Head of PE, Dean Goddard, attended an Alite course with Alistair Smith and was inspired to start using Accelerated Learning techniques himself, then with others in his Department and then across the whole school.  Find out how he did it! 

In its semi-rural location with supportive parents and its fair share of gifted and talented children you would expect St Martin's School in Essex to be a good school.

Indeed, St Martin's is popular, expanding and very oversubscribed. It has 1770 students and has been awarded Technology College status with a second specialism in Humanities. It is also a Beacon School. Yet St Martin's is a true comprehensive school with an intake that includes students of all abilities.

Before 2006, the number of students gaining five A*-C grades at GCSE always hovered around the 70% mark. Then last year the school celebrated its best ever GCSE results with 85% of students gaining a grade A* to C.

How did they do it? Well, it all started in the year 2000, when Head of PE, Dean Goddard (now Senior Assistant Head), attended an Alite course presented by Alistair Smith. He came away inspired to use Accelerated Learning techniques in his own classroom (and, of course, on the sports' pitches!).

"I was struck by how this could help boys' learning in particular. Many children who choose to study PE at GCSE are hands-on, kinaesthetic learners, so teaching to their preferred learning styles seemed common sense to me," he explained.

Dean spent time using and developing the Accelerated Learning techniques he had picked up at Alite's training until they were imbedded in his own teaching. Noticing a distinct improvement in children's attainment, in 2001 he decided that the time was right to introduce Accelerated Learning to the other members of the PE department.

Dean said; "It panned out well. I was lucky enough to have an enthusiastic team of staff who were keen to run with new ideas. We changed the whole focus of the department. Our meetings became a time to think about improving teaching and learning, not to concentrate on the mundane aspects of running a department."

The first step was to nail down ten ingredients of a great PE lesson and then to make sure that all of the lessons they taught included them. Everybody in the department concentrated on using positive language and insisted that the students did the same. Using the four stage learning cycle, mind maps, being quick to praise achievement and delivering lessons which were stimulating, exciting, and included visual, audio and kinaesthetic learning all helped to improve the GCSE grades in the PE department. 
 
In 1999 the number of PE students gaining A* to C grades was 51%. In 2002, after introducing the Accelerated Learning techniques across the board, they hit the 90% mark and in 2005 100% of students gained an A* to C.

This improvement didn't happen by magic. "We all work very hard," says Dean. "We take team practices every day at lunchtimes and after school and we have fixtures on Saturdays." The lesson planning takes time, but the focus of lessons is learning and the results speak for themselves.

In 2004 St Martin's School was inspected by Ofsted. 78% of lessons across the school were found to be satisfactory or good and 17% very good to excellent. In the PE department every single lesson that was observed was found to be outstanding. Outside the PE department, the inspectors stressed many positive characteristics of the teaching at St Martin's School but noted an over-domination by the teachers and a passive approach to learning by pupils.

This inspection prompted a desire within the school to move from good to great. Headteacher, Dr Darby, became keen to see Accelerated Learning used across the school. Dean led training on the four stage learning cycle, smart marking and other Accelerated Learning techniques. The ten ingredients of a good lesson have become an entitlement for all students in all subjects across the school and teachers are expected to talk to every child every lesson.

Many departments immediately took this on wholeheartedly, with cynics coming on board when they saw the improved results. Before 2006, the number of students gaining five A*-C grades was hovering around the 70% mark. In 2006, they hit 85%. Yet the hard work is ongoing - the school's 2010 vision is to have 90% of students gaining five A*-C grades.

How will they continue to improve?

St Martin's is now concentrating on Learning to Learn. Deputy Head, Simon London, explains how this year he has used a group of exceptional, energetic staff to deliver a Learning to Learn package to Key Stage 3 students. It involved revamping the curriculum.

"We recognised that we were struggling to deliver a suitable ICT course and that the students' skills were actually in excess of the curriculum, so we decided to use the ICT periods to launch Learning to Learn in Years 7 and 8," explains Simon. "I selected the most motivated teachers from across all faculties in order to pollinate Learning to Learn across the whole school."

For one period a week students in Years 7 and 8 learn, amongst other things, how lifestyle can influence learning, how to set targets and solve problems and how to improve their communication skills. They also study the physiology of the brain, multiple intelligences and how best to work as a team.

"We have noticed the effect in all areas of the curriculum," says Simon. "In Science, for example, students are showing a heightened self-awareness. They can self-evaluate and they really set smart targets now. We are looking forward to formalising Learning to Learn with Alite's L2 approach, which we are starting in September. The resources it offers are very exciting."

"We are developing a team culture," adds Dean. "Everyone has to be onboard and Accelerated Learning and Learning to Learn need to be embedded in the school. It must be consistent."

Dean commences his Accelerated Learning presentations to staff with a quotation from French academic and writer, Roland Barthes: "When teachers stop growing, so do their students."

And there is no doubt that at St Martin's School both teachers and students are growing and flourishing.

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Recent research shows that Chinese and English speakers use different parts of their brains when solving simple mathematical problems.  Find out the implications of this.

In 2003, researchers at University College London discovered that Mandarin speakers use more of their brain than English speakers when they are listening to their own language being spoken.

Now, in a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Professor Yiyuan Tang and colleagues have found that Chinese and English speakers use different parts of their brains when solving simple mathematical problems.

Twelve native English speakers and twelve native Chinese speakers were scanned with an fMRI whilst being asked to complete simple tasks using Arabic numbers. (This is the number system used in the West and taught to Chinese children at a very young age.)

They found that for numerical quantity comparison, (for example, when asked if 7 equals 3+4), the subjects all used the same part of the brain - the inferior parietal cortex. This region is thought to give us a sense of quantity.

However, with simple addition tasks, the native English speakers largely employed the left perisylvian cortices, which is a part of the brain we use for deducing the meaning of words. In contrast, native Chinese speakers engage the visuo-premotor association network, a region involved in the visual appearance of numbers.

In other words, the English speakers rely on a part of the brain used for language processing and the Chinese speakers rely on an area of the brain used for processing visual and spatial information.

The researchers, however, do state that this cannot be explained solely by language differences. They suggest that different mathematics teaching strategies are also likely to be responsible. For example, many Asian schools use the abacus regularly when teaching mathematics, and this could explain the use of the more visual part of the brain by the Chinese volunteers during this research.

"Ultimately this kind of work will show us… how it may be possible to teach Westerners some of the advantages of Asian thought and Asians some of the advantages of Western thought," said Richard E Nesbitt, from the University of Michigan, who was not part of the research team.

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Richard Gerver, Head of Grange Primary School in Nottingham, tidies his desk for us and reveals the three most important things on it.

"I tidied my desk especially for this interview, so some good has come from it before we even start! Not that it was that untidy, but I do have to confess that I found Lord Lucan under some paperwork!

Anyway, I'll start with an item that might sound a bit naff until you know the story behind it. It is a small picture frame and on the bottom is a motto. It reads; 'To teach is to touch a life forever.' It was given to me by a child in my first ever class, long before I made it to the lofty heights of Headteacher. This young lad had dyslexia, dyspraxia and was on the autistic spectrum. He was an inspiration to me. This picture frame with its motto helps me to remember that every single interaction I have with every single child is important - whether that interaction is as a teacher or as a headteacher. It makes me focus on the fact that everything we do as teachers will touch the lives of these young people forever.

My second item comes from a family holiday. It is a fluffy Mickey Mouse toy that I bought on a trip to Disneyland. It represents my personal philosophy that we should be creating the magic of Disneyland in schools. By that I mean that every day should be full of magic for the children we teach. It should be exciting and should tap into the interests of those children. Why shouldn't school be somewhere they WANT to be? I wish for teachers to think like advertising executives - we should be spending time marketing our product and making it truly relevant to our clients!

My final item is my CD player. I am one of those people who really need music to concentrate. I have my music on from the moment I arrive at work until the moment I leave. I love it. Some of the music I play makes the children cringe - they do rather turn their noses up at Frank Sinatra! But my Girls Aloud CD does gain me a bit more street cred. You should see the amazement on their faces when they walk in and I'm playing that CD!

My CD player also serves to remind me that we should be setting up learning environments that are safe and secure. Environments in which children are comfortable and where they feel that they can take risks and really learn.

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