Le Brain Dump

I know that sounds glamorous and fancy, but it's actually a useful recall technique for students.

We've all been awake in the wee hours with our brains working overtime trying to plan and organize something (lesson plans anyone?). By taking a few moments to put all those thoughts, questions, plans, connections, and ideas on paper we are making space in our brain for other, less stressful things. Don't even worry about getting the order of things right or spelling things correctly, it's more about the process of dumping all that info onto the paper.

I used a low tech version of a brain dump today in class as an MCAS review session.

*I had seven large poster papers around the room and each poster had 6 topics on it.

*Small groups rotated every 5-6 minutes and wrote down anything that came to mind for each topic. Vocabulary words, drawings, definitions, anything!

*Then I polled students for the top topics that they didn't have a lot to dump onto the paper. I found that these topics were mostly in the technology and engineering category, so we spent some time on review.

*Then students had another chunk of time to independently visit posters and take notes.

*I rotated through to make sure no one was getting misinformation and I helped clear up any questions.

All in all I think it was a valuable lesson where I was the guide on the side and the students did the work! That's a win-win, also known as a mutualistic relationship.

Here's a link with some more information on the benefits of a brain dump and digital tools to use.