Scaffolding New Content with Brain Writing (Primary)

One of the biggest stressors in the academic environment is when a students needs to answer a question in front of the entire class. Innocently, we teachers believe the dynamic of asking students to recall information they studied in the recent or not-so-recent past, is the perfect way to help them to transition easily into a new unit or lesson. It is actually one of the least effective ways: the students who remember, will answer and the students who don’t remember, will be horrified if called on and will sink deeper into passivity as the lesson continues. Here is a way to get all of your students active and excited about beginning a new unit that is based on past knowledge. Try it and you are going to be convinced!

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Brainwriting. Lesser known than brainstorming or mindmapping, brain writing gives students the opportunity to share ideas in a safer setting and often yields more ideas in less time than traditional group brainstorming.
Brainwriting is very simple to prepare and you’ll find the steps in the attached PDF. Some of its advantages:

  • it relieves students of the anxiety of the public classroom forum – such as in brainstorming;
  • it raises the quality and quantity of the students’ output as they learn from each other;
  • it synthesizes and summarises key points in the topic;
  • the different learning styles included (verbal, linguistic, auditive, written, manipulative), increase synaptic connections and so encourage long-term memory.

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