Teaching Excellence
Page 5
There was no need for him to translate the word and say it in English. The Japanese word was already strongly associated with the movement, so his new strategy was to hear the instruction, rehearse the movement in his mind to check it was the correct one, and make the move with his body. It was clear that the new strategy worked because his whole body changed as he practised and he beamed widely as he finished, so it obviously felt good. So in this instance we modified a strategy to make it more efficient and elegant. His strategy wasn’t broken, but as he said it was ‘clunky ’, so streamlining was the answer.
Just as some teachers may use poor tonality to give instructions, many people put drudgery in the tone of voice inside their head when they think about studying or doing homework, see themselves being bored for a long time and feel bad about it. As children are great modellers, it’s likely that they have your voice in their head as their teacher, so make sure it’s a helpful and enthusiastic voice. Recently, a little boy was very sad because Mrs Troy wasn’t his teacher anymore and he really liked her and said that she helped him. It was suggested to him that he could still ask for her help and she would probably tell him a great answer because he knew her so well. Mrs Troy’s voice was in his head and so he could still utilise that resource to help himself.
Teaching students to have good strategies involves paying attention not only to the efficient way they learn something, but also to the good feelings about the activity. Being motivated by a negative feeling is generally not a good learning strategy. Instead, build propulsion through feeling good so that your body and your mind benefit from great neuro-chemistry.
Most children who enjoy reading have learned to enjoy books even before they can read. Cuddling up on a sofa with parents, grandparents, and carers makes book time a special time with good feelings associated with reading , which seems a great place to start. Contrast this with a child whose anxious/ambitious parents flash word cards to their 18-month-old, desperate to engage reading. As the child internalises the parents’ anxiety, what is the feeling being attached to reading?
The 21st Century has seen a new phenomenon, the ‘hyper-parent’ - stressed to the hilt lest their child doesn’t become a high achiever, while instilling in children that learning is hard work and that if they don’t outstrip everyone else in their class they will be miserable for the rest of their lives! Since learning is state-related, these children may achieve great things, but they will not have good feelings associated with their achievements. If we are fearful and anxious every time we remember our times tables, is it any wonder that we prefer to forget them?
A better option is to be like Una’s father and install a love of reading with comfort and pleasure at the same time as using a simple strategy to teach reading.
Assessment FOR learning not OF learning!
One problem with the way the school system operates is that the doubt is with the child and the certainty is with the teachers. This means that the only way a child knows they are doing well is by an external reference . The teacher is the one who tells you when you have finished and whether you are right, rather than you solving the Maths problem and turning the page to see if the answer you got is the right answer. This teaches children to feel good by pleasing the teacher by the shortest route, rather than feeling good by self-initiated problem solving. This is the wrong kind of strategy installation.
At this point we can almost hear the cries of the teachers! ‘Well the students won’t do the work – they will just cheat and look at the answers!’ If the strategy the teacher installs isn’t an effective one and the answer is on the next page, yes, you will just look at the answer without doing the problem. This is because the fun isn’t in getting the right answer; the fun is in getting over the pain! The problem is not that the student is looking for the prize through minimum effort; it’s what they have been trained to do. The problem is they are trying to please the teacher rather than themselves.
Richard installed a strategy to learn maths extremely quickly with John Sebastian La Valle, son of John La Valle – Richard’s co-trainer and co-author with Richard of Persuasion Engineering® . The name of the game was get the right answer so you can please yourself! This is how the conversation went:
“I kept saying to him ‘I don’t give a hoot if you get the right answer. But if you do this you get the right answer’. John said, ‘wow I got the right answer’, so I said ‘I bet you can’t do 5 of them’. John said ‘will you check them?’ I said, ‘no, here’s the right answers’. I wrote them on 5 separate pieces of paper so he wouldn’t have to look at all 5. I said, ‘OK, here’s the first one. When you’re done, flip over the piece of paper and look at the answer. If it’s the right answer you get to feel really cool and move on to the next one. If not, you have to go back and do it until that’s the answer you get’. John said, ‘what if I can’t get it?’ I said, ‘well then you just keep going until you do and if you really can’t do it then I’ll show you how to do it, but why should I show you if you already know how? Maybe it might take you three tries’. Then he got one right, and the next, and did
6 months’ homework in 4 days. Just like that.”
Teaching a child to multiply 3 times 8 and get the answer 24 is all well and good, but there is an infinite number of numbers. Do we want to teach every single combination or do we want to teach the students to want to have the right answer? We need to design the learning to the strategy so that when the student sees those numbers s/he wants to find out what the answer is so they can feel good. As the students learn the answers they want to build the chart in their heads so that the answer pops out of their chart as fast as possible. The faster it pops out, the better they feel.
Why bother figuring out how to spell words? Because it feels good to do the right thing! If a child gets 10 words right, the next time the child will use the same process to learn new words. It makes your job as a teacher much easier. Build in the desire to get the right answer for themselves, not to please the teacher, so the child knows to focus on what they are doing that is right. If they grade their own tests, so nobody except s/he knows whether s/he is right or not, and the teacher gives exactly same test again, the child builds more and more right answers, and if s/he desires the answer s/he will go for it.
This way we could reduce the grading structure to simply an ‘A’ or an incomplete!
summary
During this chapter you have explored the key elements of effective learning strategies including chaining states, the representational systems, the TOTE model, and propulsion.
A key message to consider is how we equip our students to please
themselves rather than gain satisfaction only from external and target-driven criteria. Armed with this information, we hope that the following chapters on specific strategies will build the desire for great learning for yourself and for your students.
references
1. Alvin Toffler (1970) Future Shock, USA: Bantam Books,
2. Bandler, Grinder, et al 1980 Neuro-Linguistic Programming Vol. 1 Meta Publications
activities
Activity 1
don’t stop until you are in a happy place game
Spend 10 minutes with a group who could do with a bit more motivation.
Place 4 large signs on the floor in a row with a sequence of states such as:
interest – frustration – impatience – desire
Have the group move to each sign and discuss with the students each state in turn, asking questions that elicit that state for them, such as: ‘What interests outside school do you have?’
‘What’s great about it?’
Move on to the next sign asking about frustrating experiences and have them share them until they all feel frustrated.
Move on to impatience and repeat the process.
Finally move on to Desire. Talk about what floats their boat, what do they dream of doing or having. Now go back to the beginning and move the group swiftly from one sign to the next so the
y just touch into each of the feelings before moving onto the next one. Make it a race to link one to the next and the next. And of course end with the really good feelings so they are in a happy place. Remind them of this activity and their experience next time they need a little motivating.
Activity 2
elicit a strategy in preparation for the next chapter
Find a person willing to help you elicit their strategy for a process we have discussed. It could be for deciding to read a particular book, or getting out of bed.
Find out as much as you can about what they do inside to do this.
Here are some questions to help you get going;
What happens as you are doing this?
What do you do as you are preparing to do this?
What steps do you go through to do this quickly?
What do you do first?
What do you do next?
How do you know when you have done it?
If you think you have missed something, back up and ask:
What did you do just before that?
How do you know when you have done it? Try the strategy on for yourself. If it works through to the end – you have all the pieces
How to try on a strategy
Decide on something that you could do to have a better strategy to make the activity more exciting or enjoyable. Find someone who does this really well and elicit their strategy. Close your eyes and take some time to imagine going through each of the steps for yourself. Do this thoroughly and completely. Does this work better for you? If not, you don’t have to keep it. If it does, then decide you like it and keep it for yourself.
This eBook is licensed to Dominic Luzi, dluzi@managementalchemy.com on 10/18/2018
part 2
Strategies
For Learning
This eBook is licensed to Dominic Luzi, dluzi@managementalchemy.com on 10/18/2018
chapter 3
How to teach anyone to spell
TAP THIS TO SEE THE VIDEOS
‘Nanny Ogg knew how to start spelling ‘banana’,
but didn’t know how you stopped.’ (1)
Terry Pratchett
In this chapter
Learn the secrets of how to spell well
Discover the steps to teaching spelling from scratch
Identify the steps to improve poor spelling
Make spelling great for the whole class
We taught Louise to spell in 15 minutes during a tea break on a Neuro-Hypnotic Repatterning® (NHR) course. Afterwards she was furious! She said, ‘I have been feeling stupid for 30 years – why didn’t anyone teach me how to do this before!’ We explained that perhaps no one else she had met knew the precise steps to teach her to do this. The next day she arrived with coloured pens and large pieces of paper, set about finding every person in the group who had trouble spelling and proceeded to teach them her new-found strategy. She became an evangelist for spelling well, determined that no one else would feel like she had for all those years.
If you have been a poor speller in the past, apply the process we are about to teach you to yourself first, because a basic premise of NLP is ‘you go first’! This spelling strategy is short, sweet and easy to learn, so it is also a good place to start developing your skills for all learning strategies.
Many people refer to the ‘NLP spelling strategy’. This is a little odd since there isn’t actually one spelling strategy and it doesn’t belong to NLP. There is, however, one way that most really good spellers spell and NLP gives us the tools to discover the steps to the strategy (elicit the strategy) and teach others how to do it (install the strategy). Since it is so effective, it makes sense to teach people this way - so let’s sit for a spell!
What makes a good speller is that they are consistent and remember very well what a word looks like. Ask a good speller how to spell a word, and invariably they look up to their left and see the word in their personal spelling database as a big, clear and still picture; when they see this they get a good feeling down the midline of their body – a positive yes!
Ask a person who is ‘OK’ at spelling to spell a word and the process is more cumbersome. They may look up to their left, but they have to check it by sounding the letters out or sometimes breaking the word into phonemes (small units of sound) and then get some sense of it being right – maybe!
Ask a poor speller to spell a word and they will do a whole range of other things. For example, they may look up to their left and discover the word isn’t there, then they may say to themselves, ‘oh no, I don’t know how to spell this’ . Then they will look down and feel bad, and then try to work it out phonetically (foniks dosent werk for spelling in Inglish!) and finally they will get a feeling that lets them know they are still not sure.
A good speller who encounters a new word pays attention to the new word, makes a big still image of the word in their mind, and once they have the picture in their mind, feels certain they have the image which makes them feel good. So what we see is that a person who has a strategy for recalling information will also have a strategy for learning something new in the first place. Notice how quick the process is. Most effective strategies are as short as possible and have no unnecessary pieces or loops.
It is not that some people are naturally good at spelling and some are naturally bad spellers; they have simply worked out a way of spelling that may or may not work well. Invariably, those who have worked out a way of spelling that does not work well have done so because they haven’t been taught a good strategy in the first place. It is our responsibility as teachers to put this right, hopefully before our learners create limiting beliefs such as ‘I can’t spell’ . When teachers teach spelling in the way they believe it works (this may just be the way they do it for themselves) or without sufficient detail in how to spell, the children have no option but to randomly work out a strategy for spelling. So it’s inevitable that some of them get it right and others don’t.
The qualities of the representations are important to an effective strategy. If you are making small, faint images it’s unlikely you will remember these images clearly. To be confident in doing something you want to make a big, clear image of yourself doing it. One lady said during a class, ‘I just can’t see myself doing that somehow’ . It would be easy to assume that this person was speaking metaphorically and there could have been a long conversation about why this was, her past experience of learning, her confidence etc. Instead, she was asked to ‘just move the picture closer so it becomes bigger’ . She said, ‘oh, that’s better, now I can see myself doing this’ .
Now think about how spelling is often taught in schools. The child copies the words down from the whiteboard into one of those narrow, half-size exercise books used especially for spellings. When children are small and learning their first words, they have not graduated to using a pen so the words are written in pencil so the writing is faint and grey. Is it any wonder that they have difficulty remembering small faint letters in a little book?
Teaching Spelling from Scratch
Spelling strategies are the easiest strategies to install in people who can’t spell and it’s a great convincer for a student when they discover they can overcome a previously strongly held limiting belief. You can easily test this out for yourself with a student who wants to spell well. The first distinction to make is whether you are teaching someone to spell a word for the first time or whether you are improving or correcting poor spelling. This is an important distinction because the strategy used is slightly different, depending on the situation.
Teaching how to spell a word for the first time
To teach the spelling strategy from scratch, select a word that the learner has no idea how to spell. It’s not necessary to choose a simple word first; it’s more important that it’s a word they want to spell and they are motivated to learn to do it. With children, the word could be to do with a hobby or craze. With adults we often ask, ‘what word always trips you up?’ or ‘what word do you avoid
using because you are not sure of it?’ One lady wanted to spell ‘administered’ because she was a nurse and always had to write ‘given’ in patients’ medical notes because she couldn’t yet spell ‘administered’. The length of the word is unimportant because the learner is about to make a complete image of it.
Now take some coloured pens - the NLP Education Team use scented pens (see later) - and ask the student to choose a colour for each letter. Write each letter in nice big lower case letters on a large piece of paper, eg., flipchart paper. Words are generally written in lower case, so this is the lettering to use for teaching how to spell. Have the paper straight ahead of the learner, not flat on the table, and when you are talking to the learner use the correct name of the letter, not the sound. This way you prevent the learner returning to an unhelpful part of their strategy - namely, trying to spell a word phonetically.
Say to them, ‘now close your eyes and make a big picture of the word. When you have a clear picture open your eyes and check that the two words match’ . Repeat this process 2 or 3 times if it helps the student. This is almost always sufficient. The brain makes the image easily and quickly when directed with precision. When the internal and external images match, celebrate their success so the person feels really good – not just nice, but fantastic! (Remember, we are creating a great state to glue to the learning!).
Now ask them to close their eyes again, look at the picture and tell you in sequence what is the first letter, second letter etc. until you get to the end of the word. If the person can’t recall the letter, ask them what colour it is, and then ask them what shape is the colour. This gives them access to the letter through a different channel or representational system. If you use scented pens, you can also ask what the colour smells like to help them further. Increase the celebration and excitement with each letter so the person has a good feeling every time the words match. Continue until they have named all the letters in sequence. (NB - the use of colour and scent does not make this multi-sensory learning, it just provides another route to the image, which is what you want the learner to access).