Case studies

Brain Wave
The experience of the largest learning forum in the country
CPR Success Zone
Sue Sayer

Sue Sayer is an AST on secondment to the CPR Success Zone, the only Education Action Zone in Cornwall. This EAZ covers three Secondary Schools, one Special School, 25 Infant and Junior Schools and one Nursery. A trained Secondary teacher, Sue has spent most of her career teaching Geography and Leisure and Tourism. She has undertaken a range of management responsibilities, including Head of Year, Head of Department, Head of Upper School, CPD Coordinator, GNVQ Coordinator and ITT Coordinator. Sue’s new role is as Learning and Teaching Team Leader. Her interest in accelerated learning and brain-based approaches began during an INSET day led by Alistair Smith at Redruth School: A Technology College. More recent involvement with the University of the First Age, as a fellow, has enabled Sue to transform much of the theory into practice.

“Wouldn't it be great to be able to run a school the way we want to...?” It had only been a moment of reverie, but didn’t great events always start like this?

Brain Wave took place between the 1st and 5th July 2002. Three CPR Success Zone Secondary Schools (Camborne School and Community College, Pool School and Community College, and Redruth School: A Technology College) jointly sent 90 Year 7 to 9 students to the Brain Wave School, based in the new Learning Centre in CPR College in Camborne. This was our chance to plan, run and evaluate our very own school!

The school had the explicit aim of trying to attain high academic standards while focusing on the process of pupils’ learning and their motivation, rather than through focusing on what was to be taught. We wanted to maximise the learning of everyone involved, whilst fostering a love of learning, self awareness, self belief and a sense of place within their community. In pupil speak terms, our aims looked like this….

The Set Up

One student from each Key Stage 3 tutor group in each of the three schools attended the Brain Wave school. This representative had been selected by the students themselves using De Bono’s ‘Six Hat’ thinking tool which helped them first decide how to decide before identifying a student to send. This provided a wide cross section of abilities and needs. The Brain Wave students were then organised into eight families of 15 students in two vertical mixed teams.

Each family of students worked in their home base room with two peer tutors (Year 10 and 11 students from the same schools, trained to support learning) and a teacher. These staff were supported by a Headteacher (with authority delegated to them by the planning team), three administrators, one IT technician and three senior peer tutors (responsible for coordinating the work of the adults, Peer Tutors and students).

Our curriculum was designed to deliver a wide range of knowledge, skills and attitudes within a high challenge framework. Teams within each family were asked to design a Learning Centre for Cornwall. In order to successfully achieve this, they needed to provide evidence of the following by the end of the Thursday:

Written report - what the Centre was about and who it was for, to include:

• labelled map to show its location and the site advantages
• aims/mission statement
• logo and motto/slogan
• simple costings spreadsheet for an audience of financial backers (investment bankers, venture capitalists, EU, sponsors, donors)
• business plan
• mind map to summarise ideas about the Learning Centre

Promotional literature (part of which had to be written in a second language)
Design idea in 2D
Iterative summary – student personal logs of what had been learned during the week and how
Two minute presentation to sell the idea.

The Brain Wave building was staffed and open between 8am and 8pm with Breakfast and Homework Clubs, run by peer tutors, offered to all. Every day was planned around a five stage learning cycle (pre-conditions for learning, setting the scene/big picture, input, activity, and review and reflection). The core parts of each day started with a collective assembly for all and ended with a time for personal reflection. Students were asked to self assess the ‘what and how’ of their learning that day and, whilst peer tutors provided each student with written feedback about their participation and contributions, teachers did the same for peer tutors.

The week’s timetable for Brain Wave proved to be flexible and fluid. Each day had a clearly defined focus, but within this teams and students were able to organise their own work and learning in order to best achieve the outcomes listed above.

Day 1
Students visited possible sites for their Learning Centre, which had potential for future development. At the end of the day, the site owners were provided with an envelope of the ideas they had generated about the site’s future use.

Day 2
Students went to experience pre-existing Learning Centres, such as the Eden Project, The Seal Sanctuary, Poldark Mine and the National Marine Aquarium. This allowed students to see the amazing possibilities their Learning Centre could provide.

Day 3
Teams began designing their own Learning Centre big idea.

Day 4
Teams were given time to finish their Learning Centre design. Just as students were beginning to think that the end was in sight, they were presented with a curriculum provocation: teams were informed that in order to meet new regulations, their Learning Centre had to be energy sustainable. Achievement of the provocation would involve getting every team member up to, or beyond, Science National Curriculum level 5 in alternative energy. This provocation had been deliberately chosen, as none of the Brain Wave teachers were Science specialists.

Day 5
Teams had to plan and create a display of their work, as well as deliver a presentation about their Learning Centre ideas to an audience of about 200 people, made up of students, peer tutors, staff, parents and local/national dignitaries. For this, students had access to a PA system and full ICT kit.

The learning on Brain Wave was designed to reflect and accommodate:

• New, experimental and innovative educational ideas
• New knowledge about the brain and student motivation
• Cross curricular links with academic rigor
• Formative assessment
• The five stage learning cycle
• The different ways students process information (VAKO)
• Students’ different learning styles
• Collaboration at and between all parties, including parents
• Opportunist teaching and learning
• Student leadership
• A range of thinking skills and a toolkit for their development (De Bono’s Six Hats, Funnel Questioning, QuADS, KWL, PMI, Mind Mapping etc.)
• A balanced focus on process and content – the how and what of learning
• Maximising the release of potential

My learning experience

I learned so much from my experiences of planning and working on Brain Wave. For the first time ever, I began to visualise what an ideal Secondary School building could look like and how it could operate. A polygon-shaped, central, flexible learning space, with all the usual resources and ICT equipment, would be accessible from all homeroom spaces on all sides. Each homeroom would have one of its long walls as a moveable screen opening onto the shared central space. There would be enough spaces in each of these rooms to accommodate one tutor from each of the subject specialisms, who would work together in a learning team. Additional staff would be required to provide administrative and technical support. These would form a basic learning unit. Students and staff would move freely, as appropriate, between their homeroom bases and the central learning space. Students would be able to book time with subject specialist tutors, who would be available to all learners irrespective who their own homeroom teacher was. Teams would be vertically grouped with older students being allocated to act as peer tutors to younger ones. Each home group could be subdivided into smaller learning teams with every student being allocated a role aimed at supporting their team.

Teams should be set a series of challenges designed collaboratively by the staff and peer tutor learning teams to cover the entire national curriculum. Challenges should be designed to facilitate real life situations and enable students to access real ‘experts’ from real workplaces in the real world, who then provide students with feedback about the quality of their work. Teams should be encouraged to self assess their work against pre-determined (preferably by students) success criteria and then given the time needed to improve their products or outcomes, before a final assessment is made in a variety of ways. Teachers and teaching assistants will work collaboratively wherever possible with other adults and peer tutors. Teachers will act as generic facilitators, as well as working with real world ‘experts’ in a subject specialist role. Working collaboratively in this way, will enable all students to have access to one-to-one time with a range of adults. Behaviour issues would generally be overcome using an accelerated behaviour management approach, whilst more serious issues, when they arise, could be addressed using a circle time model, so students begin to really appreciate the impact their behaviour has on others. Multi agency teams of health, youth, police, social services and other colleagues could be used to intervene in persistent cases. Emphasis at all times is firmly placed on the development of quality relationships between all parties. Regular and frequent strategies need to be used to foster and enhance these. To cater for larger numbers of students, additional learning units could be added, replicating the first.

The future

I began to realise just how much potential all students have and just how limiting even the very best secondary school classroom practice can be. In so many instances the students greatly exceeded even my high expectations of them – for example some teams:

• produced promotional materials in five different languages
• computed spreadsheets that impressed even advanced level students and teachers
• made contact with estate agents to find suitable plots of land and their price implications
• took total responsibility for filing and presenting their folders of work produced during the week
• asked questions that the Marine Aquarium director described as ‘better than those posed by most adult audiences’
• impressed Science teachers with National Curriculum levels usually achieved only by Key Stage 4 students had T-shirts printed with their logo
• produced PowerPoint presentations demonstrating real flair in their marketing campaigns.

The students’ team presentations on the final day really brought home to me what students can do when the learning ‘glass ceiling’ is lifted. Not a single student, at any time in the week, expressed concern about having to stand up and speak in front of a huge audience, using a microphone, laptop and a data projector – all at the same time! Not a single student said, “I can’t do that,” and that’s when it hit me…

Brain Wave gave me hope for the future, hope for a better way of building collaborative learning communities, with exponentially developing skills and knowledge, driven by people with a strong moral and social purpose.

Brain Wave II 2003 is currently being planned and will take place between 7th and 12th July 2003 at CPR College and a local woodland. 72 students from Years 1 to 6 will take part in a new challenge experience, along with peer tutors from Years 7 to 11 and a new staff team. Wish us luck and visit us if you can.

Voices from the Brain Wave Team
What people said about our school…