Making a summary, underlining a text, and memorizing concepts seems like a formula known to any student. They hardly seem like the ingredients of a magic trick. But Ferran Ballard argues that it is precisely here where one of the keys to learning is hidden: acquiring a method and understanding why it works.
This idea is the origin of The Brain School, the academy founded by Ferran Ballard and Alejandra Scherk that has turned the study method into its main business model. With offices in Barcelona and Madrid, in-person and online training, and more than 10,000 students trained —from teenagers to civil service exam candidates and professionals from large companies—, the project has grown around a seemingly simple premise: before learning content, one must learn to learn.
"The problem is not so much the tools people use when studying, but that they often apply them without understanding why they work for them," Ballard argues. "Many parents try to transmit to their children the method that worked for them: making outlines, repeating concepts aloud, or underlining. But often they don't know how to explain why these tools worked for them and, therefore, the children don't understand their usefulness either," he adds.
This lack of a clear explanation of how to learn better was precisely the starting point of Ballard's research. If many students were, apparently, following the same steps, why did some obtain much superior results? When he entered Universitat Pompeu Fabra to pursue a double degree in Law and Business Administration, Ballard began to look for the answer. And he thought that the best formula to find these answers came from another field: that of magic. When a magician wants to improve a trick, he doesn't try to reinvent it from scratch, but rather studies what the best do and seeks to understand patterns and ways of working.
Ballard applied this same logic to study. Instead of looking for the best magicians, he observed the students with the best academic records in his class, analyzed their habits, and tried to identify common points. Then he contrasted these observations with existing studies and literature on cognitive psychology. He soon realized that the solution was not to study more hours, but to have a method that allowed them to make better use of them.
A classic method, turned into a system
Ballard's research would eventually crystallize into its own methodology structured in eight steps. The starting point is not memorizing, but understanding: the method proposes starting by taking notes and doing a first exploratory reading to get an overview of the content before going in-depth.
Then comes in-depth reading, a moment during which the student truly works with the content: identifies the most important ideas, separates essential content from non-essential content, and begins to structure the information. From here, the method incorporates well-known tools such as making summaries, preparing a list of questions, or creating outlines, steps that, Ballard emphasizes, should not become routine, but rather genuinely help to understand and retain what is being studied.
The last steps are memorization and review, steps that students normally place at the beginning of the entire process but which Ballard emphasizes are essential to do once all the information has been understood and organized. The key to the method, then, is not any specific technique, but knowing what step to take at each moment and, above all, for what purpose it is done.
From personal problem to educational business
This study methodology, which Ballard had initially outlined to address his own difficulties as a student, would eventually become an educational company—and, recently, even a book (Aprender con estrategia)—. The project began when he was just 18, when he created a first academy aimed at university students of Law and Business Administration from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, many of them classmates. At that time, the goal was not to build a large company, but to share a system he had developed to study better.
Growth came progressively, mainly thanks to word-of-mouth: first among students from other fields, then among families, and later, among companies. Following the pandemic, the method could also be adapted to a course that could be offered and received online, from anywhere in Spain. Ballard summarizes this journey with a quote from Ernest Hemingway: "How did you go bankrupt? Two ways: Gradually, then suddenly." The phrase, which originally refers to a bankruptcy, he uses in the opposite sense: the project did not sink, but grew gradually until, over time, it gained speed.
Today, the business, with physical locations in Barcelona and Madrid and multiple online editions, is divided into three main lines: in-person courses, online training, and corporate programs. All share the same philosophy: that "learning is not a stage of life, but a lifestyle." This is precisely the basis of The Brain School's model: the same system that helps a student organize better can also be applied in other contexts, from families to the professional world.
Organizing information, structuring knowledge, reviewing errors, or learning autonomously are skills that, according to Ballard, have value beyond the classroom. This vision also explains why, when a teenager signs up for the course, it is mandatory for them to be accompanied by their father or mother: Ballard argues that the environment is also part of the learning process. Over time, The Brain School has also incorporated training for companies, applying the same principles to other contexts. Now, Ballard and his partner Alejandra Scherk are preparing for an internationalization phase starting in 2027, combining large, specific in-person training sessions with a greater digital presence in different languages.
The underlying idea of this new stage of international expansion is that learning well is a useful skill in any country and at any stage of life, especially at a time when artificial intelligence is transforming the way people study. Although Ballard admits that tools like ChatGPT can be valuable support, he warns of the risk that students might delegate processes such as summarizing, organizing, or synthesizing information to technology. According to him, these steps are not only useful for reaching the final result, but they are part of the very process of understanding and learning.