Only Connect: thinking skills and literacy

Graham Tyrer, deputy headteacher, Nicholas Chamberlaine School,  Bedworth, Warwickshire.

This an edited extract from a speech given by Graham at the National Literacy Trust's secondary conferences in spring 2002.
 
I'd like to begin with Marianne Williamson's words quoted by Nelson Mandela at his Presidential inauguration:

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure."

Everyone is a potential genius. I want to describe where I'm up to with whole brain learning and how it has shaped my work teaching literacy.

I first came across this on one of Alistair Smith's courses and since then I've been hooked. Why? Because accelerated learning has got people thinking, talking and, crucially, innovating in their classrooms. It isn't about a whole sale turning upside down of colleagues' work. Mike Hughes calls it tweaking - it's about tiny changes, an incremental revolution.

Trying to connect the ways in which the brain works is an exciting project and can have major consequences for retention and motivation. What we think we know about the cerebellum, for instance, is that it has a strong influence over learned responses, territoriality, hierarchies, fight or flight or flock.  It's the part of the brain that responds well to ritual, routine and ceremony. It's our ally in literacy learning.

We can do this with only minimal changes. Music as students come into the room, routines everyone knows and locks into. When you take the register they have to answer with a word from the word wall, or the 2-3-4 routine, you've got two minutes to tell three people four things about last lesson, or eight people swing into action at the start because they've applied for and got room control jobs - someone's ready with the whiteboard pen because they write the learning objective up as you describe it, but in key words so the class doesn't just copy it but transforms it.

The limbic system seems to link emotion, long term memory and the propensity to goal set. It's more of a process than a site in the brain. So activities like, secret box make these links.  A slip of paper on which you write what you want to be most in the world. Then read them, dramatically, with a music background, inviting the writers to expand if they want, and if they do, it's amazing isn't it, to hear Sarah describe in magical detail how she knows she's going to be a dancer, how she sees it really clearly and nothing's going to stop her. And it's at that point that I start teaching the semi-colon, on the back of the dream, carried into the long term memory by the thought of how wonderful life's going to become.  Like for instance getting students to teach each other, each-one-teach-one.

Colleagues in the Maths team, for example, have found this helpful because it helps them teach Maths. It helps me promote high standards of spoken and written literacy. In order for the students to train as teachers, they have to understand what it means to explain something well.   So we help them to do this for themselves by working with them on the language of teaching. It's important to discuss the nature of questioning, open and closed. What else will you need to explain things, what sorts of discourse markers, analogies? And before you know it students have found it's important to ' review and develop the meaning, clarity, organisation and impact of complex sentences in their own writing;' Year 9 literacy sentence level, because that's got to be the case in the mini-text book they are putting together for the group on the other side of the room. Each-one-teach-one presses all the right emotional buttons.   You can sense the excited tension when the group stands in front of the class with their powerpoint demo explaining how to add fractions and they've been given a vast range of explanatory markers to help 'so and then, what you do next, however.

We all know about affirmations, seeing the future in the present tense. It takes so little time for a student to re-read their A6 laminated affirmations card during a quick burst of 'Search for the hero inside yourself' and the importance of the subclause is more likely to be understood and retained.    By the way, the affirmations card can also be a lesson affirmation stuck on the whiteboard as part of the routine - the affirmations manager - Darren who applied for the role, in writing as a ten minute extra homework while learning formal English - sticks on the white board We are the best behaved class in the school  or we respect each other and are totally groovy. It's what I call a green light tactic.

One of my great privileges is to be the line manager of PE  and it really gets me thinking.  If ever there was a site for whole brain learning, here it is.   PE teachers hardly give a second thought to ritual and routine. Health and Safety requires it. And they've got all sorts of easy of doing it. Like at register time instead of answering your name you give the name of famous sportsperson with your initials, while lining up for kit inspection, before you go into the gym. The learning space has a sense of ceremony about it.  Time is limited for them because of changing etc, so, at the same time, students are required to memorise the key words and think of a personal target linked to them.  Music plays. A TV theme tune - match of the day.  The teacher has an applause tape too which she plays a maximum volume in the mini-plenary half way through when, using each-one-teach-one, student share with their target partner how they are progressing and get advice on how to go further.  The teacher rewards and applauds the use of high quality language. She trains the students in the ceremony of reward.     As the students bounce up and down on the trampoline they shout out what they are doing, again using the key words only this time, the teacher has modelled how to use them in a phrase or a sentence.  It's wonderful kinesthetic learning - as the language is spoken, the whole brain is engaged, physically, emotionally, with ritual and routine.
 
The neocortex is about higher brain functions. A*, abstract learning, the ability to hypothesize, speculate and innovate with language.  Thankfully as Susan Greenfield amongst others has shown it's not a simple case of the passive voice brain cells are upper left frontal lobe. The point is the interconnectedness of these brain regions.

What we know works is when we make links.  The best literacy hours I've seen are brain friendly - or as one of our partner primaries calls them, mind-kind.  Just as important as the time divisions is the way the brain learns and retains.  VAK becomes as important as the three-part lesson time.

You remember right brain/left brain work? Sometimes also called logic and gestalt centres? Again, it's impossible to say things like if you're left handed you're bound to be more creative because you are right hemisphere dominant. It is wonderfully more complex than that.  What we know is that these facilities do exist and we all use them and we all have aptitudes in one or another.
 
 

Logic (left)	Gestalt (right)
Planned, structured	Spontaneous, fluid
Sequential thinking	Simultaneous thinking
Language-oriented	Feelings, experience-oriented
Future-oriented	Now-oriented
Technique	Flow and movement
Sports (eye, hand, foot placement)	Sports (flow and rhythm)
Art (media, tool use, how to)	Art (image, emotion, flow)
Music (notes, beat, tempo)	Music (passion, rhythm, image)

What I've found is that the more we can take into account the interconnectedness between the logic and gestalt centres, the more learning is retained. The usefulness I've found about thinking like this is that it generates new ideas.  Simply, when a teaching strategy works it does so because it works with the brain learns. It's about diversity. We think and feel and imagine in such wonderful, kaleidoscopic variety. Taking the scenic route trough the brain's thinking patterns is more likely to result in a memorable, valued and significant journey.

What if we let students in on this? What if, as well as teaching them about language, at the same time, we teach them about learning? Having students reflect with us on the nature of learning is possibly the most powerful next step.   There's an exciting opportunity here. We are quite sure that teaching students literacy metalanguage helps.  I'm convinced if we research with them the process of learning itself and link this to the skill and content teaching, we will have made an important step.  We'll be helping students ask: What do I know about the way learning happens for me?

And then the next step: students getting involved in the task construction, saying, right, I have to learn how to use complex sentences, how shall I do this so that it'll stick. Or even, and why not, I need to do this linking across different bits of the brain's learning centres.

The individualisation of this is terribly important, I think. It's about learning journeys. It's about continually asking yourself, how do I learn, in this situation, at this time in my life. And then, of course, bigger questions sauch as, what do I want to learn and what do I want to do with it?

In summary, I'm suggesting there's a lot to be gained from thinking about teaching learning and language at one and the same time. That working with the way the brain learns is more like to help progress.  And what if we made this a joint active project. What if students researched with us, the ways they learn. Teach them what we think we know, tell them, like all knowledge worth having, it should be questioned and debated and ask them to join with us on the learning journey. It'll take the rest of their lives. But that's OK. Because it's for the rest of their lives.