So over the past few months I have been experimenting with the use of mind mapping as a teaching tool.
I know many teachers who use it as a warm-up activity or even as a production task. But I’ve been curious wether it’s possible to create an entire lesson out of a mind map created by students. I’m developing a CPD training course that would help teachers to decrease their planning time and to increase student engagement and productivity by simply using mind mapping in the classroom.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, mind mapping involves taking a general topic or idea and then breaking it down into logical parts or sections that can be then broken down even further.
For example, here is a mind map I created with a class a few months ago on the topic of Social Issues.
Please ignore any spelling mistakes and reserve judgement on evaluating the validity of whether or not you believe these to be (or not be) social issues. My point is that this massive mind map was created by students, without any pre-teaching or scaffolding. After creating the mind map, I split students into groups and each group chose a topic they wanted to research and present. From there, for large portion of the lesson time, groups of students worked independently to research their topic and create short presentations. The final portion of the lesson was dedicated to each group giving a short presentation about their topic and fielding questions from the rest of the class. Now of course, one reason that it worked quite well in this instance was because they were already C1 level and higher and were able to talk quite fluently about this topic without much difficulty. For lower level students, more support would definitely be needed.
Which brings me to the point of this post. Last week, the unit topic for my B1 students was “Telling Stories” and considering that some of the other teachers and I are gearing up for Nanowrimo next month, it seemed like a good a time as any to get students thinking about the topic. So I decided to create a “Character Mind Map” that would build scaffolding that would allow my students to create their own character profiles.
Creating the mind map took almost 40 minutes but we finally ended up with this masterpiece:
It was a long process and I could tell the students were tiring of it towards the end. But what it allowed them to do was to have in front of them all the information they needed to create their own characters. By the end of the lesson these B1 students, who up till now had not been very thrilled with the idea of creating their own novel, were having a fantastic time telling me all about their characters. By structuring the lesson with this mind map, I was able to equip the students with everything they would need to succeed in producing character for their stories.
I have a lot more work and research to go as I work on developing my own training course for teachers to use mind mapping for their own topics and lessons. But I had to share this beautiful intersection of using mind mapping to present Nanowrimo to lower-intermediate students. For me at least, it felt like a break through.
If you have used mind mapping in your classroom or have any thoughts, I would love to hear from you in the comments!
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