Top Of Class For Lateral Thinkers
The Sun Herald
Saturday May 14, 1994
BEV Ogle's third grade class at Eastwood Public School call her "the teacher who teaches thinking". A lateral thinker, Mrs Ogle has thrown out textbooks, exams and report cards in favour of teaching her pupils how to think and question.
The blackboard in Mrs Ogle's class is never used. She draws flow-charts on butcher's paper which she pins to the classroom walls after the lesson so students can refresh their memories later.
Eastwood Public School, in Sydney's north-west, is the first school in NSW to introduce lateral thinking to education. The 783-pupil school has been pioneering its Outcomes Based Education (OBE) strategy for three years with phenomenal success.
Last year, 81 out of 88 Year 6 students at the school passed exams to win a place at a selective high school. Parents are queuing to send their children to Eastwood, with some even renting homes in the catchment area to qualify or sending their children to live with relatives in the area.
The school's strategy - dubbed the "Eastwood model" - has been hailed as the teaching technique to take NSW schools into the 21st century.
The pupils don't use textbooks and they don't copy teachers' notes verbatim into exercise books.
"I never use a blackboard - never. I have two large artist's easels and as the lesson unfolds I develop the children's ideas into a mind-map on the butcher's paper," Mrs Ogle said.
"The chart then goes up on the classroom wall for three or four months for the information to imprint. It works like a Coca-Cola billboard advertisement
"Then I shift the chart out into the corridors so every time they pack their bags they see it again. They don't have to record anything at all in an exercise book. I test them a week later by hiding the mind map, then a month later, six months later and 12 months later and by then it's in permanent, long-term memory."
Mrs Ogle said overseas research had found the information retention rate of children taught by mind-mapping doubled in 12 months and increased five-fold after three years.
"Thinking is not like eating or sleeping. There is a need to teach kids how to think. It will not naturally develop like walking," she said.
The strategy is based on subliminal learning and lateral thinking, invented 30 years ago by Rhodes scholar Edward de Bono, who has become a multi-millionaire conducting lateral thinking seminars for executives of multi-national companies.
"The children we have in schools now are the children of the 'me'generation and they want to be told what to do and provided with everything on a platter so their desire to think for themselves is not great," Mrs Ogle said.
"But by removing the major tests and getting rid of textbooks we dramatically increased their quality of work and motivation to learn.
"It was clearly observable in the classroom. The children were able to question and analyse and explain, which made them more confident and increased their self-esteem."
Pivotal to the strategy is an "annotated" loose-leaf folder, a portfolio containing projects and tasks performed by the pupil which the pupil assesses in detail with the teacher, noting their own strengths and failings.
The best gauge of OBE success is the number of students at the school who get into selective high schools. It has trebled in the past three years.
"We always used to get 30-odd and then the first year we got 54 but we thought it was just an aberration. Then last year we got 81 out of 88."
Principal John Payne was so confident of the success of OBE that he volunteered the school for the first round of quality assurance testing last year by the panel of experts which is putting NSW's 2,200 schools under the microscope. The school received a "wonderful report card".
As a measure of its success, Mrs Ogle has been invited by the NSW Department of School Education to join its curriculum department to implement the scheme en masse and in-service regional directors, principals and teachers.
The appointment was in response to the increasing number of schools - at least two or three a week - which invited Mrs Ogle to address them about how and why OBE works. "I tell teachers to shed the shackles and develop ways to teach belonging to the 21st century," she said.
© 1994 The Sun Herald