Forced Association
This strategy is useful in two major areas of thinking: developing creativity and brainstorming to generate ideas and awareness of relationships. Words and images are forced into an association to develop new perspectives around the original topic. By using seemingly unrelated words to force the connection, limitations of typical associations are removed and creative ideas begin to flow. And, most importantly, students’ basic thinmking is stretched to reach higher levels of learning.
Implementation
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- Carefully review the idea, situation, concept, event, or condition that you want students to consider.
- Choose words that are concrete and accessible to students, but that have no clear relationship to the concept being studied. Examples: Tree, bird, glue, hammer, candle.
- The more random the association, the better to generate forced associations.
- Provide five to six Forced Association terms to use with one course concept.
- An image or an actual object of that word could be substituted.
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Classroom Management
- Model a Forced Association to demonstrate how the process works.
- Mention the importance of being open to any and all ideas in the brainstorming segment.
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