Teaching Excellence

by Richard Bandler

  Learning on Purpose

  This book explores some vital questions:

  Why do some students learn more easily than others? What makes some teachers more effective than others? What are the keys to effective learning, remembering and thinking? The answers to these questions are surprising. The answers reveal that it is less a matter of intelligence and far more a matter of teaching teachers how to teach powerfully and teaching learners how to learn effectively. We can do this by understanding the mechanics of how teaching and learning happens in the brain. The training of teachers often pays scant regard for the tools of the teacher’s trade - communication skills. Teachers learn about lesson plans, preparation of materials, pedagogic theory, but there is little or no input on how the brain works, how learning happens and how to effectively communicate these skills to learners. This is where our book fills the gap. The reason why we have helped thousands of teachers to improve how they teach is because the technology you are about to learn in this book looks at learning in a dramatically different way than ever before. Rather than talking about what students learn, we will explore exactly how they learn. More importantly, we reveal how you can help them to master learning.

  A Learning Revolution

  The reality is that in the world we live in today, there are teachers of different standards and skill levels. The fact that you are reading this book suggests that you are one of those people who are truly interested in becoming terrific at what you do and making the lives of your students so much better. Perhaps you know intuitively that you can do even more and you are looking for the tools that can help you improve.

  Addressing the failure of students to learn effectively is urgent. Across Europe, 1 in 5 people are functionally illiterate. In the UK, only 25% of the population have a reading level of a good GCSE and 44% have a similarly low level of numeracy .(1) 1 in 3 people in the USA cannot write a letter or use a calculator to determine a 10% discount. (2) The lack of basic skills costs the UK economy £81.312 billion and the cost to the US economy is $300.80 billion.(3) The problem is not simply economic or confined to basic skills. Many studies show happiness, wellbeing, health and crime rates all correlate to the level of educational attainment.(4)

  The situation may also be critical as we find ourselves in the 21st Century with an outdated education system and training programmes for teachers that were designed for the 19th Century.

  The challenge educators now face is how to equip the next generations for a world where the job for life has disappeared. Today there is a need for flexibility and adaptability in working life and there is a dominant need for continual re-skilling. In fact, the pace of change is so rapid that almost every subject children learn as a ‘truth’ now will be irrelevant, out of date or ‘untrue’ in 10 years.(5)

  Make the Difference

  The solution to improve an outdated system, we believe, does not lie merely in a change to the structure or management of the education systems, but with teachers themselves . The good news is that teachers have the power to influence young minds and learners of all ages. You have the capacity to inspire, motivate, engage and create voracious, tenacious and enthusiastic learners every day of your life. Are you a teacher or do you simply care enough to want smarter solutions for the education of our next and future generations?

  If you are a teacher you may well be thinking ‘yes, but what about the pressures to deliver results, grades and league tables?’ Of course you are right, there are many pressures on teachers to deliver and a great deal of bureaucracy to contend with. Also, some of you may be working in institutions that do not always support you in the way that you may wish. However, waiting for ‘the authorities’ to make your life easier just doesn’t seem to work somehow. There are some really great teacher-led initiatives emerging in the field of Education and we know that they are gradually working into mainstream education.(6)

  NLP is an Educational Model

  The introduction of NLP into education by teachers trained by us means the system is beginning to benefit from well-documented, proven strategies for effective teaching and learning. The success of an excellent teacher is often attributed to qualities such as being charismatic, inspiring, energetic etc. However, NLP enables us to elicit the beliefs, attitudes and behaviours of such teachers and teach them to others. Whilst we can each claim our own individual pockets of excellence, we can all do more. You are one of the most important people in the lives of your learners. It is in learning from what has worked in this field that we can powerfully and practically improve the standards of teaching in every classroom and educational establishment. Here is our claim: By eliciting the strategies of the greatest geniuses of our time - excellent artists, magnificent mathematicians and exquisite experts in any field - and teaching these strategies to your students, you can ensure that they learn the thought processes and behaviours to successfully learn any subject. We believe that anyone can learn these apparently innate skills and become an inspiration to others and even more is possible as NLP provides the steps and strategies for how learning works.

  As a teacher (and/or parent, carer and mentor) you have an unprecedented opportunity to teach the ability to think on purpose right from the beginning of a child’s life or at least during their formative years. This means that rather than having to build on rocky foundations, you lay the foundations of healthy and happy values, beliefs and attitudes and teach children to drive their own brains so they become lifelong learners.

  Neuro Linguistic Programming: The Study of Excellence

  One of the most frequently asked questions is ‘what is NLP’? In the 1970s Richard Bandler and John Grinder asked a different but very important question: ‘How come some people go into a room and affect change in others whilst others don’t? ’

  By studying people who were actually succeeding in change work, looking at their behaviour and verbal/non-verbal communication, Bandler and Grinder systematically identified the factors that lead to change in clients. Interestingly, despite the very different approaches and theoretical models used by the therapists, they found that they had many of the actual behaviours in common. The behaviours and communication patterns used by the therapists were mostly unconscious or outside of their awareness. Bandler and Grinder paid very little attention to what the therapists said they were doing, and paid a great deal of attention to what they were actually doing .

  To test their observations, Bandler and Grinder set out to replicate the behaviours of well-known experts in the field of psychotherapy such as Milton Erickson (a prominent hypnotherapist), Virginia Satir (a renowned family therapist) and Fritz Perls (a well-known gestalt therapist) and found that they could achieve amazing results despite lacking the vast experience of these leading figures.(7) The field of NLP began to grow at a rapid rate as the co-founders began to explore how the same methodology could identify the structure of excellence in other industries and areas such as medicine, business and, crucially, learning.

  Similar questions can be asked of the teaching profession. How come some teachers are highly effective at enabling students to learn and others are not? Assuming that most teachers are experts in their subject, how come students are enthused and learn easily in the company of some teachers and not in the company of others?

  We have been lucky enough to get an opportunity to study highly effective teachers on a mass scale. We have noticed that although each person has a unique style, there are common characteristics that they all share:

  They are systematic in their behaviours

  They are proactive and outcome-orientated

  They take notice, watch and listen (using all their senses)

  They are flexible in their behaviour, so students learn by example

  They are process rather than content-driven

  They see problems as challenges and opportunities to learn

  They endeavour to like their students

  These characteristics are not innate, which means they can be learned. In th
is book we teach you how to adopt a mindset that enables you to be the best teacher you can be. As you begin to learn NLP and move through the chapters of this book, be aware that there is a significant side effect.

  As you begin to apply the principles to your teaching, you may notice that the strategies can be used to make yourself happier, more effective and fulfilled, not just as a teacher but as a person! NLP isn’t about ‘fixing people’ because they are not broken. NLP is about optimisation , so that you can make the most of the brain and body you have, free yourself from your personal fears, enjoy your loved ones and find pleasure and satisfaction in your life.

  Thinking on Purpose

  An easy way to think of NLP is as thinking on purpose . Neuro Linguistic Programming is a set of behaviours, skills and attitudes that enable us to understand how we organise information and communicate with others. Put simply, your nervous system (Neuro) is directly affected at all levels by the way you communicate with yourself (Linguistic) . The interplay between your neurology and your language sets up patterns of behaviour (Programming) .

  We learn how to communicate with ourselves through the way other significant people in our lives communicate with us as we grow and learn. Children learn through ‘modelling’ the adults around them. They learn the verbal and non-verbal ways to communicate with themselves through the way adults respond to them. Many people who discover NLP for the first time as adults find that they have the ability to choose their thought processes. This is often a huge revelation to them.

  As NLP continues to develop and be applied to areas of medicine, sport and business, in this book we also draw on other technologies created by Richard Bandler. We make use of the three main technologies that produce the best results:

  NLP : A model based on elegance; what is the minimum change we can make to get the maximum results?

  Design Human Engineering ® (DHE ® ): Enables us to design perfect strategies from scratch rather than elicit and install another person’s strategy. So, instead of just learning from what someone else does, we can create new ways of getting even better results.

  Neuro-Hypnotic Repatterning ® (NHR ® ): Teaches people to lead with their feelings and create exquisite states of pleasure and enjoyment so that learning is not unpleasant and a struggle, but delightful, easy and fun. Much evidence points to the neurological benefits of learning whilst having fun!

  For the first time, the co-founder of NLP reveals his discoveries of teaching and learning over more than 45 years of studying human behaviour through the NLP methodology. Finally, you hold in your hand the cutting-edge secrets of transforming how you teach and of using a technology that has begun to revolutionise the educational system.

  When NLP was originally developed, advances in neuroscience , Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and the understanding of the enteric nervous system had yet to be discovered. NLP was perceived as a useful model. Over the past few years more and more scientific research has become available to support the model and our understanding of teaching learning.

  Advances in the neurosciences and biochemistry have much to teach us about how people learn, however this forms little part of the teacher education curriculum. For example, we know that the most effective learning takes place when we are having fun because laughter releases endorphins into the bloodstream and smiling releases serotonin. Both of these neurotransmitters help us to feel good, and as these two chemicals react on the neural pathways , they aid in the creation of new synaptic links.(8) This short cuts the development of new neural pathways. So, rather than thinking about being a ‘nice’ teacher, it really is about generating smarter, more effective brain activity for learning.

  We live in exciting times and we hope that you will join us on a journey of discovery for yourselves, your students and the future.

  Here is the challenge we set out to address. We have yet to meet a teacher who doesn’t want their students to learn and succeed. However, although there are many resources relating to teaching specific subjects, there has been very little attention paid to how people actually learn something new. The verb ‘to learn’ is very non-specific. The instructions given to a student often relate to the external behaviours they are expected to engage in, such as take notes, draw a diagram, read aloud. The students are not given the details of the steps they need to go through inside their mind to learn something new. Learning something new involves what you do on the outside and the inside of your mind and body.

  It is now time to re-evaluate our teaching processes, focusing not just on content but on process, and learn to learn for life. The focus in many classrooms is 80% content and 20% process. We would reverse this and propose that good learning is 20% content and 80% process. What if the lesson content was merely the Trojan horse for the skills and processes of learning to learn so that we equip the next generations for the 21st Century and beyond? What if you could teach in such a way that would allow your learners to learn quickly and easily and to ‘cheat’ fairly? What if you could help give them a wonderful advantage that would last them the rest of their lives?

  This book has its origins many years ago with a question on a seminar. Kate asked, ‘How come you can teach NLP quickly and easily because you use NLP to teach NLP, but we are not using NLP to teach all the other subjects taught in schools and colleges?’ Richard’s answer was, ‘that is a very good question – off you go and figure it out!’ This conversation began a long collaboration between the two of us to combine our deep and abiding passion for teaching people to create exquisite learning through the technologies of NLP. This book is an outcome of our collaboration and we want to share our experience and understandings with you – the teachers of the next generation.

  references

  1. Europe together against Functional Illiteracy www.literacy –and-vocation.eu

  2. US Department of Labor Future work Trends and Challenges for work in 21st Century www.dol.gov

  3. Final report of World Literacy Foundation April 2012 www.worldliteracyfoundation.org/

  The_Economic_&_Social_Cost_of_Illiteracy.pdf

  4. The Social Benefits of Education, Behrman JR and Stacey N (eds). Ann Arbor, MI: University

  of Michigan Press, 1997

  5. See: Sir Ken Robinson Changing Educational Paradigms www.thersa.org/events/rsaanimate/

  animate/rsa-animate-changing-paradigms

  6. See the Durham report and Section 5 of this book for teacher led case studies http://

  www.teachinginfluence.com/resources/files/DurhamNLP_Report.pdf

  7. Richard Bandler and John Grinder Frogs into Princes: Real People Press 1979

  8. Sue Perry Neurotransmitters: How Brain Cells Use Chemicals to Communicate http://

  www.brainfacts.org/

  How to use this book

  This book is designed as a learning tool. There are bullet points at the beginning of each chapter to give you the main messages and ‘big picture’ and a summary at the end to consolidate your learning. Each chapter has accompanying activities to apply your new knowledge. Some activities are designed to enrich your own learning and others are designed to use and adapt in your own classes and with learners. NLP is a practical set of skills and ‘knowing’ about NLP is not ‘utilising’ NLP. The menu is not the same as the meal, so we strongly advise you to use the activities to practise and gain experience for yourself. If you are new to the field of NLP you will do well to read Part 1 thoroughly, as these chapters lay the foundations for understanding how to teach effective learning strategies and underpin all the later chapters. Once you have explored all the strategies for learning in Part 2, move on to discover more of how NLP applies to teaching and learning with the whole group and classroom context in Part 3. Part 4 examines ways to further support your learners and Part 5 hands over to teachers who have learned to use NLP in their classrooms so you can explore their applications and case studies. If you have some experience of NLP you may wish to skim over Part 1, which covers the elementary principles of NLP whic
h form the foundation of strategies. We advise you to skim rather than skip these chapters because all the examples given are applied to the teaching and learning environment, so even if you are a Master Practitioner there will be new applications to learn. However you choose to experience this book, relax and enjoy!

  This eBook is licensed to Dominic Luzi, dluzi@managementalchemy.com on 10/18/2018

  chapter 1

  How Learning Works

  ‘The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think.’(1)

  Bill Beattie

  In this chapter

  Discover the fundamentals of NLP which underpin learning

  strategies

  Learn the basics of NLP used in teaching

  Explore the tools for Thinking on Purpose

  Learning on Purpose – the secrets of how learning works

  “Thursday is the only evening she has free. There is extra Maths on Monday, Literature on Tuesday, and karate on Wednesday - it’s important she learns to stand up for herself! - Friday is Music, and Saturday its exam preparation.” These words, spoken by a regular mum, are typical of the scheduling of children’s time after school. Most teachers would agree that children are not in fact the ‘empty vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge’ that the 19th Century philosopher John Locke claimed they were.(2)

  Yet these days, far too often, we constantly try to cram more and more information into children’s minds without considering how to promote thinking and use methods for learning that actually work. Teaching and learning are about the wonderful mysteries of the universe, and one of the biggest mysteries of all is exactly how to use your mind and your feelings. Simply transferring information isn’t enough. We have to give people the mental tools to be able to know how to think for themselves, and we don’t think that the ability to systematically give people these tools has ever existed before. Maybe we had one or two inspiring teachers, but they didn’t consciously know what they were doing, and since they didn’t know, they couldn’t teach other teachers the tools. Now at last, NLP provides us all with the tools to do this.