Mindmapping, Essential Questions and How Students Learn

This past week, they worked on the writing process, responding to the three essential questions for the unit on Imperialism and the Progressive Age at the start of the 20th century. The first step was to brainstorm, then to outline, followed by the writing of the essay. Besides interesting responses to the questions, I found myself learning further how students use the Web with their research techniques as they construct their answers.

Sophia explained that she started her mind map with one of the essential questions in the middle, building the first circle of responses leading to text boxes (nodes) where she recorded her first-level response. The next step, she explained, was to do a Web search using keywords. Sophia then linked new nodes into her map as she read the sites and experienced “brain pops” of understanding. She took in new knowledge while making connections back to her original responses.

What caught my attention was the next step for Sophia. She explained her discovery in the book The Culture of Excess: How America Lost Self-Control and Why We Need to Redefine Success, which connected to the essential question of “Why excess?”. Sophia then went on to explain how she built another circle of thinking and research on her mind map, where she added nodes listing her ideas after reading the author’s site and book review sites with sample pages.

Expanding the mind map into circles of new nodes at various stages of thinking and researching reminded me of the color-coded mind mapping system we piloted with Dave Navis at HKIS several years ago. We worked with teachers to have their students start each unit of study by doing a preliminary mind map where they listed their responses to the essential questions. This pre-assessment helped guide the next instructional steps. As the students progressed through the unit of study, they built out their mind maps with further responses. After the unit, the students would finalize their thinking by completing their mind maps. 

The teachers would then use the diagrams to assess student understanding and the student-produced projects, which were standard with our PBL units. Dave had his students use a different color for each stage of their thinking, thus emphasizing the metacognition of the connections throughout the interdisciplinary unit.

A further step that is especially helpful if you use Inspiration is to have the students use the text box on the connector lines between nodes to explain further their thinking that led them to each new node of understanding. Talk about a powerful way to help our learners think about how they learn!

Sophia went through a similar process. It was interesting for me to ask other students to explain their thinking as they answered the essential questions, leading to a deeper understanding. The mind maps outlines, and eventual essays provided a pleasant visual learning journey.