Accelerated learning: A revolution in performance?

Its methods may sound a little crazy, but accelerated learning is being tried at a school in the Midlands and is producing amazing results. Hilary Wilce joins the class to see how it works

It is nearing lunchtime in Year Five's class at Brickhouse Junior and Infant School in Sandwell, but despite a long morning no one is flagging. In fact, the air is fizzing as 24 young minds throw about ideas for ways to describe the hair of a character that they are writing about. Their teacher, Kevin Cobane, conducts them like an orchestra, drawing responses from everyone. "Great, Liam," he says. "Wow, that's fabulous! Brilliant, Georgia. 'The sun is reflecting off his hair' – can't you just see it?"

How is he getting them to work so hard? At first glance, the class looks like a traditionalist's dream. All the desks face the teacher, everyone is paying attention, and there is not a hint of a behaviour problem. But this classroom is based on relatively recent findings about how the brain and learning works. All is not what it seems.

There is the blizzard of can-do posters on the wall, extolling life skills such as courage and initiative. Then there is the work that the pupils are doing – not the usual pieces of writing, but wriggling, multi-coloured diagrams and maps, whose spider- legs grow and branch as the children furiously note down their ideas. Then there are some very peculiar-sounding instructions from Cobane. For example, when he asks the children to imagine how their character might sound when he talks, he tells them "to turn up the volume knob" at the bottom of their piece of paper. Strangest of all is the way that after 20 minutes of quiet concentration, the whole class erupts into a "brain break" during which Cobane leads them in several rousing choruses, complete with complicated cross-body exercises, which leave everyone flushed and laughing.

"It's livelier and more fun now," says Jodie Whitehouse, 10. "We used to have kids muck about, but they don't any more. We use both sides of our brain. I didn't know there were two sides. I always thought it was just one lump."

Cobane is a fan of something known as accelerated learning. Or, to be precise, he is a convert. When he was appointed as deputy head at Brickhouse, and heard what the head, Colin Hocknull, wanted of him, he thought it sounded crazy. But just half a term into putting the ideas into practice he declares himself, "amazed, gob-smacked" at the results. His class had a very rough year last year, with many changes of teacher, but is already producing the level of work that he and Hocknull had been hoping to see by next summer.

"Accelerated learning refocuses teachers' attention away from teaching and towards learning," he says. "The children are so enthusiastic - they can see what's in it for them, and you can use it with everyone...from kids who are statemented [because of special educational needs], to the most able."

"We've had a nursery nurse come back from maternity leave ," says Hocknull. "And she immediately said, 'What's going on? It feels different.' " And an evening meeting where the school introduced the new ideas to parents went an hour and a half over time - everyone wanted to stay and talk.

Accelerated learning, as any child in Cobane's class could explain, is nothing to do with hot-housing bright kids, but a new way of approaching learning. It is based on what is known about how the brain works, about attention and motivation, and about different learning styles. It gets children to use the analytical and creative sides of their brain in a relaxed but alert atmosphere specifically designed to foster learning.

It came to Brickhouse because Hocknull had a problem. Before he arrived, the school, which serves a sizeable council estate, was failing. He had turned that around, and Ofsted praised much of the school's teaching, but attainment levels were still low. "I asked myself, if the teaching's so good, why aren't we doing better?" When he saw accelerated learning in another school, he felt he had found the answer.

The process begins by creating a climate where children feel secure and positive about learning. This includes things like inspirational posters, and more subtle things like how teachers speak to pupils and structure the things they ask them to do. It can also include making water available in classrooms so tiny brains don't dehydrate, handing out "brain food" such as bananas, playing music (Handel's Water Music for concentration; The Flight of the Bumblebee for tidying up) and using stretches and songs, often with a cross-lateral component (stretching to touch your knee with your elbow), to refresh and wake up the brain.

It emphasises a style of teaching where learning is always connected to what has gone before, and is constantly previewed and reviewed. It also emphasises allowing children to learn through seeing, hearing and doing. Many boys, for example, appear to learn primarily by feeling and doing, and make much better progress if this is taken into account.

The package creates fervent disciples, and most teachers immediately see the sense of it. Helen Hamer, a director of Alite (Accelerated Learning in Training and Education), a company founded by one of the gurus of "brain-based" learning, Alistair Smith, says that their training days always produce hall-fulls of heads nodding in agreement – not least because accelerated learning formalises many of the things good teachers already do by instinct.

So why aren't these ideas taking the British educational world by storm – especially as they have been around for more than a decade, and are already well-known in Australia, New Zealand and the United States? A big problem is that unless they take root deep in a school's daily life, enthusiasm can fizzle out quickly. A primary school in Surrey which hit the headlines seven years ago for embracing accelerated learning, for example, now no longer has any teachers who know much about it.

Another problem is that it can be easy to pick up only the sexy bits of the story, then be disheartened when a banana, a bottle of water and a Mozart symphony fail to revolutionise a class's performance.

But all that is changing fast as evidence for the success of "brain-based" learning grows, and more and more schools adopt part, or all, of one of the models now on offer.

"We've just finished a two-year action research study into how schools can help learners to learn," says Toby Greany, director of the charity, The Campaign for Learning. "We looked at a variety of things going on in 24 schools and there is definitely emerging evidence that these things raise attainments." The campaign found that they had a huge impact on teacher morale and motivation, and now wants initial teacher training courses to contain more on how humans learn, and the factors that encourage or inhibit learning.

Alite agrees about their impact, pointing to schools such as Cramlington Community High School, in Northumbria, which has been following accelerated learning ideas for five years, and has seen its proportion of children getting five good GCSEs rise from 55 per cent to 73 per cent in that time.

Alite's trainers are working at full stretch, running eight or nine courses a week, and touching "probably 200 schools a month". It has also designed a longer training course, to help teachers "embed" the ideas more deeply into schools.

But these new ways of teaching and learning are already taking their place at the forefront of school development. They underpin the big new push to raise standards in the early years of secondary school, and form the basis of the work with less advantaged children being done by organisations such as the University of the First Age. A huge amount of interest is also being shown by schools in the lively new educational networks such as action zones and learning clusters, which have been set up by the Government to raise standards in and foster collaboration between the schools in deprived areas.

In addition, many more primary schools are likely to feel free to explore such innovations following a report from Ofsted last month that in effect gave them the green light to go back to shaping their own curriculum, provided they keep within the broad framework of the national curriculum, and the numeracy and literacy strategies.

After years of tests and targets, this is what many schools have been longing for. At Brickhouse they are already ahead of the game, and looking into ways in which they can put back the creativity they feel has been taken out of primary schools over the recent past.

"People are enthusiastic about school again," says Hocknull. "Parents, pupils, classroom assistants, teachers – everyone."

SEVEN STEPS TO ACCELERATED LEARNING

Accelerated learning is one of a number of "brain-based" teaching techniques that help people learn more effectively, and which are increasingly used by companies and schools here and abroad.

All are based on the belief that we can learn how to learn, and that most of us only use a tiny part of our mental capacities. They draw on disciplines from neuro-science to cognitive psychology, and add in ideas from nutrition and health. They borrow elements of neuro-linguistic programming, Daniel Goleman's writing about emotional intelligence, and Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, and use tools like Mind Maps developed by lateral-thinkers such as Tony Buzan.

Accelerated learning was developed in this country by Alistair Smith. It encourages teachers to develop a "low-risk, high-challenge" environment in which pupils feel safe and alert enough to learn, before following a seven-step teaching cycle.

This involves:

1. Being positive, and making sure any lesson connects with what has gone before and what is to come.
2. Giving an overview of the lesson to come.
3. Telling pupils what they will have achieved by the end of the lesson.
4. Delivering the (shortish) lesson, with lots of learner questions and language exchanges, and giving new information in visual, auditory and kinesthetic (seeing, hearing and doing) modes.
5. Using a balance of activities in these different modes to explore what is being learnt.
6. Encouraging pupils to demonstrate their understanding of what they have learnt.
7. Reviewing the lesson and previewing what is to come.

For more information visit www.alite.co.uk

education@independent.co.uk