NLP In Education
Education, education, education. Would you like to have known what you know now when you were at school? The more effective our education of children becomes the longer they, and all of society will reap those benefits. One important element in the transference of knowledge is to understand how people think and then produce behaviour and recognising that everyone is a little different. This is just a part of what NLP can offer.
Whilst many teachers can adapt to individual learning styles, many don’t and presuppose that their students know how to learn without offering them alternative approaches.
In addition because teachers (like parents) are working with children and young adults who are impressionable, students can take things personally and assume something is wrong with themselves or even decide something about themselves which then limits them in some way through the rest of their lives. They can start to devalue learning and school or, they start to believe that they are dumb or a bad student. All of this can also hinder and restrict the success we have in our adult lives. To an extent this is an unavoidable part of the growing up process, but with a better and broader understanding of thinking patterns and behaviour the degree to which this occurs can be limited.
So what are some of the specifics that can be adopted from the NLP tool kit to assist educators?
Spelling Strategy
As I discovered when I was at school, in English language all words are not spelt phonetically, i.e. do not look like they sound. In fact even phonetically isn’t spelt phonetically.
Therefore, all words cannot be correctly spelt according to how they sound but they can be spelled correctly according to how they look. Therefore, an effective spelling strategy would be:-
1. Get a clear internal picture of the word broken down into syllables.
2. From this internal image, spell the word backwards – from right to left. While looking at the internal image of the word, pronounce it syllable by syllable.
3. Now, spell the word from the internal image from left to right
4. To drop the spelling word into long term memory, practice step four 6-8 times over several days
You spell the word backwards in step two so you will know if the student has a good internal image. You cannot smoothly spell a word backwards unless you do it off of a picture. Step three sets up the retrieval system so that the brain will bring up the image when the word is heard.
Representational Systems
To a greater or lesser extent we all favour one of our senses over the others. Some people like to see images in their head, whilst others like to listen to sounds, others prefer to get in touch with their feelings and many still like everything in their head to just make sense, using their thinking. All of this is perfectly normal. That is once we understand this, because if we do not have awareness of this and if we assume that everyone is just thinking the way that you do then sometimes your message won’t be getting through, just for that reason alone.
Learning Styles
Not everyone learns in quite the same way. Some people won’t listen to what you have to say unless you give them enough reasons to listen and learn. Often this is one of problems with children in school. I can remember my daughter struggling with algebra simply because she had no (and had been given no) good reason to learn it in the first place. Other people learn through understanding what a subject is, which is what much of what we get taught in school actually is. And others also learn by actually doing things and some people learn only once they can express what they have learnt or how they can use what they have learnt.
Overall teaching others is about understanding how people think and how they communicate, so flexibility is the key. By integrating NLP into school systems we have a magnificent opportunity to positively affect children’s lives forever.