Experiment Phase: Brainstorming

For the warm up this week, I decided to make a to do list on sticky notes and then place them outside of the room. When I saw this as an option, I immediately felt like this is the warm up I should do. With teaching, course work and parent conferences next week, it's hard to not have my long to do list on my mind constantly. I found that it was helpful to do this because I now have the important things I must do written down, out of my head and even out of the room! It was a low prep warm up and I enjoyed it. I think there could be a way to adapt this to my classroom too. I was thinking I could have students write down a few things that are worrying them/ on their mind during our morning meeting. We could talk about them and then put them outside the classroom in a box or something. It would be interesting to try out.

I tried both of the opposite thinking and analogy thinking to initiate my brainstorming phase. Each of them had their strong points. During the analogy thinking exercise, I liked that it got me looking for outside resources to draw upon. During the opposite thinking exercise, I liked that it forced me to look at the problem from a different perspective. I think that moving forward, I would use a mixture of the two. I think that they are most helpful when used together, not as separate thinkings for myself.

During opposite thinking, my assumptions were that students were happy to be back at school and that I assume all students find wearing a mask and distancing to be difficult all day. The opposite of that thinking would be that students are not happy to be at school, students are scared to be at school, students would rather be doing remote learning and students enjoy being distanced from each other. These opposite thoughts are helpful in my brainstorming because I am now thinking that if students really are unhappy to be at school or scared to be at school, then social emotional learning would be important to focus on to solve my problem. The helpful parts of analogy thinking were the resources I found. I found some resources that talked about ways to help students through social emotional learning. One thing that stuck out to me while reading through the inspiration I found was a point made about making time each week to check in for a face to face discussion or a written discussion about how things are going for each student. I think this will be an important part of my problem solving because it would give me a chance to connect with each student one on one, which is something that hasn't happened much since school started. Other aspects that stuck out to me and that will be essential for me are to create an emotionally safe space, make learning fun and engaging and to provide consistency for them throughout their daily routines.

Overall, I feel the different thinking exercises were helpful in starting the process of brainstorming. It allowed me to think about the problem from different perspective and look into work of people who have solved a problem similar to mine.