Creating new ideas using Brainwriting
Brainwriting is a form of brainstorming and it is classified under the intuitive and progressive methodologies as it involves driving inspiration from other members in a cyclical way.
Brainwriting is a group based brainstorming technique aimed at aiding innovation processes by stimulating creativity.
Unlike Brainstorming, in Brainwriting rather than ask students to yell out ideas (a serial process), students are asked to write down their ideas about a particular question or problem on sheets of paper for a few minutes; then, each student passes their ideas on to someone else, who reads the ideas and adds new ideas. After a few minutes, the students pass the sheets again to others, and the process repeats. After a few cycles, the sheets are collected and posted for immediate discussion.
Benefits of brainwriting
Brainwriting has several benefits and advantages over brainstorming.
- Faster, more efficient idea generation
- Less social anxiety and competing personalities
- Often yields more diverse and creative idea
- Avoids falling into group-think consensus
Because brainwriting has everyone write down their ideas at the same time, the process often generates more ideas faster.
Additionally, brainwriting is a more inclusive approach to idea generation because it gives everyone an equal opportunity to participate and share their thoughts.
Brainwriting is a great alternative to brainstorming, especially when you have a mixed group of personality types (i.e., introverts and extroverts) or those who think better on paper first.
6–3–5 Brainwriting
This is the most common variation of brainwriting sessions. In brief, it consists of 6 students supervised by a teacher/tutor who are required to write down 3 ideas on a specific worksheet within 5 minutes, this is also the etymology of the methodology’s name. The outcome after 6 rounds, during which students swap their worksheets passing them on to the team member sitting at their right, is 108 ideas generated in 30 minutes.
Here’s a diagram and an example of how 6–3–5 Brainwriting works
How to do 6–3–5 Brainwriting with LAMS online
To demo this strategy, we will use a simple question: “How can YOU improve your scores this semester?”
Outline of Activities
- Introduction to Brainwriting and key question [Noticeboard].
- Grouping: sets each student into a groups, one student per group.
- Branching -using the grouping above, sets each student to his/her own branch.
- Each branch will go through six rounds -in which a document will be passes from one student to the next for each round. In each round, students only get 5 minutes to create 3 ideas based on the question while using other students’ previous ideas for inspiration [doKu].
- The last Q&A provides a summary of all the ideas raised in the 6 previous round [Q&A].
Preview this learning design as a student:
For a step by step run of the learning design or to download it and adapt it to your own teaching, take a look at this card:
