Alistair was born and educated in Scotland. His working life has included time spent as a door-to-door salesman, a labourer on construction sites and in a woollen mill, in adult and prisons education and as a museum guide. Later in life he discovered education and began a crusade to transform teaching in classrooms. His books include Accelerated Learning in the Classroom, The ALPS Approach (with Nicola Call) and The Learning Family: How to Accelerate Your Child's Learning. He is currently working on a generic model of learning and on a publication that describes how brain research can impact on classroom practice. He is series editor of the Accelerated Learning Series for Network Educational Press and runs AL!TE, a training company that aims to help teachers and learners 'expand the horizons of possibility'.

Alistair Smith's book describes where the science of learning and the art of teaching meet. It offers to teachers something rich and powerful. Not a simple blueprint, but a set of well researched guiding principles on which to build more effective learning.The theory is there to keep the practice visionary and the practice is there to keep the theory honest. It recognises that teaching is not a mechanistic process but a performing art - one that is rooted in an understanding of how learning works and the potential of the human brain to be the architect of its own intelligence. Professor John MacBeath, Director, Quality in Education Centre, University of Strathclyde

• Introduction - extending the horizons of possibility; establishing base camp; into the foothills of learning; the learning journey; resources.