Learning to Learn through Nlp

Maite Galán & Tom Maguire

Published : (Sept.-Oct 2001) in Resource, Italy

	The outcome of this article is to give you some practical tips about how to use Nlp in your everyday classroom activities to en-able pupils in the four skills of Speaking, Listening, Reading and Writing. You will also read tips on Classroom Management and setting up your own Goals.

Nlp means Neuro-Linguistic Programming. A brief introduction to it would go like this:

"Ladies and Gentlemen, to be successful in life you only need to remember three things: 
  
 - Firstly, know what you want, have a clear idea of your goal in each situation.

 - Secondly, be alert and keep your senses open to know what you are getting.

 - Thirdly, be flexible and change your behaviour until you get what you want.

GOAL

SENSITIVITY

FLEXIBILITY

Nlp begins with an interest in people. It's about how we do things. Nlp in Education tells us about how we think and learn. It does this by enabling us to explore the structure of our own subjective experience: how we construct our view of the world. Used in Education, Nlp empowers us to submerge into the inner, virtual world each of us creates as a way of understanding the outside world.

An analogy of Nlp is the example of a history teacher I know. He is currently spending a lot of his free time learning to program a Roman house in virtual reality. His aim is to be able to take his students for a virtual walk round the house so that they can explore it in 3D. In a similar way Nlp techniques enable us to demonstrate to students their own particular learning processes. This brings them much closer to learning to manage their own rich internal software – how they represent the world to themselves through images, sounds, feelings, smells and tastes. Bit-by-bit they will come to understand and even learn how to control their individual representations of reality, the way they think. In short they will learn how to learn. This is surely our goal as educators.

So how can we apply this in class? The next part of the article consists of a series of tips on how to implement Nlp insights to enhance leaning in the four basic skills and also in the art of classroom management.

Speaking activities involve the skill of expressing internal senses in words. You can help them improve this skill through this practice:

-	Tell your pupils that they are going to hear some sounds. They listen to the sounds and imagine the story that they tell. (You can use your own sounds or buy the cassette “Sounds Interesting” by Maley and Duff (C.U.P.).  Get them to tell each other their imaginary stories attending to the images, sounds and feelings they contain.

-	Tell pupils a story getting them to interrupt you at intervals with the questions:
	- What can you see?
- What can you hear?
- What can you feel?

	      Pupils take turns to do the same with a partner.

-	Take a video scene. Turn off the sound. Pupils have to imagine the dialogue, write it down and act it out.

-	Mime a scene as input for speaking, for example receiving a letter with bad news. Pupils then discuss the interpretation of the scene, write the letter and read it out.

-	Take in pictures or a big poster. Write this spatial vocabulary on the board: TOP, BOTTOM, ON THE RIGHT, ON THE LEFT, IN THE BACKGROUND, IN THE FOREGROUND, IN THE CENTRE. 
Write the senses on the board too: SEE, HEAR, SMELL, TASTE, FEEL and tell pupils to focus on all of these in the picture. Get students to study their pictures, or the poster, and then describe it to others from memory using the spatial indications and the sense words.

Listening skills are best illustrated in the story of a little boy whose uncle asked him which he preferred the TV or the radio. The boy promptly replied: “I like the TV, but the pictures on the radio are better.”

Listening activities require students to turn sounds into images, internal sounds, smells, tastes and feelings. Here is some practice in that:

-	Prepare some general vocabulary. Get pupils to draw a small table with five sections in their notebooks. Each section is headed with the name of a sense: SEE, HEAR … Dictate the words and pupils put the different words into the category they sense them to be in. At the end they can compare their categorisation of different words and explain the differences. Ask them to tell you which sense got the most hits – explain that this is probably their favourite representation system.

-	If you find pupils who have difficulties with spelling remember that excellent spellers visualise in their heads the words that they are spelling. To become an excellent speller you must learn to see words in your mind’s eye. The ultimate proof that you can really do this is to be able to say the spelling of long words backwards.

-	A playful way of involving the three basic senses in learning is the Dictation Race. You divide up the class into small groups of three or four. Each group must designate a secretary and a writer. You pin up a copy of the same dictation on the wall furthest from each group. The activity consists in the secretary running to the dictation, reading a part then running back to the writer and dictating it to him/her. Other team members help the writer. (The Visuals will help with spelling and remembering the words / the Auditories will find it fun to hear and repeat the words / the Kinesthetics have the joy of running to and fro. (You can cater for all five senses by making up a dictation around them.

-	Read a story full of Visual, Sound, Smell, Taste and Feelings vocabulary, then ask questions about  the content and the senses, too.

-	Play a song and get pupils to identify the senses vocabulary.

-	As an end of class filler when studying the topic of weather you can visualise a rainstorm, hear it and play it out. Begin by writing on the board: RAINDROPS, PITTER PATTER, SHOWER, CATS AND DOGS, THUNDERING, RAINSTORM. Then begin to tap lightly and ever more heavily on your desk while saying the weather vocabulary in the above order.

Reading entails the transforming of written words into internal images, 
sounds, feelings, smells and tastes. Reading comprehension excellence means being able to visualise in this ample sense.

-	Before reading tell your pupils to remember to visualise the text.

-	Use any textbook reading with comprehension questions and add some of your own based on the possible internal sense representations of your pupils. (Describe the main character’s clothes/character… Are there any smells in the story? What temperature do you think it is in the story? …)

-	When choosing a class reader remind yourself of these criteria : Visual readers love long descriptions; Auditory readers like dialogue in the text; Kinesthetics like to be able to turn pages (books with big print) and they enjoy a swashbuckling, action packed plot.

-	Give students an overview of the reader before they read it by imagining the story using the clues of the title, the illustration on the frontispiece, the blurb on the back cover, the chapter titles on the Contents page and the drawings accompanying the text.

-	You can use this sequence with any reading text : 
- Underline everything you understand.
- Read what you have underlined and picture it.
- Re-read again and try to guess the meaning of the words you didn't
  understand the first time.

Writing is the skill of transforming your inner sense representations into written words. The following activities relate to Narrative and Descriptive creations: 

-	Tell students that to write a rich description you need to have a clear image of what you want to describe in your head. To help them form the picture of an imaginary place, for example, you can play some New Age instrumental music, preferably a piece which includes a guitar. They sit back and imagine their place then describe it in terms of what they SEE, HEAR, SMELL/TASTE, FEEL.

-	To enable students to form a rich visualisation you can lead them through a guided fantasy of their Bedroom, a Person they know, their Town etc… where you suggest what to look at, listen to, ask what they smell, taste and feel. You can do this in two sessions – one where they are imagining and use dictionaries to gather vocabulary; the other when they use their images and vocabulary to write.

-	A Narrative needs a moving picture where the author can see the characters, their conflicts and the resolution of the story. Suggest that they write their story by first introducing the characters and describing them. They then talk about an action and describing the scene, repeating this action-description process throughout the story. The descriptive part allows them to introduce smells, sounds and feelings and so enrich the action. 

As I mentioned in the table at the beginning of this article, to be successful the first thing you need is a clear goal. Setting your goal is a task which can be facilitated by going through this sequence:

Setting your Goal

1.	EXPRESS YOUR GOAL IN POSITIVE TERMS:  

            - What do I want? 

2. CHECK YOUR GOAL AGAINST EXPERIENCE:

- When you have achieved your goal what will you be doing?
- When you have achieved your goal what feelings will you be
  experiencing?
- When you have achieved your goal what kind of thoughts will you
  be thinking?
- What would be a demonstration of your goal? 

3. DECIDE ON THE CONTEXT OF YOUR GOAL: 

- Where do I want this goal?
- When do I want this goal?
- With whom do I want this goal

4. ECOLOGY – IS THIS GOAL TO MY BENEFIT:

- What are the advantages of this goal?
- What are the disadvantages of this goal?

Once you have set your goal you then concentrate on being alert, keeping your senses open to know what you are getting, and being flexible, changing your behaviour until you get what you want. 

We can apply goal setting immediately to our last topic one of the most important problems in classrooms today: management. Nlp offers an array of techniques to help you promote a learning atmosphere in the classroom while preserving good order and discipline. We will mention two here: getting attention and anchoring.

	 Many times we are drawn to discipline students through scolding them, arguing with them, raising our voice, shouting at them, showing anger, making them feel ashamed of their behaviour and so on. In other words we often tend to discipline pupils using a combination of voice and emotional resources. This seldom leaves us unscarred since the unpleasant debris left by these emotional episodes frequently leaves a pall of distaste in the air. As a teacher you feel that this is not the kind of person you really are and that this is not the sort of relationship you want to have with students. Students also feel attacked and a confrontational relationship may develop from what was a trivial incident. So what can we do to discipline and yet maintain rapport with pupils? 

In his book ‘Envoy, a personal guide to classroom management’, this is one of the questions Michael Grinder tackles and he makes an important first distinction. He suggests that we concentrate on using Visual resources to manage our pupils, reserving our Voice for content and excluding our Feelings from disciplinary situations. This sounds like a tall order, but luckily we can translate it into practical situations. 

Getting attention in class is one of the first management problems we encounter. To do this visually means using body language, instead of your voice. When you have done the roll call, settled the pupils in their seats and made the first eye contact you are ready to begin the class and want pupils’ full attention. At this point you step to the centre of the classroom, put your weight evenly on both feet and say your welcome in a voice louder than the class noise then stand absolutely still and keep quiet. When the classroom noise subsides start the lesson in a low voice. 
This attention getting sequence could be illustrated thus:

POISE YOURSELF IN BALANCE
↓
SAY YOUR WELCOME ABOVE CLASS NOISE
↓
FREEZE
↓
BE SILENT
↓
WHISPER WHAT YOU SAY NEXT

This sequence makes full use of visual resources to underline your message of settling down since you communicate stillness to the class by not moving and silence by not speaking. You might like to try following these steps one day and doing the opposite another then compare the results.

 Another persuasive resource you can use to manage in class is anchoring. This is simply the stimulus-response reaction of Pavlov’s dog put to good use. Pavlov did a famous experiment with a dog in which every time he fed it he rang a bell thus establishing a stimulus-response relationship between the bell and the food in the dog’s mind. He was able to install this connection so well that after a time he simply rang the bell and the dog began to salivate. In Nlp the term we use for this automatic response to stimulus is ‘anchoring’. This automatism of the brain is well recognised and indeed it was proposed as the unique learning model by the Behaviourist school. Nlp adheres to a cognitive model for learning but incorporates anchoring as one of the learning channels used by the brain. Anchoring is in fact part of the way our brains operate and we tend to anchor constantly. What Nlp has taught us is that it is useful to notice what you anchor because you can then exploit it.

	Class management through anchoring can be particularly elegant because it is outside the conscious grasp of students and thus avoids emotional side effects and confrontation. For example I was fortunate enough one year to notice that students began to hush and pay attention at the beginning of class when I closed the door. So when I arrived at the class I left the door ajar until I had the routine bureaucratic chores out of the way like cleaning the board, roll calling and setting out my notes, chalk and books, then I walked over to the door and closed it. I then had the gift of ten seconds to get the class under way because the sound of the door closing signalled pupils to pay attention. I now had the choice of wasting these precious seconds of attention by fumbling around or using them well to direct attention to the work of the day. This is where knowing your goal for that class comes into play.

	It is sometimes necessary to scold students for inappropriate behaviour. However, you do not wish your scolding to create a tension which will spill over into your teaching content or become a pattern of your intervention in class. Anchoring will allow you to separate your performance as an interested, caring, professional and your occasional need to discipline pupils. This can be achieved by what is called contamination – you effectively anchor your scolding behaviour and the shocked response of pupils to one chosen area of the classroom. This is done by choosing a spot in the classroom which you never use, usually it will be well off to the right or left of your table, or indeed a corner at the front of the room. At the time when you have to discipline the whole class verbally move directly into the chosen area and be as vociferous as you want. Give them a good telling-off! Then move back to your normal teaching position, breathing deeply a couple of times on the way to change your “angry” state. If you have anchored this successfully then in future you will only have to move into the discipline position to get the shocked response from pupils you got the first time you told them off. You may even be able to elicit the required response by moving in the direction of the “contaminated area” and not even having to get there. The advantages of anchoring responses are:
-	pupils are not consciously aware of your management of the situation since the response comes from them automatically 
-	you do not have a confrontational situation
-	there is no emotional debris so your rapport with them remains intact.
	
	In disciplining situations remember to manage visually, leaving your voice for content. Visual management avoids emotional involvement in disciplinary situations and this is primordial for your health, often the first casualty of classroom management.

Maite Galán has a degree in Philology. She works as a language teacher
in a high school and has 24 years teaching experience in Spain and
France. She is a consultant for McGill University, Canada, in reading
material foreign for language students. 
Website: http://www.xtec.es/~tgalan  E-mail: tgalan@pie.xtec.es

Tom Maguire has a BA in English (Glasgow),  Maîtrise ès Lettres (French) from Montpellier and Philology degree from Santiago. He has 27 years experience in TEFL in France and Spain. At present he teaches EFL in a Spanish State high school near Barcelona. He is interested in using Neuro-linguistic Programming (Nlp) to enhance Learning to Learn strategies. He is a Master Practitioner in Nlp and manages a listserv for those interested in NLP in Education. 
Website: http://www.xtec.es/~jmaguire   E-mail: jmaguire@pie.xtec.es