As we discussed in Part 2, behaviour relates not only to what someone does on the outside, but also how s/he behaves on the inside. The decisions they make, the way they represent situations to themselves, the sequence and steps they go through to engage in an experience are all internal behaviours. We have all seen kids completely engrossed in something on the TV in a room full of other distractions. They have learned how to turn the volume down on noise they don’t want to pay attention to, and to turn it up on what they do want to pay attention to. This proves they can change the way they experience the world so that it works for them. If you have experience of teenagers, you may recognise this form of selective deafness. Similarly, many people will experience very difficult and painful situations, but no two people will respond in the same way or make the same decisions. Some people will continue to see a difficult experience in multi–colour surround sound, whilst others will push it to the back of their minds and turn down the sound and the brightness. Lots of children experience sad or unpleasant events in their lives, and we have a responsibility to intervene and protect them when necessary, but we can also do more. We can help them to process their experiences in ways that enable them to grow into healthy and happy adults, rather than staying stuck in the bad feelings as they grow up. NLP offers many techniques for fast intervention and transformation by changing the way a person experiences their past and creating new and resourceful states to move on into the future.
4. highly effective teachers are process rather than content orientated
How is it that when the curriculum content of a particular subject is the same, the scheme of work is the same and even on occasion the lesson plan is determined, yet learners in one class learn with ease and pleasure and those in another class struggle and dislike the subject? The answer is that it has little to do with the content and much to do with the process. Most teachers focus on 80% content and 20% process. Highly Effective Teachers reverse this and focus 80% of their energies on process and only 20% on content. From planning a lesson to teaching it, the processes the students use to learn are at the forefront and form the focus of the lesson, rather than the content.
Pass rates and failure rates are regarded as measures of the success of both teachers and children. However, we need to distinguish between failure that is externally imposed, such as in a test, and formative assessment during the learning process where we learn what works and what doesn’t work. In formative assessment, there is no such thing as failure, only feedback . This means that all outcomes are results and opportunities to learn more.
It’s useful to reframe students’ beliefs about failure as simply mistakes. A useful acronym for FAIL is First Attempt In Learning! All results and behaviours are achievements, whether they are desired outcomes for a given task or not. You may have heard the fable about the inventor Thomas Edison. After multiple unsuccessful attempts in his bid to create the first commercially viable light bulb, he was asked if he felt like a failure. He replied, ‘why would I feel like a failure? I now know definitively over 9,000 ways that an electric lightbulb will not work’ . This story may or may not be true, but it’s a great illustration of the assumption that there is no such thing as failure only feedback. If a student writes an essay on the French Revolution instead of the Russian Revolution, there are still things that they have learned and got right. They have used a pen or computer, created sentences, thought up ideas, researched and learned something about revolutions, etc. So make a point of ensuring students know what they have done that’s good learning, and then let them know what they need to do next.
Assessments and tests can be devised which have success built into the process. Take, for example, the basic numeracy assessment test devised by a Maths teacher. Normal tests usually get harder and harder, so essentially the instruction is to keep going until you fail. As an alternative approach, this tutor put the questions onto cards and gave an instruction to sort the cards into three piles: One pile for the questions you know you can answer, one for the questions you know you can’t answer yet, and one for the ones you are not sure you can answer. This gives the teacher an immediate and useful assessment and the student succeeds in the task of creating three piles – which was all they were asked to do. It’s often just a matter of creating an assessment process without creating the feelings of failure.
Learners already know how to learn. One of the differences in our approach to learning is our total belief that people are natural-born exquisite learners. The question is not how do we teach people, but how can we discover what stops people learning, or what motivates them to continue. The 20th Century’s view of education was that children were empty vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge from the teacher, yet when you think about that, it really didn’t work, did it? When we act on the premise that the resources a person needs to learn and change are already within them we create learning opportunities.
Most of the really important things in life, like learning to walk, talk, use imagination, create exciting worlds and make friends, are learned without a classroom or a teacher. Many people even suggest that ‘problems’ with learning only actually begin once the child gets into the classroom!
Human beings are hard-wired for learning and for learning about learning, and it is our responsibility to remain mindful of these innate qualities so as to drive next generation thinking. Our job is to help students by giving them additional tools and strategies to learn and drive their own brains, so they develop independent learning and thinking.
Creating the link between existing skills and strategies for learning with the subject in hand is just one way a teacher can help. Take, for instance, the student who complains, ‘why do we have to do more of this when we did it in class? ’ Ask them what level they are at on an activity they enjoy, say their favourite PlayStation or Xbox game, and use the information, saying, ‘Great, you’re on level 7 of your new PlayStation game, did you just do level 6 once?’ ‘Of course not,’ they will tell you. ‘I was on level 6 for a week before I got good enough to move to level 7.’ And this is your cue: ‘Oh really, so practising something and feeling excited about it means you get really good at it – right?’ Remember, people are not broken so they don’t need fixing - they are just uneducated as to how to apply strategies for learning, motivation and change.
5. highly effective teachers are flexible in their behaviour
Each person’s version of reality is not the same as the next person’s. Imagine for a moment that you want to give directions to your house. You might describe in words how to get there, or you might draw a map. What would you focus on as important? Would you use road numbers, landmarks like shops, or street names to identify the key features of the journey? Having done this before, you will probably make a great job of it. What you won’t have on your map or detailed in your directions is every blade of grass, every paving stone or the minute details of each house on the way. We all construct an approximation of the world in order to take some shortcuts and decide what is important to us and our understanding. We each have a different map of the territory and each person’s interpretations of external data will be unique.
One of the key jobs of a teacher is the ability to understand how students map their world. Because the territory is so vast and detailed, we process the information in our unique way so that we can make sense of it, reduce it, sort it out and prioritise the input we receive. The illustration relating to the word ‘dog’ in Chapter 1 is one such example of how the map is not the territory.
Humans over-generalise, distort and delete information. This can be very useful - it is part of the learning process, like generalising the many shapes, styles and colours of seating objects as ‘chairs’. However, if on one occasion you didn’t learn your times tables and your teacher said you were stupid, and you decided you would never learn your tables again, this generalisation is really unhelpful. As a teacher, your job is not only to ensure that learning takes place, but also to ensure that your students
make good decisions about what their learning means to them.
6. highly effective teachers take notice, watch and listen
People cannot not communicate, which means that a great deal of information about a student’s state and their learning can be discovered by paying close attention to the messages they give, both verbally and non-verbally. Non-verbal cues are particularly useful with teenagers who are not known for their high level of communication skills! During one-to-one progress reviews, students often say very little, and when they do speak, it may be just to ask, ’what do you want me to say?’ Teachers then create all sorts of prompts to cajole the student into talking. However, the student has literally given you the answer – they’re not speaking to you because they haven’t figured out what it is that YOU want them to say! They haven’t learned yet that you are genuinely interested in what they say; they believe that there is a right answer and you are waiting for them to give it to you – like a test!
When we are unsure about the meaning a person is trying to convey, it is often helpful to simply listen to the words spoken and respond to them literally. So in the example above the response might be, ‘I want you to say what your thoughts and opinions are and it doesn’t matter if I agree with you or not.’
Imagine for a moment a student who is silent after you have asked them a question. There are many assumptions that could be made about what this silence means. We may assume s/he is sullen, stubborn, or upset. The problem is, all these decisions are based on a guess about what is going on and we really just don’t know. So what information is available to us? Well, you can observe the way s/he is sitting, where s/he is looking, their breathing rate, facial skin tone, the symmetry of their face and body. All of this is valuable communication and Highly Effective Teachers accept and utilise all communication and behaviour presented to them.
Some teachers are very adept at reading body language, often on an unconscious level, and by understanding even more about non-verbal communication, NLP adds new skills and resources to better enable teachers to make effective interventions.
We are sure you are aware that you have already learned a great deal about the senses, the representational systems and the submodalities of the representational systems in Chapter 1. The NLP assumption here is that all distinctions people make about their environment and behaviour can usefully be represented through the five senses .
As a reminder, people make pictures, hear sounds and have feelings inside themselves. The more skilled they are at utilising all their senses, the richer their learning will be, the more they will remember and recall and the more applications for the learning they will find. Similarly, the more the teacher uses all his/her senses and internal representations the more effective they will be in the classroom. When a teacher communicates using sensory-rich language s/he creates what is known as ‘semantic density’, which engages strongly with the internal representations the student is making and thus makes learning bigger, stronger and more memorable.
7. highly effective teachers endeavour to like theIr students
Consider the young men on the Manchester housing estate for a moment. Do you think of them as ‘bad’ individuals? Could you ‘like’ them? It’s not often said openly that to teach well it’s fundamental to find a way to at least like your students. Reflect on your own days at school; which teachers and therefore subjects did you respond to best? One of the messages they almost certainly gave you was that they liked and cared about you. However, they also probably cared about you enough to not tolerate behaviour that didn’t serve you or the wider community. An NLP assumption holds that the positive worth of the individual is held constant, while the value and appropriateness of their behaviour, whether this is internal or external, is questioned . Love the sinner, hate the sin!
It’s easy to think of the young men in Manchester as ‘bad’ people because they did bad things, but they are not. Once they were given better choices, they made better decisions. Words such as positive regard, unconditional respect and care actually mask something much more fundamental, which is that humans thrive on love and compassion. So as teachers can we care about our students enough to refuse to allow them to fail?
As teachers, we are very familiar with challenging inappropriate behaviour. Some of us are often taking control of behaviour before we can even begin to teach a class. However, in this context we also consider internal behaviour, that is, behaviour that someone is engaging in inside their heads, as well as how that is manifesting outside, in their external behaviour. It is not usually a teacher’s intention to criticise a student as a person - rather, we aim to focus on the behaviour. Unfortunately, this is where you really need to pay attention to your language, because unless you do, a student may interpret what you say as being critical of them as a person.
The techniques of NLP change and develop over time. What remain constant are the attitude and beliefs of NLP. Using NLP effectively in the classroom requires tenacity, determination, and thoroughness. Never, ever give up on a student. We don’t know when we will make a difference - we cannot not make a difference, the question is in which direction and what’s the difference that makes the difference?
summary
During this chapter you have considered the key behaviours of Highly Effective Teachers and some of the assumptions of NLP that underpin the skills and processes which generate powerful learning experiences and effective teaching. Our beliefs drive our behaviour, so it is important to choose assumptions and attitudes that serve us and enable us to create positive and worthwhile learning for our students, and to intervene in a helpful and supportive way. The side effect might just be that you gain a happier and more relaxed disposition too! We know that many students arrive with unhelpful beliefs about being stupid, being unable to learn, or that learning serves no purpose for them. When you experience the impact of having adopted the assumptions outlined in this chapter, then your students will achieve beyond what you, or they, could previously conceive.
references
1. Viktor E Frankl, 1959, Man’s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press
2. Rosenthal, Robert; Jacobson, Lenore (1992), Pygmalion in the classroom (Expanded ed.).
New York: Irvington.
3. Robert Anton Wilson, 1983, Prometheus Rising, New Falcon Publications
activities
Activity 1
Here is a list of some of the assumptions of NLP utilised by Highly
Effective Teachers we have discussed in this chapter:
The meaning of the communication is the response you get
There is a positive intention behind every behaviour and a context in which every behaviour has value
The ability to change the process by which we experience the world is more valuable than changing the content of our reality
The map is not the territory
Given better options, students will make better choices
There is no such thing as failure, only feedback. All results are outcomes whether or not they are what was intended
The resources a person needs to learn and change are already within them
Highly Effective Teachers accept and utilise all communication and behaviour presented to them
All distinctions people make about their environment and behaviour can usefully be represented through the five senses
The positive worth of the individual is held constant while the value and appropriateness of their behaviour, whether this is internal or external, is questioned
Take a little time to consider which of these assumptions you accept and hold as true in your teaching. Are there any that you would challenge or change in some way? Discuss the assumptions with your fellow teachers and compare their responses to your own.
Activity 2
You can now begin to think about how you can utilise these assumptions in your classroom so they become your default operating principles. Take a look at the following set of classroom beliefs created by Mark, NLP teacher p
ractitioner for his Year 7 History class (age 11/12):
Everyone deserves respect - always
All lessons will be useful
Appropriate state + correct strategy = the outcome you want
The outcome becomes possible the moment I see, hear and feel it is mine
Getting into my best state is my responsibility - especially my learning state
I can answer any question if I know the right strategy
Awareness of my progress gives me the choice of changing my strategy
The person who knows the most strategies wins
Everybody has the ability to succeed
My language predicts my results
Feedback is the only friend I must use
Consider the teacher’s work above and compare it to any current assumptions you may hold. Think about what you would include in a new and more resourceful list for you and your learners. Replace your rule list and design a short session with one of your classes where they create a new and useful list of helpful beliefs for learning. Notice their level of commitment to this list with their commitment to the class ‘rules’.
Activity 3
Create an assessment tool for your subject that measures progress without the possibility of ‘failure’.
This eBook is licensed to Dominic Luzi, [email protected] on 10/18/2018
chapter 10
The Mind of a Highly Effective Teacher - The Art of the State
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‘To handle yourself, use your head;
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