequence of a lot of hard work and interesting/not-so-interesting ideas.

We are not saying that the birth of an innovative idea should not be followed up with critique. We believe that evaluation of ideas and critiquing projects are essential ingredients for the success of the collaboration/product or idea. However, one must allow the creative proccess to happen and for it to flow and not shoot down an idea before it has had a chance to flourish. Think about how many brilliant ideas that have been ruined or inventions that could have made a difference because of the Devil’s Advocate?

We say: encourage creativity and constructive, thoughtful and solution-focused discussion.

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