Teaching Excellence

by Richard Bandler

  Inappropriate behaviour can sometimes be a result of a lack of confidence or inability to deal with feelings. Here is how one NLP-trained tutor decided to work with a student whose swearing was getting very out of hand. The young man wrote about his experience and these are his words. When he first went to the college his literacy level was extremely low and he would not write anything, so we are reproducing his letter here to show you just how far a young person can progress personally and educationally with the right skilled teacher:

  “At the beginning of the course of painting and decorating I was all right with my language but as the course progressed and I got to know people, they started taking the Mickey out of me and calling me names and I just started swearing at them… When Ivan [his tutor] took over he noticed me swearing a lot. One day he took me into his office and had a quiet word with me, saying I needed to calm it down or else I wouldn’t get onto the next course and he helped me by saying change your swear words into fruits and vegetables. He did some stuff with me about standing in Wembley Stadium being Kaká [a football hero of his]. It made me feel really good and made me feel I could do lots more things than I could before. When my mates try and take the Mickey now I use the things that Ivan made me think about how good I am. It’s working and I feel he has helped me to calm my swearing down. 5 weeks ago every other word I said was a swear word and now I hardly ever swear.”

  From stuck to motivated with a Visual Squash

  This is a great technique to help students to stop procrastinating. You can use this activity on a one-to-one basis or for a whole class. It can provide an alternative to the motivational speech teachers often feel necessary before an activity starts. You can experiment with this process in the following way: Have your students think about something they are really motivated to do and enjoy. Ask them to amplify the feeling (using spinning the feelings in the right direction) and notice where the image of the activity is in space. Suggest some of the submodalities of the representation, such as ‘is it in colour’ and ‘how big is it?’ Ask them to hold up their right hand and put the picture on the hand. Next ask them to make an image of the activity that they want to be motivated to do but aren’t yet and put this image on their left hand. As they hold up their hands in front of them have them imagine pictures of all the steps they need to take to get to feel motivated about the activity. When they have all the steps laid out in sequence, have them slap their hands together and bring their hands to their chest to bring the good feeling inside.

  Swish for Change

  The Swish technique is very useful when people feel compelled to act in ways they don’t want to. Try this for yourself so you have the experience and can help the students to change the way they feel and act. Make one image in your head of a behaviour or feeling you don’t want to have and notice the submodalities of the image (see the list in the appendix if you want a reminder of the submodalities). Next make an image of the behaviour or feeling you do want and shrink it down to a small dark image and put it in the corner of the first image. Now shrink down the unwanted image to a small dark dot while you simultaneously bring up the wanted image, bright and bold so it completely covers the first image. Making a ‘swish’ sound helps!

  This process can be adapted in many ways. Students can do this on their computers by creating images and manipulating them. Small children can put the images into balloons and send them off into space while making big bold pictures of new ways to be and pinning them to the walls. Here is an example of how activities can be adapted for younger children. Charlie is a 5-year-old whose mum thought he was school phobic. When Kate went to work with him, this turned out not to be the case; he just really wanted to play his favourite computer game in the mornings rather than get ready and go to school. He found the mornings very chaotic and he felt he didn’t have any control over his little life, with everyone telling him what to do and what to eat and rushing him in the mornings. Once he was at school he settled very well, but the process of getting him there literally involved carrying him kicking and screaming. The first step was to encourage Charlie to draw what it was like in the mornings now. He said he didn’t like that picture and so we screwed it up and put it in the bin. Then we asked him what he would like it to be like. Charlie decided that it would be good to get up 20 minutes earlier and have time to himself on his computer game, then he would feel ready to get himself ready to school. He felt that he was big enough to take responsibility for getting ready for school. Kate suggested he drew another picture. He immediately divided his page into 6 sections and drew each step of his perfect morning. It was bright, detailed and had timings on it. His mum agreed to leave him to his own devices for two weeks, even at the risk of being late for school. We colour copied the picture and laminated the sheets and Charlie placed them around the house to remind himself of his new strategy and the timings. The next morning Charlie was at school on time happily and with no fuss. Peace reigned again and continues to do so.

  summary

  During this chapter you have explored using timelines to motivate and engage learners by using the resources of the future in the present. You have discovered three other processes to adapt for use with your students to change states, feelings and behaviours and to boost motivation. We are sure that as you start to use the techniques of NLP you will create many more opportunities for your learners in the future.

  references

  1. Attributed to Nelson Mandela President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999

  2. Deborah Yurgelun-Todd (2007) Emotional and cognitive changes during adolescence. Curr Opin Neurobiol, Apr; 17

  activities

  Activity 1

  Create a timeline with a group, adapting the method to suit the age group.

  Start with the goal, and ask the students to create a poster and draw what success will be like for them (what pictures, sounds, feelings etc?). They all then stand with their poster and you ask them to ‘look ahead’ and imagine the future is in that space in front of them. Have them go and stand where the ‘deadline’ is (notice how many of them go a long way off!).

  They can then place their ‘success poster’ in the place where they saw the deadline.

  From the point where we have the present, ask them to consider bringing the deadline space closer and place the poster there. Ask them to notice the difference. For some students this is enough to get them wanting to make a start on steps towards achieving the goal.

  Now have them walk to that space. Suggest that they are now reaching their goal.

  Now ask them to go back to the present and look at the future again; the place on the timeline where their success poster is. Ask them what they need to do in the space that is between them and the poster. Let them suggest first steps. Use Meta Model questions to support their thinking at this stage and check for a well-formed outcome.

  Now ask them to locate action steps on the timeline and anchor each ‘step’ to the timeline. Have them return to the present and re-connect with the goal, at each step looking back at the ‘future past’ and firing off the ‘success’ state to maintain motivation towards the goal. Remember: Build a state of success and confidence (or other required resourceful state) in the present and at each ‘step’ along the way.

  Extension activities

  What other whole class activities can you create around the techniques we have explored in this chapter? Which obstacles to achievement can you help your students to overcome by adapting and applying these ideas?

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

  chapter 17

  Strategies for Learning Difference

  TAP THIS TO SEE THE VIDEOS

  ‘Every child has an enormous drive to

  demonstrate competence’ (1)

  Buckminster Fuller

  In this chapter

  Learning difference not difficulty

  Working with ADHD, Dyspraxia, Dyslexia, Autism and OCD

  How to teac
h to the symptom not the syndrome

  Explore neurological diversity

  On every seminar we teach there are worried parents who want to know how to help children who have a diagnosis of a learning difficulty. The questions range from how to teach a dyslexic child to spell, to how to help an autistic child integrate into school, to general questions such as how to use NLP with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

  To address this vast subject completely will require another book. However, this chapter gives you some helpful ideas as to how you as a teacher or parent can help children with the proliferation of diagnoses now flooding the world of education. First, though, let’s back up and discover what exactly is being talked about when we attach these labels to children, or to adults for that matter.

  Discussions and concerns in schools often revolve around ‘frustrating’ or ‘difficult’ students. These learners are often identified as being fidgety, untidy, excitable, loud, attention-seeking, lacking in concentration, under-achieving, disorganised, or lacking motivation. Parents are often worried that their child doesn’t seem to be doing as well as others and they are desperate to discover why this may be.

  There seems to be an increasing desire to provide a label or diagnosis for children to explain away the behaviour, hence the list of syndromes and conditions seems to get longer and longer: Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, Attention Deficit Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Autistic Spectrum Disorder, Asperger’s Syndrome, Emotional Behavioural Difficulty, to name just a few. The diagnostic process has advantages and disadvantages. Some children need the labels to afford them better learning support and they flourish, but others become limited by a label which can negatively affect their self-image and sense of identity. If you have struggled to learn something and, despite all your best efforts, you still can’t do it, then having an explanation can help. However, it is not helpful if you have a label attached to you and people start to believe that things will always be this way and you can’t learn new strategies.

  In extreme cases, the label provides a smoke screen for lack of parenting skills or lack of creativity in teaching processes. It is also worth noting that in many countries, schools and colleges receive additional learning support to help manage the unruly child or perk up their performance statistics, which may provide some explanation for the explosion in diagnoses over the past few years.

  Our approach differs from the norm in a number of key ways. Firstly, we prefer the term Learning Difference to Learning ‘Difficulty’ or ‘Disability’. We prefer this term because, in our view, the problem is not a learning difficulty but a teaching difficulty. Humans are neurologically diverse and to some extent everyone is ‘wired’ differently. People vary from whatever the ‘norm’ is in widely different degrees. Differences, including learning differences, are to be celebrated and some learners simply learn and process information in an alternative way.

  The onus is on us as educators and parents to discover how a child processes information, what strategies may work better for them, and to teach creative ways to overcome the hurdles and challenges each learner faces. It is much more helpful to think in terms of learning difference, recognising that humans are neurologically diverse and can learn new strategies and new skills to become exquisite learners in their own way.

  Departments of Education in many countries put significant resources into supporting learners with learning difficulties, which is admirable. The problem is that support is often given to provide adjustment for the learner, rather than teaching an effective strategy. For example, some students who have difficulty reading are provided with a member of staff to read for them. This seems absurd, which is why our approach differs significantly from ‘reasonable adjustment’. Our solution is to teach the student to read for themselves, rather than say if they can’t read let someone else do it for it for them. Reading is not regarded as a high order skill. There are many examples of children and young people with many challenges who have learned to read and develop other mastery skills. At one time it was thought that children with Down’s Syndrome could never read. This has fortunately been proved a myth and research shows that with the right interventions and strategies children with this genetic condition often access reading and move on to higher skills.(2) If a country can have a 98% literacy rate, it means many people with different brain wiring can achieve the foundation skill of reading for lifelong learning.(3)

  There is a great deal of new research into neuro-diversity and the way brains are wired, which is very helpful to teachers in understanding and identifying how a student is failing to learn. There is conjecture as to why some people have brains that are wired differently, but it really isn’t important for our purposes here. There is also much research into the neuroplasticity of the brain demonstrating that humans can continue to learn in adulthood.(4) So even if a person didn’t get the help they required at school, it is never too late to start.

  A further major difference in our approach, when using NLP to work with neurologically diverse learners, is to teach to symptom. This means that we identify what the learner can do and what the learner can’t do yet as a means of finding a way that enables them to learn in a new way. The focus is on capability, not incapacity. As with all good NLP interventions, we start by asking ourselves and the learner some helpful questions, such as:

  What is the learner trying to achieve by this behaviour or strategy?

  What is his/her current strategy?

  Which bits of the current strategy work and which bits don’t work so well?

  What can s/he do already that gives him/her the resources to achieve what s/he wants?

  What resources or skills doesn’t s/he have yet that will help him/her?

  In what context would the current strategy or behaviour work to achieve something more useful?

  We are often asked for guidance on how to work with children who have a learning difference such as Dyslexia, Dyspraxia or other ‘disability’ label. Our answer is, we will work with them in the same way as we would work with anyone else - applying the presuppositions and asking good questions to discover an effective strategy that works for the person.

  Now let’s take a look at some of common labels, what they mean and how we can help using NLP:

  Dyslexia

  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the definition of Dyslexia is, ‘A general term for disorders that involve difficulty in learning to read or interpret words, letters, and other symbols, but that do not affect general intelligence.’

  The term is commonly associated with spelling and reading while other factors such as directional and sequencing confusion, organisational problems, poor memory and visual sensitivity are also commonly associated with Dyslexia.

  The difficulties a person experiences generally become the focus of attention, while the strengths and uniqueness of the person are missed. People with a diagnosis of Dyslexia often have excellent communication skills and a caring, empathic disposition. Some have high visual spatial awareness, good understanding of the workings of machinery, computers, circuitry, etc. Some are innovative, good trouble-shooters, creative and lateral thinkers, communicators and mediators. People with Dyslexia can be a great asset to an organisation and many are extremely successful in business. These skills and resources can easily be harnessed to overcome the challenges faced by a learner

  A person with a dyslexic brain may have advantages that the rest of humanity does not. Certainly, they can cope with a degree of chaos that most of us would find daunting. Stress is often a part of the life of a dyslexic person. Constantly struggling to do tasks that others ‘say’ are easy, can cause stress and so dyslexic people learn to live with a level of stress others don’t experience. It seems that they deal with moments of crisis much better than many of us. Winston Churchill (who many people believe had Dylsexia) was a supreme example of this. A further advantage is that a dyslexic may have no need to take notes and may be able to store their thoughts in
wonderful vivid pictures in their head, creating a much fuller experience and great memory recall.

  The key to helping someone who has wiring that works in a different way to the majority is to figure out a way to utilise the resources they have to solve the problem. If a person has auditory processing difficulties, they will have a great deal of difficulty in learning to read or spell by sounding out words. Most of us find this a challenge anyway, and it can be insurmountable for someone with this type of Dyslexia. On the other hand, they may well have fantastic visual spatial awareness, so the spelling strategy outlined in this book (Chapter 3) may be easy for them, especially if they link it to a really great feeling and a determination to succeed.

  Often the difference between a poor speller and a dyslexic is stress. A poor speller may not be able to spell and doesn’t necessarily care that much. A dyslexic may stress over their ability and hold a strong belief that because they are dyslexic they cannot spell, and it becomes a huge obstacle to learning for them. It makes sense that anyone who keeps trying to do something but just can’t find a way to succeed could be stressed out. So it’s a good idea to deal with the stress up front and use strategies to relax and remove any tension that could get in the way of effective learning. Once a person relaxes and any limiting belief is doubted and removed, the spelling or reading becomes simply a matter of the right strategy. This works both ways. Success in the strategy can change a person’s beliefs about their identity.

  Terry is a senior HR manager with a Dyslexia diagnosis and he was convinced that he couldn’t learn to spell because of his Dyslexia. Kate persuaded him to suspend his disbelief just for the sake of an experiment, convincing him that the outcome didn’t matter either way because we were just playing with strategies. Once he had learned to spell one word he realised that using a visual strategy was much easier for him. Whenever Terry wrote to Kate subsequently he signed himself ‘Terry Restaurant’ after learning to be confident in spelling this word after 40 years of using ‘café’ as an alternative!