This EdThread is part three of a series on ideas as objects. See part 1 and part 2 also.

If you were going to organise your garage, would you just sit in your living room and try to imagine how to rearrange all of the objects within it? Or, instead, would you get in there and start moving things around?

Clearly, you’d go and start moving things around. So why is it that we don’t take a similar ‘get them out and move them around’ approach to ideas?

This idea, shared by Oliver Caviglioli, was revelatory for me because much of what I do, and enjoy doing, is combining, and sequencing ideas. Here, Oliver had offered a new way to approach this task that eases the burden on working memory and helps ideas to be organised much more efficiently.

Here’s how I do it! I’ll use the example of how I wrote Tools for Teachers, and I believe that this approach can be used to write any non-fiction book!

Step 1: Collect valuable information

You can’t produce a good output without quality inputs (captured in the idea of ‘information diets’). For Tools for Teachers, I collected this information over the first five years of interviews for the Education Research Reading Room Podcast.

Many people collect insights from their lived experience, a literature review, listening to podcasts or reading books, discussions, or many other methods.

Step 2: Atomise ideas

Collecting vast swathes of information isn’t enough, we need to break valuable information down into insights. By my definition, an insight is a valuable idea that can be expressed in a single sentence. Here’s an example of an insight drawn from an ERRR interviews, and that went into Tools for Teachers:

• ER28.1 Engage with the theories of action of your staff in order to generate sustainable change (VR)

This insight dot point tells me that in ERRR episode 28 with Viviane Robinson (VR), the first insight that I extracted (28.1) was, ‘Engage with the theories of action of your staff in order to generate sustainable change’.

Here are some other insights extracted from ERRR podcasts that went into Tools for Teachers:

• ER24.1 Explicit Instruction requires proceeding in small steps, checking for student understanding, and achieving active and successful participation (LH)

• ER45.2 Lead through Repetition (TS)

• ER57.6 Motivate students by being consistent with the follow up (HFW)

LH, TS, and HFW refer to Lorraine Hammond, Tom Sherrington, and Harry Fletcher-Wood respectively.

Each of these insights was stored as a separate note in Obsidian, which is my app of choice for organising ideas. Each had the insight as the title, often with supporting information in the note, such as additional quotes, anecdotes, or examples that added colour or detail to the broader insight.

Atomisation of ideas is crucial because it allows you to mix and match information in different ways to enhance clarity and add value.

Step 3: Put ideas in containers

Once ideas have been atomised, the process of recombination takes place. I took all of the ideas and began to group them. I found that they naturally fell into eight main containers (Explicit instruction, Behaviour Management, Motivation, Leadership, etc), which became the eight chapters of the book.

I then noticed that these eight chapters fell into three meta-containers of teach, lead, and learn, which became the three parts of the book.

I then got to work within each chapter, grouping the constituent atomised ideas/insights into smaller groups which became sub-sections of the chapters.

Here are the smaller containers that I found all of the ideas within the motivation chapter sat:

Step 4: Sequence containers along paths

Once we’ve got ideas in containers and sub-containers, we need to order them into a coherent narrative.

This is made easier (from a technical standpoint), by having each atomised idea as a single dot point, because you can simply use keyboard shortcuts to move them up and down to reorder them. Here’s what it looks like to manipulate ideas in Google docs (find out more about the keyboard shortcuts in Google docs here. Moving bullets up and down is called, ‘Move paragraph up/down’). The same methods can be used in Obsidian and may other apps

As each atomised idea is clearly labelled (e.g., ER45.2 Lead through Repetition (TS)), they can be easily found again in the process of writing to refer to more detailed notes.

It’s probably helpful for me to point out that the value of having ideas condensed into single sentences is that you can maintain perspective over the whole text whilst reorganising/reordering the ideas within it. If you’re copy and pasting whole paragraphs (which is what people often do), it’s very easy to get lost, because you spend all your time scrolling up and down through a large document.

If you have ideas distilled into dot points, you can easily sequence those dot points then expand upon then when you come to the writing stage

Step 5: Write and polish

Finally, write! Take each of the dot points now in a coherent sequence, and expand upon them, link them together, and write the finished piece! (this is an EdThread on organising ideas, not on quality writing, so I won’t expand on this any more at this pt : )

And that’s it!

Let me know if you found it interesting/helpful to have insights into the process of using the concept of ideas-as-objects to sort vast numbers of ideas into a coherent and valuable structure!

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Other threads to pull on

• Give personalised feedback to students without writing it, just scan a QR code and speak it… and it’s free! So cool, here.