Filtering for what is right rather than what is wrong, and using a ‘yes set’ enables you to pace the students’ experience and lead them to a better place. For example, ‘Ok guys, well done. You are all here with me today, sitting down and the room is full of chatter. You can see the questions in front of you, and as you finish talking to one another, you can now begin the next task’ .
This works better than just giving an instruction, because this way we maintain rapport and pace their reality, so it becomes much more likely that the students will follow our lead. It helps if you utilise the three main senses (see/hear/feel) and add the action (do) too, so what happens inside their minds goes something like this:
You are here and sitting down - yes I am here and I can feel the chair
With me today – yes I’m with you and it’s today
And the room is full of chatter – yes I can hear chatter
You can see the questions in front of you – yes I can see questions in
front of me
As you finish talking to one another – OK everything else is true so this must be too
Begin the next task – accepted as the next thing to do
Off we go again and the prayer wheel is spinning once more!
Other variables
Although much of this chapter has focused on your language as a teacher, it is also worth mentioning that there are other non-verbal variables that are significant in keeping a lesson on track:
Room layout
Choosing and managing the room layout will influence the responses to the variety of activities you design for your students.
A classroom-style layout creates a state of passivity with attention focused on the teacher. The message could be translated as ‘you sit, listen and absorb’ , with little opportunity to interact with anyone other than the teacher.
A horseshoe-style layout creates more opportunity to interact with the teacher and listen to/see the other students. This works OK, but the desire for contact with other students is often frustrated, so we can end up with the ‘paper aeroplane syndrome’, where missiles are used to connect across the room. If you like this layout, build in some opportunities to work together byw moving the chairs into the middle of the horseshoe.
Theatre-style works well with big groups, but isn’t always practical if students need to write. It may also elicit states of vulnerability for some people.
A cabaret or chevron style is a very useful layout for active class engagement . Here, students are seated in groups (6 is a perfect number) around tables, with the end nearest the teacher kept clear so no one has their back to you. This allows the students to look and listen to you and work in pairs, threes or sixes without the disruption of moving tables. Schools are increasingly adopting this approach, which is drawn from active whole class management techniques.(3)
No single layout is correct all the time. It’s a case of planning for the type of responses you want from your students and choosing the most appropriate layout to elicit this response. So if you want quiet reflection, cabaret is not the one to choose, but if you want group activity and discussion it may be the best choice.
Reception and infant teaching encourages the management of space and the states of little children in the classroom with story mats, quiet spaces, active play etc. However, as learners get older, it seems that teachers fail to recognise what a powerful influence the learning environment can have on students. Some environments are more challenging, such as computer rooms or laboratories, but experiment for yourself and notice what works for you and your students.
Attention-grabbers
We’re sure that you regularly consider how to make a dramatic point at the beginning of a class to illustrate the lesson to come. Using the same principle, it is a good idea to have a series of readily available props and resources to gain attention from the group if it is in danger of drifting. Putting peripheral posters on the wall reinforces learning, engages unconscious learning and can create interest or anticipation. You can utilise Power Point to sequence inspirational quotes or pictures relating to the subject. If you want your students to be quiet and reflective, use iTunes Visualisation, which creates patterns from the music and is quite dreamy.
One great teac her teaches Maths to engineers who complain they can’t do it, dressing up in a magician’s outfit to show them Maths tricks. Similarly, our NLP Education team have a range of outrageous props including wands and balls that giggle which we use to get students’ attention and as anchors for states. One favourite prop is a black bin liner containing unknown items with a large notice attached with the instruction, ‘Do not open this bag!’ Instant curiosity!
The key here is to be mindful of the significance of process in learning. Remember, great teaching is 20% content and 80% process.
summary
During this chapter you have explored ways to maintain and promote learning and keep the lesson on track. You have identified ways to motivate learners by using even more language patterns, such as yes sets and ‘the more the more’ patterns. You have learned specific ways to use praise to build confidence alongside competence. You have also considered some of the physical changes you can easily make to keep the lesson on track. So now you have read this chapter and reached the part of this book where you begin to really listen to and make changes to what you say to your students. Notice the impacts and enjoy the rewards!
references
1. Dale Carnegie, 1936 How to win friends and influence people, London Vermillion
2. Elizabeth Gunderson Journal of Child Development Volume 84, Issue 5, September/October 2013
3. Robert Powell, 1997, Active Whole Class teaching, Stafford, Robert Powell Publications
activities
Activity 1
Prepare a new running commentary that has:
A yes set pattern
A ‘more the more’ pattern
2 time presuppositions
Use it tomorrow and notice what happens!
Activity 2
Collect together a resource box of attention-grabbers to keep with
you and be creative about the different uses each object can have.
Activity 3
Draw a diagram of your teaching space or a typical classroom. Identify which areas and spaces you use for which activities and identify which states would be most useful to anchor in these places.
If you are working with little people in an infant school you will already be doing this to some degree. You will have an area for stories, maybe with a nice carpet to sit on, and an area for messy learning with water or sand. If you are working with older people, your space may be less defined. However, you can still manage the space. Where do you sit or stand when you are beginning or ending the session? Do you have a particular posture or place for setting homework? Where do you sit when the students are giving a presentation or working in groups?
You might like to create a curiosity corner or quiet thinking space. We’re wondering how creative you can be, so map these onto your new plan and commit to testing it.
This eBook is licensed to Dominic Luzi, [email protected] on 10/18/2018
chapter 14
Ending with new beginnings
TAP THIS TO SEE THE VIDEOS
‘I like a teacher who sends you home with more
to think about than homework.’ (1)
Lily Tomlin
In this chapter
Creating the desire for more learning
Taking the learning beyond the classroom
Stretch and Challenge through questioning
Storytelling and Nesting learning
An experienced and wise teacher once said, ‘my lessons have lots of beginnings and not many endings’ . There are times when even the best teachers come to the end of a lesson, exhausted and relieved, and manage to mutter something innocuous along the lines of ‘well done class, you have worked well today, see you next week’ . When we give less attention to the ending
of a lesson than we do to the beginning or to the lesson itself, we miss valuable opportunities because, rather than the end of a lesson bringing closure, it should be the beginning of even more. Similarly, any change of activity or shift in emphasis or process is a new beginning rather than an ending, and this can be where connections
are made to deeper learning.
Perhaps you have heard of Hebb’s Axiom: ‘Neurons that fire together wire together!’ (2) Every experience we encounter, whether a feeling, a thought or a sensation, is embedded in thousands of neurons that form a network. As an experience is repeated, rehearsed or remembered, it becomes embedded in the brain’s unique web-like structure and it becomes easier for the neurons to fire off and respond to the new learning.
The art and science of questioning is one way to fire and wire the neurons of our students’ brains. A recent piece of research shows that teachers ask up to 2 questions every minute, up to 400 in a day, around 70,000 a year, or 2-3 million in the course of a career. Yet the majority of these are to check for understanding or are closed, process question such as, ‘have you put your name on your work?’ or ‘have you finished yet?’ (3)
It is more useful to use questioning for formative rather than just summative assessment; this is assessment FOR learning rather than OF learning. Summative assessment checks learning, often for external reasons, whereas formative assessment through questioning invites the learner to revisit their existing network of knowledge in a variety of ways, each time embedding the learning in a deeper and more meaningful (to their experience) way.
It may be useful to reflect on how many of the questions you ask in a day move the learning forward or are crafted to a specific end. A recent study found that finding a really great question was all that was needed to excite learners when they had the necessary resources available to them for research – in this case, the Internet. Questions such as ‘why does hair keep growing on humans and not on animals? , created hours of exciting enquiry amongst a group of 8-year-olds, leading them into genetics, insulation, evolutionary theory and much more.(4)
Representational systems and questions
As you already know, people receive information about the world through the five sensory input channels – visual, auditory , kinaesthetic, olfactory and gustatory. Rather than each sense being given equal weight, each of us favours one or two over the others, although these change according to the context. Of course, there is considerable overlap in the parts of the brain responsible for processing our senses, but one or the other usually dominates a particular experience at a particular moment in time. This is known as your sensory preference. In the classroom, this knowledge has major implications for building sensory-rich questions that connect the neural pathways to support, generate and embed learning.
Do you see our point? Hear what we are saying? Catch our meaning? Does this make sense now?
You may very well see what we mean, but not hear or understand what we are saying, and it may not make sense to you! Teachers will generally ask the question that best suits their preferences. Do you have a favourite saying? Do you ask your class to ‘listen up’ or ‘look at me’ ? Do you say, ‘am I getting through to you?’
We have observed some teachers respond to students who don’t understand something by explaining it again in exactly the same way as the first, second or third time, enunciating more clearly and speaking more slowly, as if this will push the learning into the student’s head by an act of willpower! Instead, listening to how a student understands or pays attention is vital to ensuring that you communicate in a way they understand. If a student says, ‘I don’t know what you are saying’, you have a number of choices; you can find a new way of explaining it in words, or you can change to a different representational system and say ‘picture this’ or ‘let’s walk ourselves through this’. (Caution - this is not the same as ‘learning styles’ theories, which are erroneous, as we discussed in Chapter 1)
Experiment with these examples:
‘What technical adaptation to the presentation would you like to see Leanne?’
‘How does the pace of this presentation sound to you?’
‘Which musical rhythm feels most engaging, do you think?’
These sensory-laden questions enable Leanne to continually revisit and enrich her neural map of the topic, each time strengthening her connections within.
Recognising this natural variation in representational systems and learning how to utilise this provides you with an advantage, which means a teacher can connect all the representational systems together to quickly move the surface knowledge to the deep structure networks.
Stretch and Challenge through questioning
The Meta Mode l is the inverse of the Milton Model introduced in Chapter 12. It was developed by Richard and his NLP co-founder John Grinder to identify and bring to the surface the limitations in a person’s thinking and their model of the world. Its normal application is in relation to problems people may be having in their lives. As people describe their experience, they delete, distort and generalise their experience, which means their understanding, in the moment, is relatively superficial and on the surface. The Meta Model reconnects language with experiences, and can be used for gathering information, clarifying meanings, identifying limitations, and opening up choices, so it has a very relevant application in education for deepening learning and wiring together the synapses. (See later in the book for more explanation and information on how to use the Meta Model to resolve problems.) The NLP Education team have created a model for combining the use of the Meta Model with Blooms Taxonomy for effective questioning to enhance learning. Many teachers will be very familiar with Benjamin Bloom’s work to create a scheme of classification for categorising questioning and tasks from lower order thinking (mastery) to higher order (developmental) thinking.(5) Blooms explains that the type of question asked directs the student into the type of thinking they do around a topic. For example, if we only ask questions around knowledge and comprehension, such as what, where or who (lower order thinking) we are likely to limit their thinking to this level:
What is...?
Describe
Why did...?
Explain...
However, if we ask questions that push the thinking towards developmental thinking (application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation) we direct the students to higher order and creative thinking:
How would you use…?
What is the relationship between…?
What could be changed to improve…?
How would you prioritise…?
Perversely, evidence shows that more higher order questions are asked of young children at school, while the higher the level of education, the more lower order questions are asked of students. Improving the quality of questions and increasing the number of higher order questions is a simple and effective way of improving the quality of learning without the need for greater resources or time on the part of the teacher. Here are some examples of Meta Model questions mapped against Blooms Taxonomy:
Knowledge
How do you know?
Where did you find this out?
Comprehension
What does that mean?
Always?
So what will that mean for..?
Application
What would happen if..?
If that is true, what else could that mean?
How will you know when the solution is reached fully?
Analysis
What is this similar to?
How is this different to..?
What is the exception to this pattern?
Synthesis
How does this change what you know about x?
If you were to do this differently, what different results might you get?
What makes this a great answer?
Evaluation
Now you know the options, what will you decide next time?
What would have made this easier from the start?
For a detailed list of Blooms Taxonomy combined with Meta Model questions, see Appendix C.
Generative Learning
As a topic or session is concluded, you have an unprecedented opportunity not only to embed the learning, but to connect it to other areas of your students’ lives now and in the future, so that the learning becomes generative. The founders of NLP observed that Milton Erickson didn’t simply fix one problem in a patient; he wanted to create change so that every part of their lives improved as a result of this one small change. In this way the change or learning became generative. Imagine a snowball at the top of a mountain. You squeeze together a handful of snow and begin rolling it down the mountain. By the time it reaches the bottom it is huge. This is what we should be aiming for with any learning we have taught.
Milton Erickson used the skill of being ‘artfully vague’ to achieve this, and we can do the same in class. By doing this, we allow the learner to complete the details for themselves in ways that are helpful for them. While you look at the next few phrases, notice which of the patterns you recognise
‘You’ve worked well and heard many new ideas today. There are things you have learned here that you are already aware of, and others, maybe not yet. For sure, you will come to see those new ideas as extremely useful in a positive way.’
‘Over the coming days and weeks you may notice new understanding of this topic emerging as a direct result of beginning to put things together here.’
‘I don’t know exactly when you will notice changes in your project work, which group of ideas today sounded most exciting and which ones might yet surprise you.’
Teaching Excellence Page 20