This innovation coincided with a Melbourne based company, The Thinking Network, offering training of the Neethling Brain Instruments practitioners and making available online brain preference tests designed specifically for students and for teachers. Kobus Neethling is a South African creativity researcher who developed the NBI. He has worked extensively in education, sports, business, and with families to show how understanding our own brain preferences and the preferences of those we interact with, can improve creativity and performance. 

http://www.thinkingnetwork.com.au/, Mr. Ken Wall, offered me the opportunity to be trained in the application of the NBI. I accepted without hesitation because I was already convinced that whole brain learning has the potential to significantly strengthen student engagement and achievement. I had written about it in an article published online in 2002.

Doncaster Secondary College Assistant Principal, Mr Peter Egeberg, was given the responsibility of designing a program that would meet the aspirations of parents of particularly able students. Towards the end of 2002, parents of Year 6 students were informed that in 2003 the College would have an Advanced Learning class at Year 7. The selection process involved students taking ACER tests designed to measure literacy, numeracy and reasoning skills. Feedback was sought from applicants’ primary schools as to the appropriateness of their membership of the Advanced Learning class.

From the beginning of 2003, the Year 7 Advanced Learning class would be together for the study of the core subjects of English, Mathematics, Science, History, Geography, Health and Information Technology. They joined others in their Year 7 cohort for Languages Other than English, Physical Education, Sport and Creative Arts.

Towards the end of 2002, teachers were invited to express interest in teaching in the Advanced Learning Program and a team of six teachers was created to design an appropriately challenging program and an experienced teacher, Mrs Suzanne Alderson, was given the responsibility to coordinate the program.

After investigating the frameworks and approaches used in a number of schools that provide programs designed for students identified as needing an advanced curriculum to challenge them, Suzanne became convinced that the NBI was right for our innovations. She set about seeking the support of staff and parents for the use of NBI as a framework for creating a creative curriculum that would extend all students in the group.

Suzanne took up The Thinking Network’s offer of providing complementary brain preference profiles and reports for three teachers and three students. After information meetings for staff and parents, all teachers involved in the program and most of the students in the class completed the thirty questions in the online NBI test.

Teachers and students responded very positively to the insights provided by the graphic representation of their brain profiles and to the information and suggestions regarding learning in their candidate specific report. From the teachers’ perspective, analysis of the brain preferences of both the staff and student groups has deepened understanding of the dynamics in the class and has provided clues to better meeting the needs of the group and of the diverse individuals in it.

In Creative People Can Perform Miracles (2001) Kobus Neethling and his co-author Rache Rutherford identified the values that are critical to an education environment in which the encouragement of creativity flourishes:

“Enthusiasm, passion, honesty, trust, encouragement and understanding form a framework in which a creative spirit can function dynamically.” (pp. 18-19)

These are the shared values of the Advanced Learning teachers’ group that provide the base for creating a curriculum that challenges each student to use his or her whole brain, engaging both the thought processes that they prefer to use and those they would rather avoid using.

So far, each teacher has responded individually in his or her classroom to the knowledge gleaned about students’ brain preference profile.

The next step in implementing this innovation will be setting aside generous amounts of time for teachers in the group to work together to ensure that students are challenged in all four brain quadrants by the activities they complete. A brief audit of the range and frequency of the thought processes that students have engaged so far will be followed by the team planning in a way that comprehensively extends each student.

The following table provides examples of some of the thinking processes associated with each of the four quadrants and of teaching and learning strategies to engage thought process modes in them.