Brain Writing

✰✰✰

Best For: MYP and DP, Upper EAL students
Description: Brainwriting is simple. Rather than ask participants to yell out ideas (a serial process), you ask them to write down their ideas about a particular question or problem on sheets of paper for a few minutes; then, you have each participant pass their ideas on to someone else, who reads the ideas and adds new ideas. After a few minutes, you ask the participants to pass their papers to others, and the process repeats. After 10 to 15 minutes, you collect the sheets and post them for immediate discussion.

I tried the Brain-writing strategy with my Grade 11 Visual Arts students. I divided my 13 students into two groups based on their specialties (e.g. technical competence, communication of ideas, conceptual qualities, cultural values, languages, and general struggles), and they wrote their final piece plan on a lovely pink paper. I gave them the simple instructions like “write about your focused culture(s), skills/techniques, and sketches if you want to.” I was worried in the beginning because as this cohort have high-achievers, they might not be able to provide constructive feedback nor not sharing their personal ideas on the final piece. (Monica Hwang)

Ranking: This strategy is quite good, though not as much on EAL strategies involved, still a great chance for students to do some visible thinking!