It’s not just a matter of making sure the person can say each letter. They must also be absolutely convinced that they can now spell this word. So here is the convincer:
Ask the learner to start at the end of the word and spell the word from the last letter to the first. It’s just as easy to do it in reverse as it is forward because they have made a big, clear and still image. Usually, the person will feel good now all by themselves as they realise that they now have a way of learning any word they choose, backwards or forwards. Make sure you celebrate their success to reinforce the good feeling they get when they do it correctly, so that they want that feeling again and again. This builds motivation.
Improving poor spelling
Here is the modification for poor or erratic spellers. Ask the learner to spell a word and observe their strategy as they do this. Ask some helpful questions such as ‘which bit of the word are you unsure about?’ It’s often the middle of the word that is confusing or vague, or it can be an unusual or irregular part of the word. When you ask the learner to look at the word in their mind, the person will often report that they can see some of the word but part of it is blurry, or they can’t see it or it dances about. Select this part of the word and write the whole word out in the same way as before, but this time use black for the part of the word they know and highlight the part of the word they had trouble with in their favourite colour (there is no need to write each letter in a different colour). Then go through the same process as previously outlined to make the image big, clear and still. Remember to celebrate their success and explain that because they can now spell this one word they found tricky, they have the strategy to do the same with any other word they like – forever!
There are lots of tricks to help someone spell, however the most important thing is to pay attention to what they are actually doing and saying, so that you can find the one key piece to change that will make the whole strategy work. So, for example, if someone says they can’t make a picture, back up to show them how to do this first. If the picture dances about, help them to hold it still. Ask them ‘what colour is your front door?’ or ‘what does your favourite shirt look like?’ . Ask them to imagine sitting in a cinema and make a picture of a red rose that fills the movie screen. Do whatever is necessary to help the learner. Paying attention and being creative are essential attributes to using NLP for learning. NLP is a model based on elegance; that is, scientific exactness and precision. In NLP this means that we make the smallest intervention in a very precise way to create the biggest change.
Teaching spelling to the whole class
The strategy outlined here can easily be adapted to whole class teaching and can have a profound effect on your students’ spelling scores. The Durham Project(2) involved a group of teachers with no prior experience of NLP. The teachers were taught as much useful classroom-focused NLP as possible in a day and a half. The results in one particular school were astonishing.
The teacher, Andrea, and her Learning Support Assistant, Kelly, decided to see if they could improve the spelling of the whole group. They realised that they were already doing a number of useful things, so they just made some small changes to the way they taught spelling to improve the internal strategies the children were using. Small changes are not insignificant changes – they can be the ones that are the difference that makes the big difference. The children already looked at the words and wrote them out, then checked they were correct. But there wasn’t a specific instruction as to how to check the words so Andrea and Kelly introduced colour to make the spelling pattern they were concentrating on stand out. This use of colour helps the children make better pictures of the word.
Andrea then changed her language. For example, she asked the children to see the word rather than remember it. The words were written on the right hand side of the board and the children were moved so they sat looking directly at the board and moved their eyes to their left to see the words. Armed with scented felt tip pens, the children wrote out the words on BIG sheets of lining paper. This, in addition to introducing colours, made the task more fun.
A number of the children were not improving as fast as the others, so Kelly made some lovely textured letters to help them recreate the words. Using the textured letters doesn’t mean the children were learning spelling kinaesthetically , just as using scented pens doesn’t mean learning through the olfactory sense. These simply provide another route to learning the words visually . The aim of a strategy is to be as simple as possible, with no additional parts or loops to the sequence. Kelly created the textures to introduce an extra encoding only for those students who needed it. The primary focus was to ensure that the children made really good pictures of the words and the addition of colour and texture aided this process for a few children, but it wasn’t necessary for the majority.
Now look at the spelling scores. Week 1 was the baseline assessment before the changes were introduced:
RESULTS OF THE PROJECT
week 1 – 18% full score
46% 5 or over correct
week 2 – 66% full score
81% 5 or over correct
week 3 – 71% full score
92% 5 or over correct
The step change in the results is nothing less than spectacular. Less than 20% of the children got a full score in the baseline week, whereas more than 70% got all the spellings right just 2 weeks later. This is why NLP learning strategies are a little piece of magic! The full report of this project is included in Part 5 of this book.
A great strategy for learning spelling goes like this:
Hear the word spoken
Ai (Auditory internal)
See the word externally
Ke (Kinaesthetic external)
Make a big still image on the inside
Vi (Visual internal)
Feel a positive ‘Yes’ feeling
Ki (Kinaesthetic internal)
Once the strategy is installed correctly and the person is a great speller, she/he will hear the word and automatically see a big, clear and still image on the inside, with a positive feeling attached to it.
This is about as short a strategy as a person can have and illustrates the elegance of effective learning strategies.
Of course a child doesn’t need to know about notation, but it is important to keep the learning fun. Here is just one variation especially loved by little boys. It’s best to use a very conspiratorial voice for this!
How to be a great Spy !
‘This is a secret and only you have the code. Spies have lots of special equipment and secret hiding places. Do you know you have a secret camera that is so small no one else can see it? So here is how to use your special camera to spell every word you see and remember it easily - just like a spy! Look at the word; now take a picture of the word with your secret camera, blink, and click the shutter. Blow up the picture so it is really big and check that your picture is the same as the one on the paper. It is? Good, now look up in your mind and store the picture in your secret filing cabinet. When you hear the word in the test, sneak up inside your mind, open your secret filing cabinet and look at the word. Then copy it down on your sheet. Don’t let anyone know though because it’s top secret and you are training to be a great spy!’
When you listen carefully to the language learners use, they will often tell you directly how they are processing information, especially when you take what they say literally.
For example, imagine a student comes to you saying, ‘I am struggling with this assignment. I just can’t get going with it and I’m stuck. I don’t know what I am doing’ . How would you reply? Remembering the representational systems we mentioned earlier in this chapter, what clues do you have about the sensory channel this student is using to express her problem? Words like ‘struggle’, ‘get going’, ‘doing’ indicate strong kinaesthetic representations. In order to gain rapport with the learner and speak the same language you need to use the same sensory-based language in response, such as, ‘okay
Anne, it feels like we need to get to grips with this so let’s roll our sleeves up, get stuck in and unpack the problem’ .
However, if in response, a teacher uses a strong visual preference to solving this particular problem and replies, ‘ okay Anne, clearly you just can’t see the wood for the trees. Let’s take a good look it and see if we can shine some light on the problem, we just need to focus in on the big picture’ . Anne is expressing her (problem) experience using language that is primarily kinaesthetic, revealing that, at this time, she is using the kinaesthetic modalities to access her representation of the problem. By matching her language the teacher has a good chance of helping her, whereas by using his default (visual) language, he runs a great risk of alienating her and she may well retort, ‘oh you just don’t get it’ , and she would be right! If you listen to the way she is representing the problem, you can respond using language which will make her feel like you can really help her. It’s a case of speaking the same language – literally!
Similarly, improving your ability to notice a learner’s eye accessing cues and other nonverbal cues (your sensory acuity), so that you notice ‘how’ people learn, gives you a huge amount of information without anyone saying a word. This can be especially rewarding when dealing with older children and teenagers, who are not known for their love of communicating with adults. Where a person looks, how and when they breathe, and their body posture are all clues to tracking the learning strategy they are using. It helps you to work out which parts work and which don’t.
Take Adam for example, he hasn’t done his homework and when asked why he hasn’t done it, he reveals his strategy for not doing his homework. “Well, I was going to do it and then I imagined playing football instead and I said to myself, ‘what would I rather do? The football is much more exciting than sitting studying’. So I checked the time and decided I could do it later. But when it came to it I was too tired.” Adam’s strategy for not doing his homework begins with him making a picture of himself doing something else. He gives himself a choice by asking a question in his mind and then compares the two different feelings – doing his homework and playing football – makes another picture of time and expands time so that he will have enough time to do both. Finally, he has another feeling (being too tired) and doesn’t do it. Does this sound familiar?
It’s also worth bearing in mind that many people have favourite or habitual ways of expressing themselves and assume that because they are communicating effectively everyone will understand precisely what they mean. This may not be the case! People respond to language at an unconscious level, literally. You may believe you are illustrating a point metaphorically, but the other person may be responding to it in a very different way. Remember the lady who couldn’t see herself doing something?
Understanding how someone learns requires you to track the sequence that they go through using the representation systems. Listen and look for the combination of visual, auditory and kinaesthetic representations in the sequence. The sequence may work really well - or it may not. When you learn to track the sequence you will begin to know where and what to improve and just where to make the change so the strategy works really well and makes the person feel great at the same time.
summary
In this chapter you have learned how to teach the strategy for spelling, both with individuals and with a whole class. You have developed your sensory acuity further and begun to listen carefully to the language people use to discover their strategies for learning. So now you can begin to install exquisite learning strategies in all your students.
references
1. Terry Pratchett, 1991 Witches Abroad, Victor Gollancz
2. Kate Benson and John Carey 2006 The Durham Project, META Ltd1
activities
Activity 1
notice eye accessing cues in an excellent speller Find someone who is an expert speller. Ask them to spell a word and watch very carefully their eye accessing cues. Pay really close attention, because this will happen very quickly. You may want to repeat this a few times so you become skilled at noticing what they do.
Activity 2
install an excellent spelling strategy in a poor speller Now find someone who is not confident with spelling and repeat Activity 1, noticing what they do with their eyes and body. This will be easier because the process will go on longer!
Ask if the poor speller would like to sit for a spell and improve their life by teaching them to spell using the strategy in this chapter. Keep it simple and remember, your enthusiasm is infectious!
Extension activity
What are the key terms your students need to know in your subject? Make some big, bright and colourful cards or posters and put them on the walls high up. Refer to them from time to time with the instruction to ‘see’ the correct word on the poster on the outside and the inside of their minds. Leave the cards/posters there for a week or two and then take them down and ask the students to write down the words. Notice how they look at the posters in their imagination.
This eBook is licensed to Dominic Luzi, [email protected] on 10/18/2018
Chapter 4
How to teach anyone to read –
the mechanics and beyond
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‘One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.’ (1)
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In this chapter
Discover how to create pleasure in reading
Identify the strategies to master the mechanics of reading
Explore the difference between learning to read and reading to learn
Learn the strategies for reading for meaning and reading quickly
Consider for a moment the shocking facts that in the UK 1 in 4 people are functionally illiterate and 42 million adults in the USA can’t read. Immersing yourself in the pages of Tolstoy and Shakespeare is not the issue here. Simply being able to understand a bus timetable or official letter is essential to day-to-day life and freedom of choice. Reading is a route to freedom and a basic human right rather than an academic choice. It is not just a question of accessing the rest of the curriculum , although this is important too. Regardless of what subject or age group you teach, we hope that every teacher equips themselves with the skills to teach reading and improve their learners’ strategies for reading. Reading is a foundational pillar of all learning. It is not therefore about learning to read, it is about reading to learn. Once we begin to move on from teaching the mechanics of reading towards recognising the capability of reading as a skill that facilitates learning, we open up a whole new vista of possibilities for learning almost anything.
Let’s start by making three distinctions:
There are the mechanics of reading - recognition of the letter pattern and the associated sound of words, and applying rules as to how the words are used (these are Mastery skills, see chapter 14).
There are the reading strategies for specific needs such as ‘reading for meaning’, ‘reading for full sensory immersion’ or ‘reading speedily to extract information’ (these are Developmental skills, also see chapter 14).
Underpinning both these activities is discovering the joy and pleasure associated with reading.
The assessment of whether someone can read or not is often treated as a yes or no question. Why do we talk about a person’s ability to read in such digital terms as ‘can do’ or ‘can’t do’? To look at a sequence of letters and know how to pronounce the word is only one level of learning to read. Knowing what the word means and being able to manipulate the meaning in your mind is another step. Creating images, feelings and a virtual reality is yet another. Grasping the mechanics of reading is just a step and not the goal. What we really want is to be able to utilise the best reading strategy according to the context and required outcome.
Learning to enjoy reading
The problem with words on a page is that they are two-dimensional and, initially, less interestin
g to look at than the multi-sensory three-dimensional world we inhabit. A baby looking at, touching and feeling a cat and hearing it making interesting sounds is quite excited to learn that the thing is called cat. When s/he looks at the three flat letters C A T and is told that says cat, it’s not such a rich experience. So it’s an advantage to quickly work out the mechanics of letters and words so that the child can move swiftly on to enter a world of sensory-rich imagination.
Strategies that encourage people to generate rich pictures out of ‘flat’ words encourage learners to read swiftly and efficiently, and this can start well before a child formally learns to read. Children who read really well have usually had books read to them. They have sat on the lap of a parent, grandparent or caring adult, staring at the page, listening to the story and making vivid pictures in their mind’s eye. So when they look at the words they don’t bother to see each and every word, they make pictures of the story. The story is also not in their own voice.
When you hear a story, it enables you build other voices in your head. For many of us remembering back to school, the best part about reading was the teacher reading to the class whilst we had the book, so that we weren’t burdened with the process and could immerse ourselves in the experience, just as Una did (Chapter 2) when she sat on her father’s knee when he read to her.
Teaching Excellence Page 6