The Language Teacher

Teachers need more than knowledge of their subject!

From the 1950s to the 1980s, psychologist Virginia Satir was one of the most influential developers in the new field of human relationship counseling. Often called the grandmother of Family Therapy, Satir assisted thousands of married couples and families to resolve old conflicts and create a more enjoyable life together. In her field, she was an expert, but Satir had one problem -- she couldn't teach what she did to others. Hundreds of people trained with her, but when they left her seminars, they were usually unable to copy what she had done.

One day Satir was demonstrating in front of a group of student psychotherapists. She stopped talking to the couple she was working with, and asked if any of her students could carry on, using her methods. One by one, students tried to help the couple, but none of them seemed to know how Virginia chose what to say. At the back of the room a young man, Richard Bandler, was tape recording the training session. He was a computer programmer and a graduate student of linguistics at the University of California, and he had no training in psychology. Finally, after Satir's students had failed, Bandler came to the front of the room and offered to talk to the couple. Amazingly, he seemed to know exactly how Virginia was constructing her questions and suggestions to the couple. Listening to him was like listening to her. The psychotherapists were puzzled. Who was this young man, and how had he learned Satir's method so precisely?

In 1976 Richard Bandler and professor of linguistics John Grinder wrote the first of several books explaining their discoveries about communication, human change, and teaching. Their first book, called The Structure of Magic (Bandler & Grinder, 1975) explained that by understanding the inner languages of the brain (neuro-linguistics) anyone could learn to achieve the excellent results of the most expert communicators, teachers and therapists. Before publication, Bandler and Grinder showed the transcripts of their books to the experts whose skills they had "modeled," people like medical doctor/hypnotherapist Milton Erickson, anthropologist Gregory Bateson, and of course Virginia Satir. Satir's comments, which I will quote from later, convey the excitement which teachers around the world have been reporting ever since, as they learn the "structure of the magic" of Neuro Linguistic Programming.

What NLP Offers Teachers

For language teachers, NLP offers three important benefits. Firstly, it provides a new model of how people learn. NLP's precise understanding of the way the brain works can be compared to a computer "User's Manual." Without the manual, you know that the computer has a vast memory and can do amazing things. If you play around with it, eventually you'll manage to stumble on some of those things. But with the manual, you can choose exactly what you want to do, and have the computer do it perfectly every time. In NLP, we know the programs (or strategies to use the NLP term) which naturally excellent learners have accidentally stumbled on: the strategy perfect spellers use to memorize words; the strategy enthusiastic readers use to speed read their books in a fraction of the time, and so on.

Secondly, though, human beings are more than computers. Learning and creativity work best when the student's mind is free from distraction, when it has an almost meditative calmness and alertness. Research shows that having students relax at the start of each teaching session will increase their learning by 25% (Jensen, 1995). NLP delivers us some remarkable new ways to get students quickly into that state.

If NLP only provided these powerful new ways for students to learn, it would already deserve it's place at the center of the learning revolution. But NLP also provides a whole new model of what teaching is, of how the most effective teachers are able to create a sense of "rapport" with their students, motivate them, and inspire them to achieve their best. In a world where the teacher competes for students' attention with television, video games and popular culture, that is no small achievement. NLP shows you how to utilize your every move, and your every word so that they support you in getting your students to believe in and be hungry for learning.

NLP is not one technique; it is hundreds of techniques, and the framework that makes sense of them. This article, and this issue, gives just a sample of the ideas you can take advantage of.

Making Sense of Learning

Here is a simple experiment which explains the NLP model of how your neurology (or to use less formal language, your "brain") works. Think of a fresh lemon. Imagine one in front of you now, and feel what it feels like as you pick it up. Take a knife and cut a slice off the lemon, and hear the slight sound as the juice squirts out. Smell the lemon as you lift the slice to your mouth and take a bite of the slice. Taste the sharp taste of the fruit.

If you actually imagined doing that, your mouth is now salivating. Why? Because your brain followed your instructions and thought about, saw, heard, felt, smelled and tasted the lemon. Your brain treated the imaginary lemon as if it was real, and prepared saliva to digest it. Seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting are the natural languages of your neurology. When you use these languages, your neurology treats what you're thinking about as "real".

In the past, some teachers thought that learning was just a matter of "thinking" about the subject, of using words. But when students learn, they are using the five basic senses, as well as the sixth language of the brain -- words. In NLP the six languages of the brain are called:

Visual (seeing pictures or images)
Auditory (hearing sounds)
Kinesthetic (feeling body sensations)
Olfactory (smelling fragrances)
Gustatory (tasting flavors)
Auditory digital (thinking in words or concepts)

Some students do a lot of thinking in words (auditory digital). They want to know the "information" you're telling them. But for other students, being able to "picture" what you're showing them (visual) is more important. Others will want to "tune in to the main themes" behind your words (auditory) or "come to grips with" the lesson and "work through" some examples (kinesthetic). If you listen to the words students use, they will actually tell you which is their favorite sensory system for representing their learning in (called in NLP their preferred Representational System). Effective teachers learn to "speak in each of the representational systems" (Bolstad, Hamblett, Ohlson, & Hardie, 1992, p. 72).

NLP gives you a number of ways to reach the learners you have in your classroom. If there are some of your students who just don't seem to learn, you may not be teaching to the sense they think in most. For example, to reach visual learners, you may want to write words up on the board, and draw more diagrams. To reach auditory learners, you may choose more discussions and use music. Kinesthetic learners like to move around (you've probably noticed them in the class already), and they will appreciate your use of activities like role plays. You can adjust your language to match each of the main senses. (If you don't see the point of this, you may not be picking up a key way to get on the same wavelength as your more challenging students.) When you use all these main three senses in your classroom teaching, your studentsｹ brains will be far more fully activated. They will thirst for your teaching just as your mouth watered for that lemon.

The Right Sense For The Job

How do polyglots remember which of a dozen languages each word comes from? Is it magic? In the past many people have assumed that there might be something different in the polyglot's neurology; something that made them naturally more able to keep each language separate. Actually, NLP studies (Dilts & Epstein, 1995, p. 222) show that polyglots are paying special attention to their auditory and kinesthetic sensory systems. They use a different tone of voice and different set of body postures for each language. People who only use their visual system (and try to picture each word they say, as if it is written down) will not find it as easy to become fluent in multiple languages.

Just as the Windows software program can be installed in any IBM compatible computer, so the "strategy" that polyglots use can actually be installed in any other person. If it's possible in one person's neurology, it's possible in anyone's. All we need to know is exactly which sensory distinctions the first person uses, and in which sequence. To "install" a new strategy, NLP uses a series of groundbreaking discoveries about what happens when a person uses each sensory system. For example, we use the fact that a person's eyes move differently depending on which sense they are getting information from.

Just how easily a new learning strategy can be installed is shown by a piece of research done at the University of Moncton in Canada. (Dilts & Epstein, 1995, p. 409). Here four groups of pretested average spellers were given the same spelling test (using made up nonsense words they had not seen before). Each group had different instructions.

• Group A was simply told to learn the words.
• Group B was told to visualize the words as a method of learning them.

The two other groups were told to look in a certain direction while they visualized.

• Group C was told to look up to the left (an eye position which NLP claims will help visual memory).
• Group D were told to look down to the right (an eye position which NLP claims will help feeling kinesthetically, but may hinder visualizing.
• Group A scored the same as their pretest.
• Group B scored 10% better.
• Group C scored 20-25% better.
• Group D scored 15% worse!

This study supports two NLP claims: a) the eye position learners use decides which sensory system they can effectively process information in; and b) visual recall is the best sensory system for learning spelling in English. Even more exciting, it demonstrates that students can be successfully taught (in 5 minutes) to use the most effective sensory strategy. For a kinesthetic learner who had been a poor speller, this would result in an instant improvement of 35-40%.

In the same way, any learning strategy can be "modeled" from expert learners and taught to others in a minimum of time.

The State Where Learning Naturally Occurs

Research bears out the belief of accelerated learning experts that students' ability to memorize new information is increased by 25% simply by having them enter a relaxed state (e.g., Jensen, 1995, p. 178). Learning new information such as vocabulary is not so much a result of studious concentration by the conscious mind, as it is a result of relaxed almost un-conscious attention. Children learn nursery rhymes and television commercial songs, not by studying them consciously, but by just relaxing while they are sung. You ride a bike, not by thinking about your balance at each moment, but by trusting your unconscious responses.

This natural learning state or "trance" state was well understood in Zen Buddhism. Seventeenth century Sensei Yagyu Munenori explains, "When you are writing, if you are conscious of writing, your pen will be unsteady. Even when you play the harp, if you are conscious of playing, the tune will be off. . . . When you are not consciously mindful, you will succeed every time. However, not being consciously mindful does not mean total mindlessness, it just means a normal mind." (Cleary, 1992, p. 28)

What NLP offers the teacher is the skill to quickly and unobtrusively invite students into this relaxed state. The NLP skills which achieve this were modeled from Hypnotherapist Milton Erickson. They are similar to the techniques developed in Suggestopedia from Hypnotherapist Georgi Lozanov. An NLP practitioner learns to talk in such a way that students relax, without having to use formal relaxation techniques ("You are getting more and more relaxed; your toes are relaxed, your feet are relaxed . . ." etc.). The result is like switching your students' memories into top gear within minutes of them walking into the room (see Bolstad, et al, 1992, p 33, for an example of this relaxation process).

One of the key ways NLP uses to get your students into a learning state of mind is anchoring. Here's an example of what I mean by anchoring. Sometimes when you're listening to the radio, you hear a song you haven't heard for many years, a song that was a favorite of yours back then. When you hear it, all the feeling of what it was like back then may come back to you; even the sound of old voices and the image of those favorite places may re-emerge. The song has anchored you back into that "state." In the same way, if you revisit your old school, it will anchor you back to the feeling of being at that school (not always as positive as the song!).

Once you understand this process, you can design powerful anchors which instantly get your students feeling confident, curious and eager to learn. Even playing the same tune at the start of each of your classes will help to get your students quickly into the mind-set for your subject. (see Bolstad, et al, 1992, p. 24).

Communicating Your Enthusiasm For Language Learning

Earlier this century, successful salespeople were considered to have a sort of inexplicable charisma, a personal magnetism that made others buy from them. We now know that this charisma can be taught -- that when new executives learn the body language, and speech patterns of expert salespeople, their own sales begin to rise.

In the past, these kinds of skills have not been available to teachers. My belief as an NLP Trainer is that teachers have even more right to be skilled at motivating people than sales staff. Just as no modern company would leave its sales staff untrained in this area, no school can afford not to teach its teachers how to motivate students. In a sense, we are salespeople for the future. The life we and our children will enjoy depends on our ability to inspire and enthuse them with a love of learning.

NLP is continuously developing and expanding new teaching techniques such as metaphor, positional and music-based anchoring, and mind maps. But NLP is much more than "The most important communications toolbox of the decade." (Jensen, p. 178). It is a whole new way of thinking about teaching in particular, and communication in general. In this new way, teaching is a process of "building rapport and then leading." (Bolstad, et al, 1992, p. 78)

Rapport is the feeling of shared understanding that good friends and business colleagues sometimes build. It results in a genuine eagerness to co-operate and follow each otherｹs lead. If you remember a time when you really admired a teacher and had fun in her/his class, you know the feeling of rapport. You probably became interested in the things your teacher was interested in, and were highly motivated to follow his/her suggestions.

Rapport is created by matching your students' behavior. That means doing activities together with them, using examples that are already interesting to them, using their preferred sensory system when you teach them, using similar gestures and body positions to them, adjusting your voice to a similar speed and tone, even breathing in time with them. If these things seem a little strange at first, notice that you do them naturally with your own close friends. Wherever people build rapport, they match each others' behavior. The dancing at the Japanese Obon festival is a good example of whole communities building rapport by doing the same movements together. Much of Japan's business success is based on skill with the building of rapport.

Leading is the process of inviting students to follow your suggestions. If you have rapport, students will do this easily. Once, teachers would have said that students who don't follow their suggestions were "resistant" or "disobedient." It makes more sense to realize that when students don't follow your leading, it just means they aren't enough in rapport with you yet. That's something you can change, when you learn NLP rapport skills.

Successful teachers are also good at using their language to elegantly invite students to learn and change. When we study skilled teachers, we find them using their language with care to create the kind of internal representations (pictures/sounds/feelings, etc.) they want their students to have. In order to understand what you say, your students make internal representations of your words.

Here's an example. If I say to you "Don't think of a juicy lemon!", in order to understand my sentence, you first make an internal representation of a juicy lemon. If I add "and don't taste the tang of that lemon now!" your mouth may begin to water -- even though I told you not to. When teachers say "Don't forget to do your homework!", students have to imagine forgetting it. Their brain is thus more likely to forget. If you want to suggest that your students do their homework, the thing to say is not "Don't forget . . .", it's "Remember your homework."

Skilled teachers structure their every word so that it produces the representation they want their students to have. This art, called Suggestion in hypnosis, is very powerful. I wouldn't want to suggest that you want to learn about suggestion now though, because you probably already know about it from reading "Educational Hypnosis" (Murphey & Bolstad, this issue).

Reframing (changing the meaning of an experience by describing it differently) and metaphor (telling stories to offer students new choices) are other examples of how skilled teachers use their language to have students create useful internal representations (O'Connor & Seymour, 1994, p. 182). For example, many students believe that the more mistakes they make, the worse their learning is. As a metaphor, I often tell them about Thomas Edison, who tried 10,000 different materials before finding the one that would make an electric light work. He said that this was the real key to his brilliant invention; that he was willing to find 9,999 things that didn't make a light go. Mistakes are the secret of genius! (That last sentence is a reframe. It changes the meaning of "mistakes.")

NLP: A New Field and A Tool For Our Profession

As you read the above descriptions, you may have thought "Well, I already do some of that." That's right! That's part of why NLP is so powerful. NLP will help you to identify what you already do well, so you can repeat it even with the most difficult students, and the most challenging subject matter.

And that's why Virginia Satir, one of the first teachers studied by NLP, said in her foreword to The Structure of Magic (Bandler & Grinder, 1975): "It would be hard for me to write this paper without my own feeling of excitement, amazement and thrill coming through. I have been a teacher of family therapy for a long time. . . . I have a theory about how I make change occur. The knowledge of the process is now considerably advanced by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, who can talk in a way that can be concretized and measured about the ingredients of the what that goes into making the how possible." (Satir, in Bandler & Grinder, 1975, p. viii)

In summary:

References

Bandler, R., & Grinder, J. (1975). The structure of magic. Cupertino, CA: Meta Publications.

Bolstad, R., Hamblett, M., Ohlson, T. H., & Hardie, J. (1992). Communicating caring. Auckland: Longman Paul.

Cleary, T., (1992). The Japanese art of war. Boston: Shamballa.

Dilts, R., & Epstein, T. (1995). Dynamic learning. Capitola: Meta Publications.

Jensen, E. (1995). The learning brain: Turning point for teachers. Del Mar, CA: Turning Point.

O'Connor, J., & Seymour, J. (1994). Training with NLP. London: Harper Collins.

Richard Bolstad may be contacted at: The National Training Institute of NLP, 26 Southampton Street, Christchurch. 8002. New Zealand. Tel/Fax: 64-3-337-1852. e-mail: <NLP@chch.planet.org.nz>