Recently my friend Lisa Blackford gave me a draft of talking points or thoughts leading to potential talking points that her students had constructed in their planning for how they will approach members of the Traverse City community about a shared class project. Some of the points are directed to themselves such as “what we do NOT want to say” or “we may be just as uncomfortable.” In the midst of this reflection and anxiety a couple of statements seemed to really focus on what the class wanted to learn: “We want to learn the complexities of being a social worker in working within the systems of homelessness, food insecurities.”

I was trying to get my class to do a some similar brainstorming explaining to them how they needed to develop talking points so that their listeners would know why we are doing this class project and would become interested in helping us with it. I gave them several prompts to just try and get them producing ideas and thinking through the communication problem they were facing, but we hit a wall. They expected me to tell them what to do, or maybe they thought that I wanted to tell them to say and do certain things. However, in my writing class part of what they need to learn is to practice different writing invention processes.

I didn’t want to tell them what to write, but we needed to break through and get working. Lisa had told me I could share her class’s brainstorming, so I did. My class took the “we want to learn” construct and starting generating ideas that I think got increasingly nuanced. Here’s the some of the sequence of their new thoughts:

“We want to learn more about what they need and what people can do to help.

We want to learn more about the stigmas and what’s not true.

We want to learn more about their lives before they experienced homelessness–rather we want to learn more about them as a whole person–how they see themselves as people.”

After we generated these ideas about what we wanted to learn, my students suddenly seemed to become more focused in their own planning groups. They worked out interview questions and conversation starters and started distributing tasks among each other. The notes from our class brainstorming weren’t transferred directly to the writing they did in their groups, but the brainstorming created a catalyst for us to write.