I discovered mind mapping when I was at school 35 years ago, and found that by setting out my thoughts in a simple, “everything on one sheet of paper” way, it was much easier to remember things.

Developing, revising, and maintaining a school business plan is now a major concern for everyone involved in school management and many Heads, Bursars and business managers now find themselves under considerable pressure to find new ways to plan and come up with truly innovative solutions to recurring questions.

There are many ways and approaches which have much to offer to schools in individual circumstances, but from my own experience, I have found that “mind mapping” is both an innovative and a productive problem-solving tool.

So, what is Mind Mapping?
Mind maps are simply a tool for displaying and connecting information ideas by representing information visually instead of in the traditional linear written way. They’ve been around for centuries of course, and in their basic form, consist of an idea or theme – represented by a word in the centre of the page – and branches radiating from it showing all the other ideas or themes which are related to it in some way.

Each of these sub-ideas may then in turn have their own “sub, sub- ideas” represented by more branches or even whole new maps of their own emanating from the centre.

With the arrival of affordable software to replace pen, paper and colouring crayons, the mind map, like the spreadsheet before it, has only now started to take off as a mainstream business tool and is spreading like wildfire by word-of-mouth recommendations from users. Once experienced, its users tend to become positively evangelistic about it and find they can’t live without it.

I discovered mind mapping when I was at school 35 years ago, and found that by setting out my thoughts in a simple, “everything on one sheet of paper” way, it was much easier to remember things.

I just knew that if I organised my ideas and my notes in graphic form on a piece of paper, with branches and nodes, it helped me to learn better and now after more than 20 years of mind mapping on paper as a geography teacher and Head, I am delighted to find that technology has finally caught up with me and that software is now available. I have introduced MindManager software to teachers and pupils at the Dragon and found that it has been received in the same positive way

Once colleagues were persuaded that this is not just a recent fad, but a tool that has evolved out of years of research and usage, and which can be used for everything in the school, from day-to-day management, planning for inspections, teaching and problem-solving, they were more open to practicing.

Outside the classroom, I use mind mapping to plan my working life. With a click of a mouse, you can put your ideas into separate branches and, instead of using scraps of paper and coloured pens, you can formulate things in one place and drag ideas to where they fit best.

Previously I wrote my speeches and presentations in linear fashion on paper, but using software, you can deliver it without notes because it is all there in your head. You can just picture your mind map and extemporise on the bullet points.

I also use it as presentation software as well. I have presented the school’s strategic plan after drawing it up as a mind map and I delivered it to parents using the software to show the expansion of thoughts from the central point. You can juxtapose ideas; on one side of the mind map one can place all the curriculum information and, on the other side, the extracurricular. People can start to see the logic and the balance of the curriculum in front of them, and the linkages between various elements of it.

Mind mapping helps users to gain insights into the connection and relationships between various parts of a problem with the resulting advantages of arriving at an ideal solution.

Outside the classroom, I can mind map my home life as well: “It’s useful for shopping lists, moving house, lots of personal things. If you’re planning a 21st birthday party for your daughter, as we have just done, it is a fantastic way of setting things up.”

How does mind mapping work?
Roger Sperry, a Nobel Prize winner in physiology, found that the cerebral cortex of the brain has two hemispheres, with the right side appearing dominant in rhythm, spatial awareness, gestalt (wholeness), imagination, dreaming, colour, and dimension; and the left side appearing dominant in words, logic, numbers, sequence, linearity, analysis, and lists.

By stimulating both right and left hemispheres, a mind map has greater power to evoke human memories than ordinary notes do. Some of the properties of mind maps that make them so effective are: