Team Mind-Mapping

In a reading group focusing on comprehension, we recently read the realistic fiction book Stefan’s Shirt by Rosie Bensen. After the students independently read the book, we used a Kagan structure called Team Mind-Mapping to help us share our understanding of the text.

To begin this structure, we wrote the title of the text in the center of a large piece of chart paper. Next, the students came to a consensus on core concepts that are important to share when telling another person about a text. The students chose characters, setting, problem, solution, and the lesson learned in the text as their core concepts. We wrote these core concepts around our main topic on our chart paper.

After our mind map was set up, each student was given a different color marker. The students then began adding their thinking to the mind map. The students worked to write about what they knew about each core concept from the text. By the students having their own marker color, each student felt that he/she was accountable for adding his/her thinking to each part of the mind map. While the students wrote, they shared their thinking out loud and bounced ideas off one another. This helped to make Team Mind-Mapping a collaborative process. Finally, after the students wrote down all of their ideas, we discussed our text using our mind map as our visual guide. We noticed similarities between our ideas, and the students explained the differences we had.

Team Mind-Mapping about Stefan’s Shirt allowed the students to show what they knew about the text in a collaborative way that involved all group members and created a visual display of their thinking.