Tips & Tricks
- Establish a warm, supportive environment for students to feel confident when coming out with new ideas that may lay on the common ground.
- Some experts recommend a “warm-up” dynamic to boost students’ creativity before starting the brainwriting/3-6-5- technique. In this sense, it is recommended to start with situations that give rise to hilarity, with well-structured scenes and then move on to a serious approach.
- Emphasise that a quantity rather than the quality of ideas is the goal, and that it’s okay for students to think outside the box.
- Remember to discourage evaluative or critical comments from peers during the ideas-gathering phase and do encourage and provide opportunity for all students to participate
Slow networked or cyber-variant variant of brainwriting
Instead of using a sheet of paper, this technique can be applied by email, on a sheet of a text editor. Here there must be a leader, an organiser of the working group, who creates the sheet(s), sends them to each member of the group, receives their reply e-mail and organises the resulting sheet(s). In this variant it is very useful to avoid displaying the name of the person who wrote previously, as this creates an atmosphere of absolute confidentiality and therefore the most irrational and creative ideas flow like water from the spring. The leader also has to define the role of exchanging sheets. Although this variant is slower and loses some of the face-to-face interaction, it is a useful and simple alternative that takes very little time for each member. It is very effective, for example, to implement this technique in groups of five to ten people, where each month a different issue is proposed and at the end of the month the sheet is closed.
