Case studies

"That were good that were, Miss"
Kingsbury School and Sports College
Julie Goddard

Julie Goddard is Head of Expressive Arts at Kingsbury School and Sports College in Birmingham. She's in the final year of her MA Education at the UCE.  Her thesis entitled "That were good that were, Miss" uses Edward Debono's thinking hats combined with Accelerated Learning Techniques to deepen children's thinking.

Kingsbury School and Sports College is on the map and not one that you'd need to blow the dust off first to see.  In fact any A-Z could point you in the right direction.  Erdington town is roughly three miles from Birmingham City Centre.  Our pupils have been described as 'challenging' but we prefer to look at them as rough-cut diamonds.

Our problem was simple: our diamonds believed they were Cubic Zirconia.  We need to change their perspective.

We underpinned our pilot scheme, which was taught through Drama with Year 7 pupils, with positive thinking.  We developed a system of what we called sound feedback: Send clear advice about what to improve ONLY talks about the work and not the person UNDERSTANDS we need more than praise to improve.  NEVER just says what was wrong but how we can do it better DEMONSTRATES how we can improve.

We channeled our energy into creating the right learning environment with a 'code of conduct' negotiated with pupils and £19 traffic lights from Ikea (!) which signaled our 'metacogniton' time and structured our talking about thinking.

We also needed to find a model for our thinking which would diffuse our pupils innate desire to baton down the hatches and man the machine guns rather than listen to their peers' comments.

We found what we were looking for in Edward Debono's six thinking hats system - we removed the ego.  We all thought in the same way and at the same time and as a result our learning has been transformed.

Every single one of the pupil questionnaires returned revealed the story of how these techniques had helped them - and here's the important point.  It helped them NOT just in the classroom, but outside of school.  Questions varied from how useful pupils found the work, to whether they thought it had improved their use of imagination.  The questionnaires followed a format used by QCA on their 'arts alive' website and unanimously illustrated how helpful our pupils found these techniques.

We are now setting up a working party to spread the techniques to the whole school.  How can we ignore results such as pupils going home and teaching their families how to use the hats to solve arguments about what programmes to watch on TV?