Teaching Excellence

by Richard Bandler

  In this chapter you have learned to use maths charts in your head to find easy and simple ways to multiply and divide numbers. You have discovered ways to teach geometry and algebra using visual representations. You can now begin to identify steps that are missing in a learner’s strategy, to correct and improve mathematical ability and to have more than one way of finding a solution. By applying these processes you also build propulsion and motivation into your learners so the more they learn the better they feel and the more they want to learn.

  references

  1. Paul Lockhart, 2009, A Mathematician’s Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form, New York, Bellevue Literary press

  2. The New Wave Project 2011, Meta Education Team, Funded by Cornwall Learning Partnership

  activities

  Activity 1

  Create a multiplication chart in your head and see how big you can make it! Most people have a chart that goes up to 12 x 12; how high can you get yours to go? Practise using a relaxed and alert state to focus your attention

  Activity 2

  Design an activity to build a multiplication chart in a group of learners. How big, bright, colourful and memorable can you make it?

  Extension activity

  Search the web for really great examples of moving geometry – there are lots out there. Watch the numbers morph and install the same machine in your mind so you build bigger and better learning machines. To get you started have a look at www.mathsisfun.cov

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

  chapter 8

  How to nurture Creativity and Talent

  Scan this to see the video

  ‘Creativity is as important now in education

  as literacy and we should treat it with

  the same status.’ (1)

  Sir Ken Robinson

  In this chapter

  Strategies for Music

  Strategies for Art

  Strategies for Creative Writing

  Throughout the ages, humankind has sought to find expression through artistic endeavour. Think for a moment of Neolithic cave paintings, the drumbeats and music of indigenous peoples around the world, the poems of the Greeks and the story ballads of the Dark Ages. It seems that creativity is hard-wired in people. Yet in Education today, creativity is given a low priority against the ‘hard skills’ of literacy and numeracy.

  Just imagine how interesting it would be if you and your students could study the greatest artistic geniuses of all time and identify their creative processes for painting, composing and playing music, or writing great literature. Well, this is now possible using NLP strategies, so read on to discover how you can learn the creativity of past masters and future geniuses.

  Sadly, many people have a belief that they are just not creative. They believe they can’t sing, paint or make music. This is such a shame because everyone is capable of creativity. Children who are encouraged to enjoy creativity have a great resource, both for their academic and future working life and for their own pleasure and enjoyment. The ability to think creatively has many more applications than just the arts. It enables people to take a different perspective and look for solutions in many different ways. So here and now is a good time to change.

  The first step to creativity is to create in every learner the strong belief that they are a creative person. Many people have to overcome the unhelpful suggestions given to them by other people, often unintentionally. A teacher may have given a child an instrument to play and they couldn’t make a sound out of it, or someone may have told them they can’t sing. People often think about painting and automatically feel bad and say to themselves, ‘I am not artistic’ , just because of a silly suggestion long ago. So, seeing yourself in your mind’s eye being creative, playing music, designing or writing is the first step. Beliefs guide our behaviour, but the nice thing is that they are not true and we can change them, so our new beliefs guide different behaviour.

  Next, teach learners to feel excited when they think about being creative. Sometimes, the very foundation of creativity is starting with a really strong and different feeling instead of starting with a really bad feeling. Most of the time when people begin a new project with really horrible feelings they just don’t create good work. Even people who claim they have to have pain to be creative actually feel the pain, then get excited about it and output it as creativity. Vincent Van Gogh was one such artist although, unlike him, you could just skip the pain of cutting off your ear because it’s a lot better to just feel good in the first place. Otherwise you will run out of ears very quickly!

  Although NLP may have started by curing phobias and resolving people’s problems, the co-founders soon became interested in the many talented people in the world, asking the question, ‘how do they do that?’ Fortunately, NLP allows us to ask very precise questions about states of consciousness, and all creative states seem to involve an altered state of consciousness and focused concentration. Altered states are the rule that creates talent - not the exception. We want to create states of concentration, enthusiasm, tenacity and ferocity, so that the learner keeps going and the more they do, the better they feel and the more they enjoy being creative. The more sophisticated or challenging it becomes the more excited the learners become. When we have the right beliefs and the right states created, just a small piece of a strategy will mean that people will be able to be creative.

  Art

  Take a walk along the River Thames and you may see street artists at work. One day, one of them was drawing the buildings on the other side of the river, producing an amazingly accurate picture, as Richard passed by, and he asked the artist how he did it. The artist said there was a big hand in the sky with a wire attached to his own hand, and as the hand in the sky moved, so did his hand on the paper. ‘You have to keep the wire tight!’ he said.

  This one piece of strategy is enough to give a child a really clear instruction as to how to recreate an image in front of them. By doing this, the learner begins to really open their eyes and see more detail, more colours, more shade and light, so that their representations become more and more detailed.

  Being creative in art is different in some ways from the person who sits by the river and makes the painting exactly like the river, although some of the same skills can be useful. Creativity in art is the degree to which someone looks at something and responds to it with their feelings, taking part of what is actually there and adding elements using their own imagination and internal world. Some people look at Van Gogh’s work and are convinced that he actually saw the world the way his pictures looked. We doubt that. His pictures are creations of how he could distort reality.

  The Picasso strategy

  Think for a moment - compared to the number of things you can see, how many things can you imagine? Let’s imagine being in Picasso’s mind. To begin, start to draw something you can see, like a circle, a triangle or a square. To do this, first have a connection between the images in your head and your hand. See a hand in your mind drawing around a circle. Connect a wire from the hand on the inside to the hand on the outside so when the hand on the inside moves, the wire moves and the hand on the outside moves too. This way you make sure what you see in your mind matches what you put on the canvas.

  The next step is to take somethinglike a circle and see what you would have to do to it to make it a different shape. So take the circle and pop it up so it has a pointy edge, and pop it out so it has another pointy edge somewhere else, and pop it out again in the other direction too. What would happen if you popped it in a few more directions? You now have a shape that no one has ever seen before. So now you have created a ‘something’. If you took a square and put it inside the circle and started bringing some of the lines in and pushing some of the lines out, you would have a more sophisticated shape that no one has ever seen before.

  Now take this never-seen-before shape and put it inside the square an
d manipulate the shapes from the inside and the outside of the square and even between the new lines you have just created. Then take your finger inside your mind and swirl it in a spiral and draw that. Now you can take something that no one has ever seen and draw it on the outside. Then take something from the outside world, perhaps a fish, a bird or somebody’s face, and start doing the same thing. You can take just one idea or image from the real world, mix it with your own responses and emotions and morph it using your own imagination into a piece of art that no one has ever seen before. Then your name is Picasso!

  Another skill in a great artistic strategy is to create first on the inside of your mind. We all produce some material that we aren’t happy with, but great artists produce very little poor work. This is because they create on the inside before they create on the outside

  The Chagall strategy

  The artist Marc Chagall would paint things in the back of his mind and as he did so, he would think, ‘this area is going to be reddish, this area is going to be greenish and this bluish’ . So when you step back far enough from one of his paintings, to where you can’t see the objects, you can see there are colour centres. Even though there are colours inside the colours, when you stand 20 yards away, the pictures have colour areas which are like tonal centres in music. So instead of just seeing one thing at one distance from you, you can create something that is one thing from one distance and another from a different distance, angle or perspective. This way you change your perspective and look at things from different angles and different points of view, making them bigger and smaller inside your mind.

  Maybe you can look at something and in your mind make a picture of it and start to pixelate it, so you could make it very different to the original view. It may be that Monet was losing his sight, because if you visit his garden at Giverny which features in so many of his paintings and squint whilst looking at it, you will find it looks just like one of his paintings! Whether he was blind or whether he squinted isn’t important, because if you want to paint the way Monet did, you can squint too so that the world looks that way, or you can make a picture of what you are seeing, distort it inside your mind and then use this image as the representation of what you paint.

  These are some of the distinctions between drawing something you are looking at and creating a representation in your mind so that you draw something that has never existed before, by taking your feelings and letting them swirl out onto the paper. The truth is, there are different strategies for different types of creativity. Learning to read and interpret a piece of music that someone else wrote is entirely different to writing a piece of music and is different again to playing by ear. A key point is that the more distinctions we can make in the creative process the more we can unleash people’s creativity .

  Music

  There are people who can read any piece of music but can’t play unless they are looking at a music score. One of Richard’s friends had a perfect musical ear. When someone tapped a glass, he could tell you what key the sound was in, because when he heard the note made by the glass he would see the key go down on the keyboard in his mind. Yet he couldn’t improvise music or play jazz.

  It’s possible to teach perfect pitch. One mother did this deliberately with her son. He sat on one side of the room away from her, and she would ask him what note she was playing on the piano. If he didn’t get it right, he would go to the piano and watch the key go down physically and see the key go down on the imaginary keyboard in his mind. He reached the point where he always knew which note was which. It was a good teaching method. His mother was a piano teacher and oddly enough she didn’t do this with her piano students, only with her son, because it was just a game they played together.

  However, what this mother didn’t give her son was the ability to take this beautiful, crystal ear and hear something inside his head that nobody had ever played before. Creativity doesn’t start on the outside, it starts on the inside. Most of the great solo artists hear the melody and their fingers play it automatically. But the notes come on the inside first and their fingers go down simultaneously - almost as an afterthought. They hear a good melody and they play a good melody.

  People often say, ‘oh I just can’t hold a tune in my head’ . Well, the truth is, there isn’t anything solid to hold on to! The first step in playing music is to hear the tune in your head. Listen really closely to it and start to hum along with it. If it doesn’t match, listen again and match it again so that what is on the inside of your mind matches what is on the outside.

  All music has a certain melody and feel to it. Some people start with the words and then make a melody for them, and some people make a melody and find words for it. There is no limitation to the possibilities. There does seem to be a restriction with each individual in that they have to do it one way, because that is the only way they know – so far.

  Learning to play classical music is totally different to learning to play jazz, and writing classical music is totally different to writing jazz. They are completely different tasks and there’s no reason why a learner can’t learn to do both. Consider the genius Leonard Bernstein; his music draws on every genre and type of music. What made him such a genius is that he cognitively understood each type of music. He would think, ‘this is part of opera, this is how opera works, it has these motives and I am going to pull them out of here and I am going to put them in a musical ’. He would add a little of this and a little of that. By understanding how to function in each of the different structures he was able to put together something that was greater than the sum of its parts. Teaching children how to do this, not just with music but with art and all creative activities, means it’s going to start leaking out in many different areas of their lives. Their ideas will not simply be about how to get the music or the art right, but how to make it even more than it was before.

  Poetry and Creative Writing

  Poetry is an area of creativity where asking great questions can kickstart the creative process. Many people, children and adults alike, claim that they can’t do creative writing, so begin by asking your learners about what could never be the case. Ask, ‘what is the strangest thing about looking in the sky?’ They may say ‘well, the clouds’ , so ask ‘what is the weirdest cloud that you have ever seen?’ They may say, ‘I saw a cloud like a hippopotamus’ . Say, ‘what sound does the wind make? It howls. The hippopotamus in the sky howls ’. Connecting unrelated ideas together creates great poetry. Children are so animated they can write great poetry, draw a picture of their poem and create beauty in many different ways.

  Creative writing is a perfect example of where people are not taught enough about creating language. People often say, ‘I have writer’s block’ . Ask, ‘where are you blocked?’ and they may respond that it is in the first sentence. So write what comes first, such as ‘I am blocked’ and ask the question ‘while?’ Because as soon as you add linkage words, whatever comes next is connected to what went before.

  Creative writing is about linking ideas that have not been put together before. Rather than worrying ‘am I doing this right?’ you will always keep going if there is a link that prompts your brain as to what comes next. This differs from the norm in writing, where a great deal is taught about stopping. Is it a complete sentence? Oddly enough that’s a question! Am I dangling a participle? If you worry about that you will never get to a participle! We love the child who said ‘my teacher said I was dangling a Popsicle’ . So if you don’t have good grammar you will dangle a Popsicle!

  Here is an illustration of how to kick-start the creative writing process with children and adults alike created by our Teaching Excellence student Tanya. Tanya begins the lesson by introducing the class to her beach hut and her hobbies, one of which is writing in her beach hut. She invites the group to join her on a magical journey to inspire their imaginations for writing. The journey is to the seaside (see Chapter 12 for how to create guided journeys). Guided journeys using artfully vague language exercise th
e imagination ‘muscles’, enabling learners to create a rich internal world to draw upon in the next part of the lesson.

  In the second part of the lesson Tanya models the writing process by engaging the group in a conversation about thinking aloud, describing what it was and how it moved, so that in the third part of the lesson the group begin to create and innovate their own poetry lines and verses to end with the phrase, “Down at the beach” . The learners then combine ideas together, evaluate how their poem is progressing and rehearse reading their poems. In the plenary session, the learners perform their poems and celebrate their success.

  Here are some examples of the poems created using this process.

  Children’s outcomes - example :

  “Brown crabs crawling,

  Shark tails splashing,

  Fast fish flying,

  Down at the beach”

  Adults’ outcomes - example:

  “The seagulls high will fly

  As tourists their souvenirs will buy,

  Down the throat will go beer

  As I look at my peer/ pier! Down at the beach”

  For Tanya’s full lesson plan and mind map of the lesson see the activity section at the end of this chapter.

  Beyond the Arts

  One interior decorator had every piece of furniture he used built by cabinet makers. When he wanted antique furniture, he would have it built, leave it outside his house for a year and tell people that it took him a year to find it – so that put up the price! What was interesting is that he would walk into an empty room and start trying objects out in the room in his imagination. He would start with objects he had seen, and if the object wasn’t perfect he would start morphing it into the perfect object for that place. If the best object he could conceive of was a bookcase that looked a particular way, he would start changing it into something even better in terms of how it would fit his vision of the finished room, and when he looked at the finished room it would feel right. He would begin with the feel of what he wanted and change the objects until they matched the desired state. The key here is to oscillate between your images or the sounds that you make on the inside, the feelings you are aiming for and the output channels – the music , the art or the interior design.