Thinking on Purpose
Take a moment to join us in an experiment. What is your immediate thought when you hear the word ‘DOG’? Now ask a few other people for their responses when you say the word ‘DOG’ to them. What you may notice is that some people will see mental pictures of their dog, others will remember a bark, someone else may get a warm feeling, and another person may come out in a rash!
Next, select only the people who had a similar representation of the word ‘dog’ to you and ask them to describe the details or draw a picture. How many similarities/differences would you expect? Who is right and holds the master definition of the word ‘dog’? Each person’s dog reference is unique to them, yet we can all agree that these representations relate to a fairly uniform definition:
Dog: A domesticated descendent of wolf, generally 4 legs and a tail, variable size, colour and disposition.
As humans we experience the world through our five senses by seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling our environment. This sensory input is filtered, coded and stored, and later recalled. To do this we create representations of the five senses with which we experience the world. In effect, we think through re-presenting to ourselves an interpretation of our senses. In NLP, we call this re-presenting of the senses of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell the representational systems , and we refer to each of these as visual, auditory , kinaesthetic, olfactory and gustatory.
When we ask you to think of your favourite teacher, how do you do this? Are you now aware of re-creating and accessing your experience as a picture, and/or sound, and/or feeling, and/or smell, and/or taste? Your representation of your experience is unique to you.
When your brain takes in your external experience through one (or a combination) of the sensory channels, you then code and store this data for later recall as a memory. Of course this retrieval (image, sound, etc.) is not actually the original perception, but your unique representation of it. Each representation has certain qualities, such as the size of the image, how loud or soft the sound is, where the feeling is located in your body, the type of smell or taste - sweet, sour, pungent etc. The qualities of these representations are called the submodalities . They are the distinctions between one representation and another.
Think again of your favourite teacher and compare this representation with one of a teacher you didn’t like very much. In order to distinguish between the two teachers in your memory notice the differences in the submodalities of your recall. One picture you might have in your mind’s eye may be still or moving, in colour or black and white, bordered or panoramic. Similarly, you may hear sounds such as the teacher’s voice or some other sound, and this may be a surround sound or from a particular direction, high or low pitch, fast or slow beat. You might notice feelings in specific parts of your body or all over, you might feel a temperature change or a sense of lightness or heaviness. Perhaps there is even a taste or smell associated with the representations. So each experience has distinctions and there is a range of submodalities within the representation, which are not the same as reality. The map is not the territory!
To teach a learner to learn something new, it is crucial to identify their learning strategy. A learning strategy is the sequence of things a person does on the inside and the outside of their head, and the submodalities or qualities of these thoughts. We pay attention to these internal and external behaviours so we can determine precisely the sequence of the representational systems and the associated submodalities and this gives us the information to teach it to other learners. The instructions you give to a learner should be equally precise - when to make a picture, when to say something inside their head, when to feel a particular feeling. We want the strategy to have precise behaviours - both the ones we can see on the outside and the behaviours on the inside. (A full list of the submodalities to use for practice can be found in Appendix A.)
There are some abiding myths and mistaken assumptions about how skilled people are able to do wonderful things. For example, the assumption that musicians only use their (inherent) strong auditory representational system to compose or play great music . Similarly, that painters must have a ‘good eye’. This is not necessarily the case. For example, one famous musician was asked on the radio how he composed music. He said: ‘I wait until I can see it all out there in a big space in front of me and then I play the images!’ A friend who played in an orchestra was asked after a concert what she had been playing. She said, ‘Oh, I don’t know - I just play the dots’ . She saw the dots and her hands and bow moved to the correct position, then she heard the notes and made sure the sound matched the dots on the page.
All strategies in a kinaesthetic have a sequence of representations and most begin and end with a kinaesthetic representation - a feeling that tells you that you haven’t done it yet and one that tells you that you have finished.
At this point, you may be reminded of a commonly held misconception in education - the idea that we each have a visual , auditory or kinaesthetic (VAK) learning style. Many schools and colleges use questionnaires to assess their students’ learning styles, and while understanding individual learning preferences may be useful, it is a serious mistake to limit a person’s chance of learning as a result of the idea that there is only one channel and one fixed way through which that person can learn.
The visual, auditory and kinaesthetic (VAK) learning style questionnaires used in many schools may have taken as their starting point the NLP representational systems described by Bandler and Grinder(3) but the use of VAK learning styles are reductionist - a gross oversimplification which falls short of supporting fast and easy learning. Instead, we need to be paying real attention to the learning strategy a person uses. Why? Because strategies can be identified, modelled and taught to others, quickly and effectively, using NLP.
Learning on Purpose
Learning something new, remembering it and recalling it are process skills which involve a series of steps that utilise the representational systems. People don’t use just one representational system all the time, although they may have context-related preferences. Furthermore, the more fully the representational systems are engaged and overlap, the more powerful the learning. The useful process of overlapping representational systems is known as synaesthesia , which is a good thing! As we learn something new, the more the representational systems are engaged, the more powerful and memorable the learning becomes. So, in short, a learning strategy is the sequence of mental and behavioural steps a person uses to install and encode the learning.
People are rarely aware of the process they are going through inside their minds because this process takes place unconsciously unless or until they become aware of it. Were you aware of how you thought about your teachers before you read the paragraphs above?
Even if we could make a learning styles questionnaire sophisticated enough to reflect the processes we have discussed, it still wouldn’t be accurate because what people think they do and what they actually do can be very different. Take for example the (incorrect) assumption that people who like sport must be kinaesthetic and then look closely at the strategies used to score goals in the case of someone like David Beckham. Amazing players like Beckham need to be able to calculate distance, speed, velocity, and angles in addition to the kinaesthetic ability to kick the ball well. This involves a complex sequence using imagery, sounds and feelings.
Watching an 11-year-old playing very good football on the field, we observed him talking to himself the whole time, running through what he was doing, saying things like, ‘Yes! He scores a goal! Back of the net’ . He was running his own personal coaching commentary. He was also visualising and calculating how the ball would go in the net with good kinaesthetic coordination in using his leg and foot to hit the ball. It is not surprising that sports coaches have made excellent and high profile use of NLP, using representational systems to bring about peak performance.
There is a trend in some schools of ‘learning by doing’ - or le
arning kinaesthetically - as a primary way of teaching. Although it is true that learning through doing can be a great way to learn, the problem with this approach is that it confines everyone to only one choice of how to learn. Worse, it also leads students to believe that this is the only way. The children who can learn with this type of teaching either make sense of it directly through the kinaesthetic channel, or they are able to translate it through their representational systems, which is how they manage to make it work for them. So they may talk to themselves about it as they do it, or they may make pictures of themselves doing the activity. The important thing is not what they do on the outside, but what they do on the inside. The teacher’s job is to find the fastest, easiest and best way to encode the learning inside the learner and to limit their strategy to one method hinders learning.
Many students who are deemed to be ‘slow learners’ do not somehow have brains that work more slowly - they are just poor translators. This means they find it difficult to translate the teacher’s teaching strategy into their learning strategy. Approximately 30% of children today are deemed to be ‘academic’ and may go on to higher education. However, what this more accurately reflects is their ability to translate information presented to them in a relatively limited way, through their own representational systems. Some have more flexibility in their internal behaviour, others process information in a similar way to the teacher, making it easier for them to learn. As Ignacio Estrada said, ‘if a child can’t learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn’ .(4)
Sadly, it seems the input channels for learning offered to children become increasingly restricted as a child grows. There are interactive and sensory-rich experiences offered in early years, whilst at around the age of 7 or 8 there is generally a move to visual and auditory input, which then reduces to mainly auditory input for teenagers. Adult education takes a further turn to favour visual channels. This is one way people are restricted when they find it difficult to translate the input channel into their chosen representations. As one American teenager commented, ‘when I am in school I have to power down’ (5) because his brain works faster than the speed of the teaching.
A research project undertaken by Frank Coffield evaluated 13 learning style models including the VAK questionnaire and concluded that, ‘all but one of the learning style instruments were unreliable and invalid and had a negligible impact on the teaching of staff and the learning of students’ ( 6) . The ‘one’ was not the VAK questionnaire! The only one given any validity was Howard Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences, which proposes that people are ‘intelligent’ in a variety of different ways. People may ask, ‘if I can’t use a questionnaire how can I find out how my students learn?’ Our answer is simple - watch them and listen to them.
People will show you or tell you how they are learning, or not learning, and give you all the clues you need to elicit their strategy. By watching and listening to a person, you can learn to read a learner’s unconscious, non-verbal responses by matching external behavioural cues with a specific internal response. In this way, you can start to understand how they are thinking. This process is called calibration . The calibration tool we call eye accessing cues is one of the best-known discoveries of NLP. This easy-to-understand model enables you to notice and calibrate a person’s eye movements. By observing a person’s eye patterns, we can see where s/he accesses information, as follows:
Looking up, left or right = accessing visual information
Eyes to either side, level with ears = accessing auditory information
Eyes down and to their right = accessing kinaesthetic information
Eyes down to their left = talking to themselves
The direction of the eyes, left or right, depends on whether they are recalling/remembering information, or constructing/creating new information. Calibration is essential as these are generalised patterns, and it is important not to assume everyone has the same pattern.
See the chart below to see how this works in more detail. Imagine this illustration superimposed on the face of someone you are looking at:
This is not new information; it’s just that nobody noticed it before. You can test this for yourself. Notice what happens when you ask someone what colour are their child’s eyes. Or what are the last words of the National Anthem. Ask them what temperature their toes are at the moment. Be careful not to make assumptions and pay attention to the way you ask the question. The response you get will be different depending on what and how you ask. One mother told us, ‘I knew he was lying because he looked up and to the left’ (his right, indicating a constructed picture). But it is not necessarily the case that he lied at all - all we can say is that he created something visual. Perhaps it was an image of himself getting into trouble if he told a lie!
Attention to non-verbal cues from body language and eye accessing cues, combined with verbal feedback from a person, provides most of the information you need to elicit their strategy for learning. Hopefully you are even more aware now of how much information is available to you as you pay more and more attention to the clues, both verbal and non-verbal, of how a person processes information. Other cues to pay attention to are breathing rates, changes in the colour of a person’s face, and the evenness of skin tone, to name a few. The important skill to develop is your ability to notice – your sensory acuity.
Now you could elicit a brilliant learning strategy, or one that doesn’t work so well, or even one that is a disaster! What is really important is for you to become aware of the sequence in the way someone encodes and decodes information. This is the basis of their strategy for learning in that particular context.
The Emotional State of Learning
Effectively teaching a new strategy for learning involves more than merely knowing the steps to take. We don’t want any key factors to be left to chance in the learning process and we want to take account of as many of the variables involved in effective learning as possible. A crucial variable is the feeling or feelings that learners experience when they are learning. This is not just about feeling good all the time. The way we feel enables a person to want to start learning, provides the motivation to continue, and to know when they are finished.
Take a moment to think about something that you were brilliant at and really enjoyed learning when you were at school. You probably knew you were good at it because you got feedback. You enjoyed it because your teacher was enthusiastic, fascinated, and nice to you. Your teacher created in you some of the key factors in learning well - a sense of security and being cared for, curiosity, enthusiasm, and motivation. Unfortunately, as teachers we often leave these key factors to chance rather than controlling them as variables.
When a person learns something new, the chemical and neurological conditions which exist at that time are directly connected to the learning. Any new learning is effectively ‘glued’ to the specific state you are in at the time you are learning. Many of us are aware that learning is an emotional process and it can be a great experience or, sadly, a fearful one. The term ‘state ’ in NLP means the total on-going mental, emotional and physical conditions that a person is experiencing at that moment in time, and from which a person acts. State is the totality of what you are thinking and feeling. For example:
Remembering the past
Imagining the future
Referencing facts
Hallucinating fiction
Making pictures and movies in your mind’s eye
Making sound tracks of internal dialogue
Feeling internal feelings like butterflies, excitement, calm, tenacity,
Experiencing bio-chemical changes triggered by fight, flight or freeze
Your ability to enthuse your students, convince them that they can learn, it’s worth doing and they want to learn, is a variable that is within your control to manage. So it’s essential that you as a teacher find the state of enthusiasm for yourself first, and then convey that through your voice tone and language to the le
arner. So in the next chapter you will discover more about creating great states in your learners to ensure that they are motivated to learn and have fun doing so.
summary
During this chapter you have discovered how the representational systems work to encode and decode learning, and how we make use of this process to elicit and install simple strategies. You have increased your knowledge of sensory acuity so you can start to notice more and more about how your students learn and alter your language to communicate more effectively. You have considered current practice regarding learning styles and how NLP provides a much more effective way to elicit and install exquisite learning. Some of these fundamentals are re-visited in later chapters in relation to group and classroom work. Now you have some of the building blocks of learning strategies, go ahead, stay curious and have fun!
references
1. Antonia and Bill Beattie, author, I Ching or Book of Changes
2. Locke, John. Some Thoughts Concerning Education and of the Conduct of the Understanding. Eds. Ruth W. Grant and Nathan Tarcov. (1996) Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc.
3. Bandler, Richard; Grinder, John (1976). The Structure of Magic II.Palo Alto: Science and behavior Books Inc.
4. Ignacio Estrada Director, Grants and Administration, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
5. David Puttnam, www.theguardian.com/education/2007/may/08/elearning.schools
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