53 Interesting Things to do in your Seminars and Tutorials: Tips and strategies for running really effective small groups (53 WAYS) by Gibbs Graham & Habeshaw Trevor & Habeshaw Sue & Strawson Hannah

Author:Gibbs, Graham & Habeshaw, Trevor & Habeshaw, Sue & Strawson, Hannah [Gibbs, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2012-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

26 Thought shower

This is a very good method for the situation where the aim is to expand people’s thinking in an area and look for ideas which might not be arrived at by rational methods. Because it is a situation where anything goes and people are not expected to justify what they say and also because they are stimulated by ideas coming from others, the results are often very creative. This method is particularly appropriate at the beginning of a course or section of a course: if the group surveys the area in the broadest possible way, they have a context into which to fit the detail and there is less likelihood that important items will be omitted.

In a thought shower members of the group call out suggestions which one member of the group – not necessarily the leader – writes down on a board, computer or flipchart.

The ground rules for the members are as follows:

• call out suggestions in any order

• don’t explain or justify your suggestions

• don’t comment on other people’s suggestions

(These ground rules give group members the freedom to express their ideas, even if they aren’t sure how they might explain or justify them.)

After an agreed period of time, or when no more suggestions are forthcoming, the group turns its attention to the total list, either accepting it as a statement of a range of possibilities (as in the first example below) or discussing the items and selecting the most useful (as in the second example below).

The procedure and ground rules will need to be made clear to the group before you start.

Two examples of the use of a thought shower:

a ‘On this nineteenth-century novel course, we’ll obviously be picking out different matters of interest from different novels but I think it’s helpful if we agree before we start on the range of things we’ll be looking out for in any novel that we read. So can we think about this? The title is Things to look out for in a novel and if you call them out, I’ll write them up.’

b ‘As trainee teachers it’s crucial that you know how to evaluate your own teaching and what methods of evaluation you have to chose from. Can we make a thought shower on Ways I can evaluate my teaching ? And then we’ll pick out the ones we want to concentrate on.’

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