Meta Model questions are used to gather and specify information about the experience the learner is having. This is not just information for you as the teacher; it also helps students to gather information about what they are doing on the inside that isn’t working for them. The Meta Model allows you and the student to discover what has to happen for change to take place for that person specifically.
To specify the process of having a problem, we want to remove the biggest chunks of stone from our rock first, so we use a ‘big chunk’ question. Often, the best to start with is ‘How do you know?’ In order to answer this question, the person has to go inside and think about it and as a result will often answer with a much more specific response than they might have done otherwise. Using our previous example, the initial statement could be ‘I have exam anxiety’ . We ask the question – ‘how do you know?’ and the person may say something like, ‘Well, when I think about my exams I imagine I am not going to know any of the answers, and I dread the exams, knowing that I will be disappointed when I get my results’ . Now we have more specific information and we can continue with other questions to chip off the smaller pieces of rock until we have a clear and specified process of how the person creates anxiety around exams in him/herself.
Remember that the information we are seeking to discover are the deletions, distortions and generalisations the learner is making to create their map of the world. This is the surface structure of their world. We want to discover the deeper structure of their experience so that they can re-model their world in ways that serve them better. So the questions can be usefully categorised in the same way.
What is ‘deleted’, or missing?
When someone says, ‘I’m scared’ / ‘I’m worried’ / ‘I’m confused’ , what is missing? A person has to be scared of something. Similarly, are they scared, worried or confused all the time? Ask them, ‘What’s scaring you?’/ ‘When do you worry?’ / ‘What specifically is confusing you?’ These questions prompt the person to go inside and find some more information. Two other things are happening, too. One is that feeling worried is a very big state and adding information puts the worrying in a particular context; by definition there are some things that are not worrying them, so this is now immediately more manageable. Secondly, notice the nature of the question. It doesn’t say ‘what are you confused about?’ it says ‘when are you confused?’ Using an active tense – confusing - creates movement, unlike ‘I’m confused’ , which implies being stuck in a state. Using an active tense – confusing - implies that things are fluid and can change. If you use a past tense – ‘what were you confused about?’ – you can put the confusion in the past and imply that it is no longer happening.
Compared to what?
Sometimes students compare themselves to other people or compare one thing with another but miss out what it is they are comparing it with. This is called comparative deletion – ‘he’s better’ / ‘this is worse’ / ‘it’s harder’ . Ask the student ‘better than what?’ or ‘compared to what?’ The student may then reply, ‘he’s better than me’ / ‘this is worse than yesterday’ / ‘it’s harder than last week’s maths ’. Again, you have helped the person to reduce the size of the problem and specified when and what it is that is limiting them.
Who says?
People often express as a fact something that is really just an opinion, using verbs that miss out the specifics about how, where and when. Notice the phrases ‘it’s hard’, ‘they are best’, ‘I am stupid’, ‘research says’ . What is missing here? Ask ‘ what is hard’, ‘ who is best’, ‘ how do you know specifically’ and ‘ which research?’ Once a student realises that it is just what they think about something, and isn’t necessarily the absolute truth, it opens up the possibility of changing their point of view. In this way, ‘I am stupid’ becomes ‘I think I am stupid because yesterday I couldn’t do the maths questions and my friend said, ‘it’s easy so you must be stupid’ . You may then want to go on to question the truth in this statement by asking, ‘has your friend ever been wrong?’
What’s altered or distorted?
‘I have no motivation’ ‘His behaviour is bad!’ ‘I have anxiety’ , are all examples of taking a verb - the action to motivate, to behave, to be anxious - and turning it into a noun – an object. In NLP, these are called nominalisations. To test this, ask yourself ‘can you put it in a wheelbarrow?’ If someone says, ‘I have depression’ , or ‘I have anxiety’ , we can’t actually touch these things as objects (or put them in a wheelbarrow!), so we need to turn them back into processes which can change easily rather than be ‘things that are static and hard to change. Ask, ‘What is not motivating you?’ ‘How is he behaving badly?’ ‘How are you making yourself anxious?’ These questions create the possibility of movement and change.
The labels we attach to people such as ADHD or Dyslexia are designed as descriptions of symptoms or behaviours, but sometimes people can begin to define themselves by the term as if they are it. We challenge this in ways that enable students to see that they may have unusual or extraordinary ways of processing information. Ask them how do they do dyslexia or ADHD. Or you may find even more creative ways of challenging this belief, as this teacher did:
A young boy came into a teacher’s class and said, ‘I’ve got ADHD, Miss’. She said, ‘really? Where is it?’ He said, ‘what you mean? I don’t know where it is!’ As he did this, he held his hands out in front of him as if he was holding a parcel. The teacher said, ‘Oh, there it is’ and pointed to his hands. ‘Give it to me and I will put it under the table until the end of the lesson and then you can have your ADHD back’ . She mimed taking the ADHD from him and put it under the table. He smiled and said, ‘you’re mad, Miss!’ Then he behaved perfectly well all lesson and the next day came in and said, ‘I left it outside today, Miss’ .
What she helped him to understand was that his ADHD was not a static object and he had choice in how he was behaving as a process.
Some teachers could do well to pay attention to the way they create nominalisations. ‘Attitude, behaviour, motivation’, are all nominalisations which are not a way to help a student to do things differently. Rather, this is just a way for people to convince themselves into a set of beliefs that absolves them of any responsibility. Next time you are in the staff room, just listen for some of the more common nominalisations and perhaps begin to challenge a few.
Where’s the connection?
An interviewer once said to the musician Frank Zappa, ‘You have long hair; does that make you a woman?’ Frank Zappa’s response was, ‘You have a wooden leg; does that make you a table?’
We can distort information by linking two things together as if one thing makes another thing happen. ‘You make me angry’ . ‘When you look at me that way it makes me feel bad’ . The truth is, as the former US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt said, ‘no one can make me feel bad without my consent’ . Most students and many teachers often presuppose a causal link when there isn’t one. Again, the way to challenge this is to ask, with a great deal of surprise in your voice, ‘how do I/they do that!’ Young people use this pattern a great deal and of course little people do it in relation to magical thinking. Take the rhyme, ‘if you tread on a nick you will marry a stick and a witch will come to your wedding’ . We are not going to challenge distortions that are natural in children or are useful and fun for them. However, as children grow up it may be helpful to them to see that two things may not be connected and they have more choices about how to respond to a situation or comment.
Mind reading
One young girl flounced out of the room in tears on hearing the teacher say, ‘I have just spoken to your mother’ . The young girl wouldn’t stay to listen because she had already decided that she knew what her mother had said. She took some convincing to listen to the actual response from her mother. We cannot know precisely what someone else is thinking, but we often distort reality and behave as if we can. Children are very good at this
- ‘You don’t like me’. ‘He hates me’. ‘I know what you are thinking’ . ‘You think I’m stupid’ . It’s easy to challenge this by asking, ‘how do you know that?’ .
What’s the connection?
Another misconception is that X means or is the same as Y. ‘You don’t love me, you don’t bring me flowers anymore.’ ‘You hate me – you gave me a C in my assignment’ . Simply ask how does X mean Y? Like this – ‘how does me bringing you flowers mean that I love you?’ ‘How does you getting a C mean I hate you?’
What’s generalised?
Is it always true?
‘Every student always wants to learn and always behaves beautifully in all my classes’ . This is probably not true, even though it could help to choose to believe it. People can also make generalisations that are really unhelpful for their learning, such as: ‘No one likes me’. ‘Everyone treats me badly and picks on me all the time!’ ‘I always do badly in Languages’ . These patterns are Generalisations . The most obvious of these are known as Universal Quantifiers , which you learned in relation to the discussion on rapport in Chapter 12. Now we are considering them from the perspective of someone limiting their model of the world. You can challenge universal quantifiers simply by exaggerating the statement, ‘No one? Everyone? Always? ’ Or you can simply ask, ‘is there not one person who likes you? What about your mother, or me?’ How you ask these questions is just as important as what you ask. Reading these words on the page doesn’t necessarily impart the tonality or smile that would accompany such a question; again, a little giggle and gentle tease maintains rapport, whereas a strong challenge may cause the person to reject your help.
What has to be there?
Sometimes people assume that something is true before something else can happen. ‘I can get on with my work when you stop picking on me’ , has a presupposition that you are picking on me. ‘I can’t answer the question because I am always wrong’ , presupposes that the person is always wrong. We have explored helpful presuppositions in the use of the Milton Model in the classroom. However, when you are working through a challenge with a student, the trick is to listen for any presuppositions which are preventing them using a better strategy. If you allow a presupposition to go unchallenged you are implicitly accepting it as true, so intervene as soon as you hear something being implied by the speaker.
Where’s the choice?
Try putting a tape recorder under your desk and playing back half an hour of you talking to students. As teachers we should, must, ought, have to, get them through their exams. They can or can’t study, they might revise or they may not. These motivating words, known as Modal Operators, can imply possibility, such as can, can’t, might, may, could, or can be words that imply necessity, such as must, have to, should . Listen to many teachers and parents and you may notice that the term ‘you need to’ is the most common!
When a learner asks for help, the way they ask you gives you information about how to help them to move forward. If a student says, ‘I can’t do this’ the question to ask is, ‘what stops you?’ If on the other hand they tell you that they ‘mustn’t do this’, then the question is, ‘what would happen if you did?’
When a student implies they have no choice, either because they don’t have the resources or some external factor stops them, your job is to provide the opportunity for them to explore either what’s inside them that stops the process or what external factors are influencing them in their decision.
Now there is a lot of information here and it may seem to some that it is a challenge to know where to start, but it isn’t really. It is more about listening to what is really going on and responding appropriately, rather than knowing which label or name of each pattern is which. Here’s a transcript of a conversation Kate had with a student who was regularly getting into trouble for fighting. He had just had another fight when this conversation took place:
Kate: Why did you hit him?
Josh : I had to!
Kate: You had to?
Josh : Yes, he called me a f****** b******.
Kate: Oh, so when someone calls you a f****** b****** you HAVE to hit him?
Josh : Yeah, that’s right!
Kate : Even me?
Josh: Yeah, that’s right!
Kate : OK, so what if I call you a f******* b******* in Japanese – would you
have to hit me then?
Josh: Don’t be stupid, of course not!’
Kate : Why not? (asked in all innocence)
Josh: Because I wouldn’t know what you were saying!
Kate : Oh! You have to understand what I’m saying?
Josh: Yeah!
Kate: So what does it mean when someone calls you a f*****b*****?
Josh: They don’t show me no respect.
Kate: ( leaving the double negative aside…) So if someone doesn’t show
you respect you HAVE to hit them?
Josh: Yeah!
Kate: Have you ever called someone a f******** b******* and they hit you?
Josh: Yep!
Kate: What would happen if there were two guys you called f******
b*******s and one of them hit you but the other one, who was bigger
than you, just smiled and walked away. Which one would you have
more respect for?
Josh: The one who walked away, I guess
Kate: Oh really? So what are you going to do next time?
Josh: I’m going to say ‘I could flatten you, but you ain’t worth it’!
This was progress, if not perfection! You might be thinking – what a long way around, why not just tell him not to hit people? Well, the reason is that he had been hearing that all his life and it didn’t work because he hadn’t worked out that he had other choices that still maintained his high value of ‘respect’. All the other options had required him to give up his street belief about respect. This way, his values around respect were maintained, while the distortions in his thinking were challenged and allowed him to make a different choice in the future.
Now you may have noticed that some of these patterns overlap a little. What’s important is that you go for the response that is going to make the biggest difference to the way the person perceives the difficulty they are having. When Josh said, ‘I had to’ , the missing performative could have been challenged by asking ‘who says?’ But by reflecting back ‘had to’ he gained the information which showed him that X didn’t mean Y and he could take a different course of action next time.
The effect of using the Meta Model is that the person goes inside themselves and carries out what is called a transderivational search . That is, they go and find some way to recover some deeper meaning to what they are saying and provide more information about what they are thinking. It’s more thinking on purpose, isn’t it?
When you read transcripts of people using NLP with clients or students, one of the things you may notice is that the practitioner doesn’t always do a great deal of listening and there is a good reason for this. Take this situation: Eve came in to see her tutor and was obviously very unhappy and upset. She said, ‘I hate school, I am always unhappy; no one likes me and they make me angry, teasing me. I am too slow and can’t learn anything because I’m stupid! ’ Her tutor’s response was, ‘you are not stupid Eve, you are very clever at some things’. Because her tutor ignored the generalisations ‘I hate school’, ‘I am always unhappy’ and the mind read ‘no one likes me’ , it’s fair for Eve to presume that these first three comments are true!
People are very experienced in justifying their position; the longer you let it go on, the more fixed their position becomes and the more they will convince themselves of their truth. When a student does this we need to go for the very first deletion, distortion, or generalisation, otherwise we are effectively agreeing with them. By challenging the very first statement we begin to cast doubt on this and all subsequent unhelpful beliefs.
When you create enough doubt about a belief and find enough examples of
ways in which it isn’t true, then the learner is able to find a new belief to support a better version of their model of the world. By asking the right question in the right way we can help the person to see what they have missed out or changed to be able to perpetuate a particular belief or behaviour.
Once you begin to use the Meta Model to specify exactly the difficulty the learner is having, this can often be sufficient for the learner to start to make changes in their internal behaviour for themselves. A learner may make a statement such as ‘I can’t do Maths’ , but when questioned the problem becomes ‘I don’t know how to multiply this number by that number in this equation; whenever I think about it I just feel sick’ . Now using NLP we would ask, ‘how did you think about it? Did you make a picture or say something to yourself?’ The person then has to go inside and work out the process that they went through to make themselves feel sick and then it becomes easier to do something else instead.
Where this is not the case you at least have details of their strategy for the unhelpful thinking, and the pieces of the strategy that work and the ones that don’t. You have chipped off enough rock to see precisely what is going on. At this point you can use the same processes you have already learned for installing, changing or modifying a strategy so it works for the student. There are more interventions and processes to use in the next chapter. Remember, people are not broken and they do not need fixing; they are just uneducated as to how to run their own brains and your interventions on a one-to-one basis are an extension of your teaching role - teaching your learners to run their own brains.
summary
In this chapter you have explored the elegant use of Meta Model as a way of making effective interventions with learners. You have identified the way people delete, distort and generalise information to maintain a belief or strategy and how to challenge these unhelpful assumptions in a supportive way to enable students to grow and learn.
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