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I am a big fan of a technique called Freewriting which was introduced by Peter Elbow back in the late 70's. Freewriting is a way to graphically organize your thoughts and ideas on paper but unlike brainstorming which relies on listing ideas, Freewriting is a stream of thought on sentence form that enables students to get into the mode of writing. By forcing yourself to write down whatever you can think of you begin to unconsciously make order out of chaos and form coherent ideas and concepts. In a Guided Freewriting session, students are told to write for a period of five minutes on a predetermined topic and are encouraged to write about any sort of connection that the may come up with. "This topic reminds me of..." Or "I'm having a hard time with..." After the session is over students share their thoughts and ideas in an open forum. By doing this students reinforce the information they recently covered, practice writing and vocabulary skills and analyze concepts. Click here for a detail of how to do this.
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