Foundations Newsletter

One of our students’ main problems in writing is their inability to generate solid ideas to support their essays in a short amount of time. We often see them struggle whenever we hand them a writing prompt.

If they are instructed to start with a quick brainstorm, they could take more than 30 minutes to come up with a “list” of two ideas, if you’re lucky. It’s even harder for those who start writing their essays right away without giving the topic a second thought. They almost always reach a dead end after the second paragraph.

But… there still is hope! With practice, once they understand how important/useful it is to brainstorm before they write, students end up thinking faster and finding their own ways to generate ideas in a quick and efficient manner. It is after all just like any other skill that just needs a lot of practice to master.

What is brainstorming?

I find that more students now understand the concept of brainstorming than previous batches, but there is still a good number of students who are not familiar with the concept of generating ideas before they start writing. So, to help them get started, they first need to understand what brainstorming is and how helpful it could be for them, and for the final outcome.

There might be other interesting ways, but I usually demonstrate what brainstorming is the first time we bring it up. A funny problem usually helps as I draw a big circle with arrows out of it and think out loud. After a few ideas, I pause and struggle, and that’s when they start throwing their ideas. And we brainstorm together.

You might want to use a video to introduce the concept, but I haven’t found anything more interesting/simple than this one. –Please, do add a comment if you have other videos/ways.

How to Brainstorm?

In addition to explaining that a brainstorm helps with generating as many ideas as we can, it might be a good idea to do an activity in class that requires the whole class to think out loud and brainstorm ideas for a problem.

Whether you choose to do it as a whole class activity, or let students do it in groups as you go around to help, it is important to assure students that the quality of these ideas is not important at this stage. It’s the quantity. If we stop ourselves at each bad idea we come up with, it’ll never end, or even start! And, I guess, this is one of the main obstacles they face when they brainstorm for the first time.

Also, students will most probably need guidance in terms of ways to think, or to look for ideas. So, it could help to show them how the 6 wh- questions can help them look in different directions. In addition, as our colleague Gary Pathare suggests, it could be useful to offer students a list of topics or areas to think about as they look for ideas, like: health, society, money, etc. Drawing or doodling can also be a helpful technique for visual or artistic students.

Then what?

After generating a list of ideas, it is important to show students how this list of ideas can be filtered to generate valid points for their body paragraphs. They can:

• classify these ideas and group them into paragraphs,
• combine two or more of these ideas to come up with one good solid point with a good example to support it, and
• eliminate some (or many) ideas, although they might find it difficult to let go.

To help them choose the right ideas, it could be helpful to explain that a 250 word essay won’t need more than 3 ideas for each body paragraph. But, each point will need an example or some kind of support.

After finalizing a list of 6 points (3 for each paragraph), to see how easy it is to write a good paragraph AFTER you brainstorm ideas, it could be a good idea to ask them to write a paragraph using these points. And, don’t waste this opportunity to stress that although it might have been a bit challenging to brainstorm, it did make writing the final essay a lot easier, which is the ultimate goal.