Teaching Excellence

by Richard Bandler

  Hop

  Do this to the window

  Quickly

  Hop to the window like this

  Shiny

  Hop quickly to the shiny window

  Adapt this process to create more games.

  Activity 2

  Find a person who is a really effective reader and is willing to help you elicit their strategy for reading.

  Find out as much as you can about what they do on the inside.

  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?

  Extension activity

  Make some question cards as a new resource for your class to improve

  their comprehension of a subject as they read and review a text. Make the questions as sensory-rich as you can:

  What would it feel like to have been in the jungle at that time?

  Build an image of the volcano in your mind. How hot would it feel? How would it sound? What are the smells associated with volcanoes?

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

  chapter 5

  Memory Strategies

  TAP THIS TO SEE THE VIDEOS

  ‘The true art of memory is the art of attention.’ (1)

  Samuel Johnson

  In this chapter

  How to build a great memory

  Remembering names

  Remembering lists and facts

  Making remembering fun and rewarding

  ‘I can’t remember! I have a memory like a sieve! I forget things all the time! ’ These are cries we hear over and over again. From children sitting with furrowed brows staring at facts, to adults panicking over failing memory, it’s a problem for many people. This chapter teaches you memory and recall strategies that are easy to learn and use. It takes just a few minutes, once you know what the key steps are and how to drive your own brain, to develop a great memory for yourself and your students.

  Like it or not, there are times when we have to remember information. Even in the age of technology, instant images and Wikipedia, some information needs to be memorised. It’s a pleasurable experience for many people to remember information such as poetry or dialogue from a play or film, so if remembering information can be fun some of the time, why not make it fun all the time?

  Good memory techniques use all the senses. The more senses that are engaged, the more powerful the recall will be.(2) A good memory technique has two key components. Firstly, remembering the item, and then, more importantly, recalling the item . Think of this as encoding and decoding the information.

  By connecting the senses together we create synaesthesia. Synaesthesia occurs when one experience or representation immediately fires another experience in a different representation.(3) So, for example, smelling baking bread may immediately bring to mind an image of your grandmother in her kitchen. The olfactory sense fires a visual representation.

  The ability to remember information is also the foundation of creativity. The process of memorising depends on how creative you can be in presenting and representing the information to yourself. The first question to ask is, ‘how do I represent this information to myself in a way that is useful?’

  Having a great memory is about choosing the most helpful way to encode the information and store it so it can easily be decoded. For example, to learn the capital cities of different countries, the best place to put them in your mind is on a map. Then you can animate the map in your mind, so as you focus on each country it expands to make it really big and you make the capital city pop out of the country. Repeat this with each country and capital city. The more you teach children to do this in their imagination, the more it becomes automatic and the question is not ‘can you look at the picture of Japan and make it big in your head?’ ; but ‘how big can you make it?’ ‘How big can you make the letters of the capital city?’ If the word ‘Mississippi’ is written in white on white you won’t be able to see it. But it’s easy to see it when you make the letters in a strong contrast and exaggerate them.

  Concentrating on encoding means that people can decode easily. The result is they can recall the information in a number of different ways and contexts. Reciting poetry from memory is easy when it is written out on a huge screen inside your mind so you can read it from a distance. Children remember nursery rhymes perfectly because a nursery rhyme has a melody and a rhythm which is pleasing. Add the melody to the big screen and connect it to a body movement. So if you can’t quite recall a line of the poem, look at the screen, listen to the rhythm or just put your body in the same position and the line pops up so that each representational system triggers all the other systems.

  Learning names

  Many teachers worry that they can’t learn students’ names. It is particularly important that teachers, more than most people, have a good strategy for learning names, so let’s use this common problem to show how a good memory strategy works.

  Caroline is a teacher who used to believe she was incapable of learning her students’ names. During a Teaching Excellence seminar she learned this strategy and now she uses it to learn 200 students’ names in the first week of the new term. She turns it into a competition with all the students in the school hall. The students test her by mixing themselves up in the room. She names them all and she wins every time. The students love her more than ever now.

  When people complain about remembering bad things, they typically make very large pictures of the situation. They may even say they have ‘blown it out of all proportion’ . To get rid of the bad feeling, we do the reverse and make the picture very small until the feeling goes away. Every strategy is useful in a different context, so the way we ‘blow something out of all proportion’ is a key to a good memory strategy.

  To begin, we want to ask questions about encoding. People have different encoding strategies for different contexts, and this is a good thing because you do not want to use the same strategy for buying lunch as you do for picking a husband or a wife. One is just a shortterm decision - the other one lasts a lifetime! So the questions you ask about how someone encodes something should be similar in nature to the issue you are dealing with. So ask about objects that they already know about. How many chairs do you have in your house? How many pairs of socks do you own, etc.? This tells you what works well for them. Once you discover how someone encodes remembering something else, you have some clues to use in encoding names.

  The next step is to ask how they don’t remember names, so you discover what isn’t working. One teacher said, ‘it doesn’t take me very long not to remember’ . Well if we used that strategy we would forget very easily too! This of course is a very useful strategy for remembering to forget things that are unhelpful, like bad memories, so store this one away for those times. Remember, all strategies have a context in which they are useful!

  Next, build confidence in the certainty that the person is able to do this and care enough to make it worthwhile. Failing to remember someone’s name is often about not really paying attention and not really caring about remembering who the person is and what they are called. This is why students really like the teachers who remember their names. A name is the call sign for who you are.

  The next step is to consciously begin to use a strategy that works:

  Look at the person

  Ve Visual external

  Make a picture of the person and morph some characteristic of their face so that the image becomes a caricature of the person

  Vi Visual Internal

  Do this until it is funny and absurd and you get a good, strong kinaesthetic response

&
nbsp; Ki Kinaesthetic internal

  At this point you are beginning to make the image memorable because it is different. It is important to know that people like sameness, but learn through difference.

  Ask, ‘what is your name?’

  Ae Auditory external

  Say their name on the inside

  Ai Auditory internal

  Write it phonetically under or over the image you have made of their face

  Vi Visual internal

  Say to yourself on the inside ‘his name is….’

  Ai Auditory internal

  Ask the person ‘is your name …… ‘? Listen to the ‘YES’ reply

  Ae Auditory external

  This verifies the certainty feeling. There is no point in feeling certain if the name is incorrect.

  Ki Kinaesthetic internal

  You are creating a strategy that uses the main representation systems. Repeat the steps a few times so the person becomes quicker and quicker at remembering names. It’s then a good idea to take the strategy from a conscious process to an unconscious process, so that the learning happens in the right state of consciousness and becomes automatic. So now ask the person to ‘ close your eyes and go back through in your mind and replay what you did’ . Good encoding requires verification, so lay the foundation to remembering. Ask the person to ‘find a good memory and spin the feelings so the experience intensifies. Notice where the good feeling is and which way it moves’ . As they do this, tell them, ‘make the feeling spin more in the good direction so it feels wonderful’ . Whilst they do this, go through the steps again. In this way we create unconscious motivation and attach it to the strategy. Say to the person, ‘speed it up in your mind so that you can do it faster and faster so that it becomes a little addictive as the conviction that you do this well builds’ . The more we run through a process making it faster and faster, and each time we get to the end, we feel even better and this builds our motivation to do even more.

  Lastly, to make it worth doing, make the learning generative. So it’s not just names of people that you can remember; you can remember dates, places, names of countries, the periodic table or anything else that is worth remembering.

  Installing good strategies creates efficiency in your mind so you build the target and aim for it. As you get better at something, notice the improvement and make the feeling of improvement something that feels so good you want it even more.

  Remembering lists

  Mnemonics are often used to help learners remember a chain of information and associate one thing with the next thing, but it is really a matter of transforming the list in some way so the information stands out in your mind. If you are asked ‘when was the Battle of Hastings?’ it should have something attached to it, so ‘the Battle of Hastings’ triggers a really loud 1066 . When you teach it this way, learners will encode the information in a similar way on the inside. So rather than have them say the answers, why not have them shout or sing the answers as a group? It’s important that you look at the date, say the name differently, and then blow up the size of the date, so saying the name makes the date pop up. This means that the link works both ways - encode so you can decode and memory functions well.

  We know of some teachers who get a little upset when students use their phone camera to capture information from a flipchart or whiteboard. This seems to stem from the belief that the process of writing things down helps students to remember the information. This is not necessarily the case. Firstly, the image that they capture on camera may be clearer and easier to remember than in their own writing. The problem with a digital image is that you won’t have it with you at all times, but then you won’t have your list with you at all times either. What you do have with you at all times is your body, so here is another way to use the representational systems and synaesthesia for remembering lists:

  Memory Pegs

  This is just one of many powerful and effective memory strategies and a fun activity to do with any group. Everyone can utilise this strategy easily and quickly, and once you know the steps and the key components, it is easy to adapt and create your own unique strategy. When taught to one person in front of a group, there is often a major change in belief among the other people in the group. Test the strategy a few days later with one learner and the whole group will remember all the items and be keen to shout them out!

  As the strategy is content-free, it can be used for any subject. It raises a learner’s confidence in their own ability because it is not just a learning strategy - it is also a strategy that convinces them they can remember a whole list. As with all great NLP, the learning is generative and the improvement in ability also creates a powerful belief. The learner moves from a belief that they have a bad memory to one of ‘wow, I really have a great memory!’

  Although we are showing you how to teach others the strategy, teach it to yourself first and make the changes you want to make in your own ability and beliefs. Remember - you go first!

  The Memory Pegs Strategy

  Connecting the new learning to prior learning and experiences builds more synaptic links in the brain.(4) Human brains recognise and like patterns. Memory Pegs use something that is instantly recognisable and always with us – our own body - and connect the learning to it. Different parts of the body already have strong associations, so it’s ready-made for a memory strategy.

  Our best and most vivid memories are often funny or absurd. Memory Pegs utilises this by ensuring that the process is funny and the whole activity is ridiculous in a nice way.

  As with all strategies, it’s important to be thorough and ensure all the steps are completed with a certain amount of checks and repetition included, so the learner knows very quickly that they are progressing. Success breeds success!

  Like all good strategies, this is as short it can be and has no unnecessary loops. Some people think that if they add extra steps it will get better, but actually it becomes less efficient. As you know by now

  NLP is based on a model of elegance, which means we take the smallest number of steps to create the most powerful change.

  This technique utilises a process called ‘anchoring’. Anchoring is the process of associating an internal response with some external trigger. We establish anchors so we can re-access the state we were experiencing at the time the anchor was established, and we remember the learning associated with the state simultaneously. A trigger or anchor fired in one sense or representational system will re-create an experience in that sense and in other senses too.

  How to learn the Memory Pegs Strategy

  Ask your group to suggest a random list of 11 items. Write the list up so it is visible to the whole group. The first time you do this, make it as silly and funny as possible so everyone is engaged and enjoying learning. This way, remembering becomes fun

  Test the person’s (or group’s) ability to remember the list. Challenge the person/group to remember the list in 1 minute. Most will remember around 4 items; the most anyone without a memory strategy will remember is 7 items. If someone remembers them all – elicit their strategy because it’s a good one! Choose the person with the lowest score to volunteer.

  Now ‘place’ each item on the body of the volunteer as shown in the diagram below: Starting at the top, touch the crown of the head (check that the person is OK with this first) and ask them to visualise a sandwich on top of their head. Use humour and ask questions such as ‘what type of sandwich is it?’ Have fun discussing stinky cheese sandwiches or imagining tomato sauce running down your forehead, so that the person is laughing or having another strong response. Remember to utilise all senses when installing the items (words, objects) onto each memory peg so on sense is linked to all the other senses

  Now move on to the next ‘place’ the nose. Repeat the process, having the volunteer imagine a bunch of keys dangling from their nose. Have them think about how heavy they are and the sound they make.

  Onc e you have got to the ears, check back on the head. Continue t
o work through the sequence in the order on the list. Make the images big and bold and the sensations powerful. When you get to the hands, check back on the mouth and ears. Then start to check randomly and out of sequence. This is so the sequence builds, firstly in a linear way and then holistically, so the person doesn’t have to run through the whole list to find the one they want.

  This is very useful for recall later. 6. Test, feed back and immediately correct any mistakes until the person has them all instantly available as recall. This shouldn’t take more than 3 minutes Here is one list to start with.

  Change it in any way you like so long as it is fun and entertaining:

  BODY -PEG

  ITEM

  ASSOCIATION

  1

  Top of the head

  Sandwich

  What sauces are running down from the sandwich?

  2

  Up your nose

  Bunch of keys

  Which one would you use to start a car?

  3

  In your mouth

  Watering can

  Your mouth is the rose of the watering can

  – water the garden

  4

  Hanging from

  your ears

  Bananas

  Sing Yes, we have no Bananas!

  5

  Right shoulder

  Owl

  Instead of a parrot - you have an owl

  perched on your shoulder!

  6

  Left Shoulder

  The Sun

  How would the sunshine feel on your

  cheek?

  7

  Right hand palm

  Glass of water

  Don’t spill it!

  8

  Left hand palm

  Door handle