Brainstorm Graphic Organizers

Visual structures of new ideas and concepts

• Brainstorming creates a judgment-free zone to express creative ideas and explore new concepts.
• Widely accepted rules include, “quantity over quality,” “withhold judgment and criticism,” “build on each other’s ideas,” and “welcome oddity.”
• Graphic organizers, or visual representations of knowledge, are sense-making frameworks that facilitate teams as they brainstorm unconventional alternatives within a domain.
• Brainstorming Webs help develop a central concept or question, identifying its characteristics, supporting facts, and related ideas.
• Tree Diagrams communicate hierarchy, a classification system, or relationships between main and supporting ideas.
• Flow Diagrams document a sequence of events, represent the actions or processes of different actors in a system, or show cause and effect of interrelated elements.