Teaching Excellence

by Richard Bandler

  6. Frank Coffield et al 2008 Just suppose teaching and learning became the first Priority: Learning and Skills Network

  activities

  Activity 1

  Ask a friend or colleague to spend a few minutes with you while you study their eye accessing cues.

  Use an image such as this to draw arrows to indicate which way they look when you ask him/her questions. There is a list of questions in Appendix B to get you started, then be creative and start asking your own questions and notice the results.

  Activity 2

  Build some of the questions from the list and some of the ones you have created yourself into questions you can ask in class and start to notice where your students look and how they respond. Notice that how you frame your questions has an impact on the way your students represent the answer to themselves. Introduce your students to eye accessing with a pairs activity based on your own list.

  Extension activity

  Spend a day paying attention to how you give instructions. Record yourself for an hour and listen to how you phrase your questions and instructions. Ask your family, friends and colleagues too. Your children will tell you the truth! Do you use some phrases more habitually than others?

  Look this way

  Listen up

  Show me

  Tell me

  Follow these instructions

  Get on with it

  Notice how to do this

  Do you see what I mean?

  Do you understand what I am saying?

  Does it make sense to you?

  All of these statements give a person a suggestion as to how to act on the inside. Evaluate your list and decide if the meaning of your communication is conveyed through the specific use of the words you choose.

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

  part 1

  the building blocks

  of nlp

  applied to learning

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

  chapter 2

  Building Strategies

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  ‘The illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.’ (1)

  Alvin Toffler

  In this chapter

  How to drive learning with good feelings

  A step-by-step guide to Learning Strategies

  The secrets of building motivation and propulsion for learning

  The benefits of Assessment FOR not OF Learning

  Una, a Teaching Excellence student, was one of the best readers we have ever encountered. Una could read anything effectively and efficiently and enjoy the process. This is her strategy: As she begins to think about reading something she has a warm and light feeling of excitement and confidence, she smells a faint smell of pipe tobacco and Old Spice aftershave, and starts to imagine her ‘reading room’. She studies the reading matter and decides what sort of reading room would be best for this particular literature. If it is a technical report, she might decide that a high stool with a stainless steel desk and a bright lamp would be good. Or if it is a novel she might decide that a big comfy armchair by a fire would be nice. When she has created her room she enters it in her imagination and begins to read. She can do this anywhere. It doesn’t matter if she is on the Underground or standing at a windy bus stop because when she reads she is undisturbed in her reading room.

  Eliciting her strategy was fun and illuminating. Asked how she learned to read, she said her father would come home from the city and sit her on his lap. He would read The Financial Times to her, moving his finger along the words as he read them out loud. Do you notice the sensory richness of her experience? She didn’t need a special reading scheme and her experience shows that the context and process of learning is far more important than the content.

  A huge amount of a child’s learning takes place at home and is, for the most part, a matter of trial and error because parents have little access to understanding learning processes. Parents naturally have an expectation that schools and colleges have the best teaching strategies in place and use them at all times with their children. Yet one of the things we notice time and time again is how few teachers and parents understand the significance of knowing what a learning strategy actually is, when a strategy really works, and how to test that it works. Even fewer teachers and parents know how to build self-propelling systems for motivation to learn, despite understanding the importance of these processes.

  Driving Learning with Good Feelings

  The ability to merely learn to play music isn’t enough. You want to have a self-propelling system to motivate yourself to enjoy learning and enjoy practising. Rather than just teaching children the dates on which a President was born, we want to teach them how to be motivated enough to pick up a book and discover information, to become interested in what that person offered to history and to think about how his part in history may affect the future.

  Learning a new strategy is not only about the learning state you start with, but how to connect each step with the best state , in sequence, until you finish and feel great. Whatever the activity - whether it’s a sport, art, music, geometry or spelling - if you are terrified you just won’t do something as well as when you feel good. Doing a scientific experiment in chemistry in a state of curiosity and inquisitiveness leads to you watching carefully, making clear notes, and noticing what happens.

  To install a good strategy we want to teach people what to feel just before they do something new, what to feel as they do it, and what feeling to have that tells them they have done it correctly - and stop! The key is to constantly attach the right state to the activity at the right moment, so that the activity itself triggers the internal feeling and provides the propulsion to complete it.

  Think for a moment of the typical objections you may have heard from learners about learning something new. ‘I want to do it, but I just can’t seem to get around to it’ . What is lacking is the feeling of excitement about beginning something new. How about later in the process? ‘I’m stuck and can’t get back into it’ . This learner needs the state of tenacity and determination to push through to the end. Then of course there is the student who just drafts and redrafts and doesn’t ever seem to hand in the finished project. This learner needs to know when they are finished and feel satisfied with his/her work.

  As teachers we want to teach our students how to feel excited about getting started, determined to continue, tenacious when they get stuck, and ecstatic when they finish. There is no reason why, when they are at school, children can’t go inside and remember being excited, and remember being frustrated, and get their frustration to lead to impatience, and this to lead to excitement. As teachers, we know in advance that learners are going to feel frustrated at some point and are highly likely to face a problem or task that feels too hard – it’s happened to the best of us. When we chain the states and link them together, the feeling of ‘it’s too hard’ leaks into feeling really frustrated, and the frustration leaks into impatience, and the impatience leaks into curiosity, then you really start trying to answer the problem. This process is going to build a tenacious child.

  In this case the sequence is: Frustration, Hesitation, Impatience, Curiosity, Desire All too often when a child gets frustrated at school, the teacher will tell the child off and the result is the learning just stops. In our day you were sent to the corner or to the Headteacher. Even now ‘time outs’ are in common use. The effect of this is to connect frustration with stopping learning, rather than the teacher leading the frustration into curiosity or desire. Even the most caring parent can inadvertently create the belief in a child that when you get frustrated you stop. Recently, Kate observed a mother who intervened as soon as her child became ‘stuck’ or frustrated. When Mum was taught to say, ‘oh dear, you seem to be a bit stuck there
, it’s time to think of another solution ’, the boy found another way and was consequently delighted with himself.

  Children and teachers can learn to do this routinely and for fun until the point it becomes a game. Here is a game to try with your learners. Say to your learners, ‘okay, think of the most frustrating thing we’ve done here today and how we hesitated to get going, but then feel impatient to get on with it and curious as to what we can learn next, so we really want to do it well and finish it!’ This literally loops the learners through the states so they don’t stop in the wrong place, hit frustration and give up. Rather, they use their frustration as a motivation to continue and get to the end.

  Humour, gentle teasing and chiding are an important skill for a teacher. By chiding children out of bad states they lead themselves from bad states into good states, and you build people who are self-propelled learners. One of the most important things that a teacher does is to give the message to children - don’t stop until you get to a happy place . A bad place just means that you are doing it the wrong way and you have to take a step back and find the easy way.

  A step-by-step guide to Learning Strategies

  Learning doesn’t stop at 3 o’clock in the afternoon and education doesn’t just happen when you’re doing homework. Everything you teach children, from cleaning their room, to washing the car, to doing chores, has a right state in which to begin, a way to know when you’re doing it correctly, a way to know when you are not doing it correctly, and a way to know when you are finished. All strategies have a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s just the same with learning strategies.

  A strategy is a sequence of activities within our sensory representational systems that have become a single unit of behaviour. On a very simple level, imagine the process of answering a phone, or on a more complex level, of driving a car. When you first learn to drive a car, each activity has to be thought through individually, but as you practise over and over, driving becomes a single unit of activity.

  A useful model for understanding strategy elicitation and installation is the TOTE model(2) Test Operate Test Exit (TOTE)

  The TOTE model is the internal process we go through to successfully complete a strategy, whether this is getting out of bed in the morning, deciding what to eat for lunch, or learning something new. Here is a simple example of TOTE in action:

  TEST – Have we done it yet? Test the present state (the workbook is blank) against the desired state (the workbook is completed). If the two don’t match it’s a no to the question!

  OPERATE - Run the strategy with tenacity and determination, keep going and the more we get right, the better we feel, the harder the challenge the more determined we become to succeed. Using a variety of representations and submodalities the answer is worked out.

  TEST - Have we done it? (The workbook is completed) Yes! Knowing that we have done just the right amount to complete the process, not going for closure too soon, leaving the question half completed and not persisting beyond what is necessary.

  EXIT - We are done – feel great!

  Good strategies are short and sweet! They have no additional or unnecessary steps and they have no unnecessary loops. Good learning strategies are driven by good feelings. Some people have really good strategies for motivating themselves to do things. Some people may have effective strategies but rely on pain rather than gain to achieve the result they want. For example, a famous horror story writer motivates himself to write scary books by scaring himself, which may not be the best way!

  Motivation and propulsion

  We wonder if you have ever heard teachers complain that their students ‘just aren’t motivated’ ? Motivation is not a permanent state that you experience outside of any context. A friend went on a seminar with a famous self-improvement speaker. After the event our friend said he felt ‘so motivated’ ! We asked him ‘motivated to do what?’ His answer was to do more courses with this speaker! Motivation is related to a particular context and everyone feels motivated to do something at some time, even if it is to stay in bed! Motivation is where you see that your homework is not done, and seeing it makes you feel like you want to do it, rather than you have to do it.

  In addition to knowing the most effective steps and sequence of steps in a strategy, the rationale, desire and drive also need to be in place. Why you are doing it, what you have to do, how you do it, and where else it can take you. You also need to know when you are done! Any good strategy is not just about the steps to learn something - it includes the propulsion system to create the motivation to learn and find out even more, and has a sense of achievement when you have finished.

  How do you motivate yourself? Do you motivate yourself towards feeling the gain or away from feeling the pain? Let’s take a look at an everyday requirement to do something – getting out of bed! How do you motivate yourself to get out of bed in the morning? Are you up with the lark or do you roll over and leave it to the last possible minute before you get up? This example also illustrates the differences in effective and elegant strategies and ones that are clumsy and inefficient. It’s also an opportunity for us to introduce you to the way we formally notate strategies.

  Caroline is up with the lark. She knows she is awake when she hears the sounds in the room minutes before the alarm clock goes off. She imagines what she is going to do that day, sees herself enjoying herself, has a good feeling, throws back the covers and is up.

  The strategy Caroline has, when the content is removed, goes like this:

  T est: Am out of bed?

  No

  O perate the strategy:

  She hears a sound

  Ae

  (Auditory external)

  She sees a movie

  Vi

  (Visual internal)

  She feels good

  Ki

  (Kinaesthetic internal)

  She gets up

  Ke

  (Kinaesthetic external)

  T est: Am I out of bed?

  Yes

  E xit

  Duncan, on the other hand, wakes up when the alarm goes off, feels bad, groans, and turns the alarm to snooze. He says to himself, ‘oh no, just 5 more minutes’ , and snuggles under the covers feeling how nice it is to be in bed. The alarm goes off again. He hits snooze again and imagines that if he skips breakfast he can have 5 more minutes. He snuggles back down in bed and feels how good it is to be dozing still. The alarm goes off again. He feels he needs to go to the bathroom, but puts it off and says to himself, ‘just 5 more minutes’ . Then he imagines himself arriving late for work and what his boss will say to him. He has a feeling of panic combined with wanting to go to the toilet and he drags himself out of bed. The strategy Duncan has with the content removed goes like this:

  T est Am I out of bed?

  No

  O perate the strategy:

  He hears a sound

  Ae

  (Auditory external)

  He feels bad

  Ki

  (Kinaesthetic internal)

  He does something

  Ke

  (kinaesthetic external)

  He says something to himself

  Ai

  (Auditory internal)

  He feels good (still in bed)

  Ki

  (Kinaesthetic internal)

  T est: Am I out of bed yet?

  No!

  He loops this strategy round and round, adding bad feelings at each loop until the bad feelings he is using to motivate himself eventually get him out of bed.

  Caroline’s model goes: Test Operate Test Exit, which is short and sweet. Duncan’s model goes: Test Operate Test Operate Test Operate (repeating over and over) Exit (eventually!)

  If Duncan wants to enjoy getting out of bed in the morning he can change his strategy in a number of ways. Firstly he could ‘try on’ Caroline’s strategy and see if it works for him. Or he can take some of the loops out of his strategy to make it shorter and more elegant and change some of the pictures, f
eelings and sounds to make it genuinely more pleasant to get up in the morning. Changing the sub-modalities of the sounds and images will often be sufficient to change the feelings associated with the activity. Or he could create an entirely new strategy that he likes much more and puts him in a great state for the day.

  One of the choices that you make as a teacher in deciding how best to help someone is to choose which intervention to make. Recently, a black belt martial artist who was progressing very well in his studies wanted help with passing his examinations, which were demonstration- based. He said it took him too long to decide what move to make. He even used the term ‘clunky’ to describe his strategy for choosing and making the move. His strategy was as follows:

  He heard his master call out the move in Japanese

  Ae

  He would say the Japanese word to himself

  Ai

  He would translate the word in his head to English

  Ai

  He would look at the sequence of moves in his mind

  Vi

  He would rehearse the movement in his mind with his body

  Ki

  He would make the move

  Ke

  He was usually not sure he had it right

  Ki

  The strategy worked and was organised, but it wasn’t elegant because it had more steps than he needed and he was unsure and not feeling good while running the strategy. The solution was to take out some steps and rehearse the new strategy a few times so he became confident in it.