chapter 13

Keeping the lesson on track

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‘Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by horse sense and persistence,is the quality that most often makes for success’ (1)

Dale Carnegie

In this chapter

At the end of a workshop, a lady asked for help with a problem she was experiencing with a group of students. She was in charge of a computer workshop to which a group of students brought their assignments from other classes to work on in her session.
Her complaint was that instead of getting on with their assignments, the students were playing computer games or going on the Internet.

Asked, ‘are they doing this all the time?’ she replied, ‘no, they’re all right when I’m watching them or standing next to them, but as soon as my back is turned they stop working on their assignments’ . We asked her, ‘what are the specific instructions you give to the students?’ She replied, ‘I’ve told them time after time that I don’t want to see them playing games on the computer when they’re supposed to be doing their assignments’ .

There is a big clue here; the students are following her instructions exactly and doing precisely as they are told. They are making sure she doesn’t SEE them playing on the computers .

‘But I didn’t mean that!’ she cried.

Of course she didn’t mean to give this instruction, and the moral in this tale is be careful what you ask for, because you will probably get it!

This is an example of how powerful language is, how easy it is to get a result you don’t want and how easy it is to change the outcome. Once this teacher realised that the students were responding literally to her instruction, we worked on this alternative instruction:

‘As you have arrived on time with your assignments and are ready to enjoy working, this means that when you have completed your assignments and I have checked that you have done them thoroughly, you can feel really great and use the time left to play on the computers if you want’ . She insisted that it couldn’t be that simple, but as she discovered in the next lesson – it really was!

Listen as you speak

It is crucial that you hone the ability to listen to what you are actually saying, as you are speaking , rather than consider speaking and listening as two separate activities. People say the opposite of talking is listening, but it isn’t. The most important time to listen is when you are talking! A valuable NLP teaching skill involves learning how to plan, utilise and adjust your language at the same time as you are speaking.

And it’s not just the words you say on the outside that matter. Internal dialogue is also language that influences the mind of the thinker, whilst the spoken word influences the mind of the receiver. As teachers, we must use language precisely because, as we are about to demonstrate, language has great power.

Now that you are familiar with presuppositions, we’re sure you realise why we avoid presupposing things will be more difficult than they need to be, or presupposing that some kids are going to fail, or presupposing that they are not smart. Hearing something like, ‘if you were intelligent you would be able to do this ’, will almost certainly render a child demoralised, believing themselves to be unintelligent at the very least (if not stupid), because that is what is presupposed in the sentence. This is rarely what is intended of course. What we want to do is the opposite, so that every time a student succeeds they feel clever and have good feelings about their success, so their confidence grows in line with their competence.

Ask any group of adults, ‘who can’t sing? Who can’t paint? Who can’t do maths?’ and you will surely hear a story of how a teacher once told a member of the group something negative which grew into a lifelong belief, haunting them and preventing their success in that particular area. We term this a post-hypnotic suggestion for a learning difficulty, despite this usually not being the teacher’s intention. Simple ignorance about the power of words, or a lack of training in listening to what you are saying when you speak, is the culprit. Really listen to what you are actually saying, and you give yourself more chance to accelerate teaching and learning.

A client of Richard’s believed absolutely that he could not read. He also had a vivid and unpleasant childhood memory of a teacher snapping a pencil in front of his face in frustration, and telling him, ‘you’ll never learn to read’ . And guess what? He didn’t! For whatever reason, his unconscious mind accepted this as a command - pure hypnosis! Despite few teachers ever realising it, they have on the tips of their tongues both the process and the language of hypnosis. Suffice to say, with great power comes enormous responsibility for the educational wellbeing of learners, not just whilst they are in our classes but for the rest of their lives.

Learning to hear what you are saying and practising using the Milton language patterns outlined in the last chapter sensitises you to hearing the patterns in other people and in yourself. As you begin to hear the distinctions, remember that if you make a mistake or think you’ve said something silly, it’s not the end of the world, you can just correct it. But keep doing it and you run the risk of doing a disservice to yourself as a teacher and to your students. For a start, you make your job harder than it needs to be, and we believe that making a teacher’s job easy and enjoyable is a good thing! The more you learn to presuppose things are going to be easy and fun, the more you presuppose that kids are going to be self-initiated and will feel smart, and the closer they get to getting things right, the better they will feel.

Spinning the prayer wheel
A well set up lesson will of course increase the likelihood of students staying on track throughout the lesson and beyond. However, we can do much more than this. Often, teachers plan and prepare a lovely lesson, set the students up really well and off they go with the activities, learning away. After a little while the students seem to lose momentum and motivation and begin to wander off track. Sometimes, it’s as if we cross our fingers and hope for the best until the end of the lesson! Whether your students continue to be enthusiastic and learn well throughout the lesson is not subject to chance; there are many variables and skills you can utilise to ensure that learning and motivation continue.

Think for a moment of a Tibetan prayer wheel. Getting it moving needs a lot of energy and a really good spin. If the wind is in the right direction, it will keep moving, if not, it stops and needs a really good spin again. However, given a little tap every now and again it will keep going with very little extra effort. A lesson is very similar, so here are some strategies to keep the prayer wheel spinning and the lesson on track.

The use and understanding of language changes as people mature. Younger children respond literally to language on a conscious level. For example, at a certain age, if you say to a child ‘is the phone ringing?’ they just look at you and say ‘yes!’ But when people reach a certain stage, they will respond by handing you the phone. As people grow up they do not process language literally on a conscious level, but people will still unconsciously respond to the literal meaning. As a child gets older, you can start to use questions such as, ‘can you enjoy doing this now?’

And of course the answer to the question is yes, but the command within the question is ‘enjoy doing this now!’ Asking a question or posing a problem which is on the surface a statement of fact or a closed question but actually requires an action on the part of the listener is called a conversational postulate. For example, if we ask you ‘do you have the time?’, the answer is really yes or no, but most people will look at their watch and tell you the time.

Learning to be precise with your language is an essential skill for teachers. The language we use should take account of the different ways the conscious and unconscious mind processes information so that it is easy for a student to respond in a way that is helpful for their learning.

If students go off task it’s often an uphill battle to get them back on track. The trick is to keep the momentum going by nudging the lesson in the right direction.

Praise is a great motivator and many studies show how effective it is in keeping students learning.(2) However, bouncing around the room scattering praise around - ‘well done, that’s fabulous, great terrific’ - in the hope of generating some enthusiasm may create some good feelings, but they are not necessarily associated with useful learning. The effect of this is to create confidence without competence. We don’t want students to lack confidence, but neither do we want them to be confident doing something without developing their competence. Think of a brain surgeon who is very confident but not competent, or the young person who is confident in his driving ability but hasn’t passed his test. Great teachers ensure that as competence grows, so does confidence.

Building Confidence with Competence
There is a great deal of debate about lack of self-esteem in children today. Yet despite the concerns of parents and children, no one seems to be able to specify how to build self-esteem. It seems to be suggested that this is something you do first and then children will gain confidence. Well, no one has a bucket of self-esteem to throw over a child! Having a sense of self worth is a process, not a thing - we do not have it, we do it! It’s simple - people have self-esteem when they do the right thing for the right reasons. Hence, learners build their self-esteem when they do the right things for the right reasons, and they have a sense of achievement when they overcome challenges and succeed in the task.

How to praise effectively
A recent study showed that children who are praised for effort rather than being praised for being clever, are much more successful.(3) This is simple; if you are praised for being clever, undertaking a new and difficult task may challenge your blossoming self-belief that you are clever, because if you fail it challenges this belief. If, on the other hand, you are praised for the effort you are putting in, your self-belief that you are the kind of person who keeps going and puts in effort is only reinforced by trying even harder. Although everyone likes praise in private, some learners find it hard to accept personal praise in a group situation, so a straightforward way to keep the prayer wheel spinning is through a running praise commentary. Adults do this naturally around very young children, like this: ‘Oh look, Molly is putting the dolly in the pram; what a kind girl you are Molly, that’s right, dolly needs to be strapped in to keep her safe. Well done Molly that’s brilliant’ . Although people tend to stop doing this as children get older, it can have an amazing effect on students. When giving praise, the key is to link the praise with a specific activity, so each step tells the student to feel more confident as they gain competence. Then you can add language patterns to drive the learning forward, like this:

Put it in Quotes
When we quote someone else (or even ourselves) it increases the impact on the listener. This pattern can easily be used to let students know they are doing well, praising and inoculating against anything that may get in the way of learning. There is a report that says, ‘praise passed on to another person feels even better than first hand’ and when we stack these together it causes mild confusion, which means the learner accepts the comment on many levels.

Compare these two sentences:

‘Mr Smith said you worked extremely well yesterday’

and ‘I was talking to Mr Smith this morning and he said ‘2B are working extremely well’.

Now think about this: ‘A wise man said, ‘the more you practise using your language elegantly the more you will find that you do this naturally and the more your students will learn and more enjoyable teaching becomes’ .

Using ‘the more the more’ pattern illustrated in the paragraph above is an elegant way to spin the prayer wheel and builds propulsion for your students:

Time for action
Many teachers use the word ‘if’ without ever realising how they disadvantage themselves. ‘If you answer the question, you get a sticker.’ Or even more unhelpfully, ‘if you don’t hand in your work you won’t get a mark’ . ‘If’ implies that something may or may not happen, so why dilute your influence with the possibility of failure when you could just as easily consolidate your influence by changing the word to ‘when ’? Using time verbs and adverbs presupposes the task will happen, like this:

Giving feedback for great results

When a student’s learning isn’t going so well, or you need to provide feedback of what to do next, it’s helpful to have a way of redirecting the learning. We frequently hear encouragements such as, ‘that’s really great, but I want you to move on to page 7 now’ . The use of ‘but’, and the softer version, ‘however’, actually negates ‘that’s really great’ by directing the listener’s attention to ‘move on to page 7 now’ .

‘But ’, and ‘however’ both have the potential to cancel what has just gone before, causing a separation within the sentence: ‘You have done lots of good work today Jemima, but you haven’t finished the exercises yet’ , leaves Jemima feeling like she has lots more to do and it’s not good news.

‘You haven’t finished the exercises yet Jemima, but you have already done lots of good work today’ , has the effect of focusing on the good news, so Jemima is more likely to use the satisfaction of having done lots of work to motivate herself to finish the exercise. This is not the same as the famous ‘praise sandwich’, which doesn’t cancel out the bad news, just leaves it squashed in the middle. Instead, this is about deciding where you want to direct someone’s attention and then adding propulsion towards a goal. Try these:

So make sure you put your ‘but’ in the right place!

Yes sets
If a person acknowledges that a number of things are true, then they are very likely to believe the next thing you say is valid, whether it is true or not.

For example, you have this book in front of you (one truism) and are reading the words (second truism), you may have begun at the beginning or started somewhere else (third truism), and wherever you started you are learning how to use NLP to teach brilliantly (what we want you to do).

By determining that at least three things are true, we are more likely to accept the next thing as true. This useful ‘yes set’ pattern is often used in sales and because we are often ‘selling’ learning, it can be very helpful as a convincer for students, just as it may have been for you!

This is great pattern to remember when you need to get students back on track. Teachers are trained to notice mistakes and advise on corrections. However, pointing out when students are not on task isn’t always useful. We know already that the students are not doing the task, and so do they. When we reverse the process and focus on what they are doing that’s right and what is true for them, it enables us to move them from reverse gear and back into forward gear. So ask yourself, ‘what is it that they are doing that is right?’

Filtering for what is right rather than what is wrong, and using a ‘yes set’ enables you to pace the students’ experience and lead them to a better place. For example, ‘Ok guys, well done. You are all here with me today, sitting down and the room is full of chatter. You can see the questions in front of you, and as you finish talking to one another, you can now begin the next task’ .

This works better than just giving an instruction, because this way we maintain rapport and pace their reality, so it becomes much more likely that the students will follow our lead. It helps if you utilise the three main senses (see/hear/feel) and add the action (do) too, so what happens inside their minds goes something like this:

Other variables
Although much of this chapter has focused on your language as a teacher, it is also worth mentioning that there are other non-verbal variables that are significant in keeping a lesson on track:

Room layout
Choosing and managing the room layout will influence the responses to the variety of activities you design for your students.

A classroom-style layout creates a state of passivity with attention focused on the teacher. The message could be translated as ‘you sit, listen and absorb’ , with little opportunity to interact with anyone other than the teacher.

A horseshoe-style layout creates more opportunity to interact with the teacher and listen to/see the other students. This works OK, but the desire for contact with other students is often frustrated, so we can end up with the ‘paper aeroplane syndrome’, where missiles are used to connect across the room. If you like this layout, build in some opportunities to work together byw moving the chairs into the middle of the horseshoe.

Theatre-style works well with big groups, but isn’t always practical if students need to write. It may also elicit states of vulnerability for some people.

A cabaret or chevron style is a very useful layout for active class engagement . Here, students are seated in groups (6 is a perfect number) around tables, with the end nearest the teacher kept clear so no one has their back to you. This allows the students to look and listen to you and work in pairs, threes or sixes without the disruption of moving tables. Schools are increasingly adopting this approach, which is drawn from active whole class management techniques.(3)

No single layout is correct all the time. It’s a case of planning for the type of responses you want from your students and choosing the most appropriate layout to elicit this response. So if you want quiet reflection, cabaret is not the one to choose, but if you want group activity and discussion it may be the best choice.

Reception and infant teaching encourages the management of space and the states of little children in the classroom with story mats, quiet spaces, active play etc. However, as learners get older, it seems that teachers fail to recognise what a powerful influence the learning environment can have on students. Some environments are more challenging, such as computer rooms or laboratories, but experiment for yourself and notice what works for you and your students.

Attention-grabbers
We’re sure that you regularly consider how to make a dramatic point at the beginning of a class to illustrate the lesson to come. Using the same principle, it is a good idea to have a series of readily available props and resources to gain attention from the group if it is in danger of drifting. Putting peripheral posters on the wall reinforces learning, engages unconscious learning and can create interest or anticipation. You can utilise Power Point to sequence inspirational quotes or pictures relating to the subject. If you want your students to be quiet and reflective, use iTunes Visualisation, which creates patterns from the music and is quite dreamy.

One great teac her teaches Maths to engineers who complain they can’t do it, dressing up in a magician’s outfit to show them Maths tricks. Similarly, our NLP Education team have a range of outrageous props including wands and balls that giggle which we use to get students’ attention and as anchors for states. One favourite prop is a black bin liner containing unknown items with a large notice attached with the instruction, ‘Do not open this bag!’ Instant curiosity!

The key here is to be mindful of the significance of process in learning. Remember, great teaching is 20% content and 80% process.

summary

During this chapter you have explored ways to maintain and promote learning and keep the lesson on track. You have identified ways to motivate learners by using even more language patterns, such as yes sets and ‘the more the more’ patterns. You have learned specific ways to use praise to build confidence alongside competence. You have also considered some of the physical changes you can easily make to keep the lesson on track. So now you have read this chapter and reached the part of this book where you begin to really listen to and make changes to what you say to your students. Notice the impacts and enjoy the rewards!

references

1. Dale Carnegie, 1936 How to win friends and influence people, London Vermillion

2. Elizabeth Gunderson Journal of Child Development Volume 84, Issue 5, September/October 2013

3. Robert Powell, 1997, Active Whole Class teaching, Stafford, Robert Powell Publications

activities

Activity 1
 Prepare a new running commentary that has:

Use it tomorrow and notice what happens!

Activity 2
 Collect together a resource box of attention-grabbers to keep with
you and be creative about the different uses each object can have.

Activity 3
 Draw a diagram of your teaching space or a typical classroom. Identify which areas and spaces you use for which activities and identify which states would be most useful to anchor in these places.

If you are working with little people in an infant school you will already be doing this to some degree. You will have an area for stories, maybe with a nice carpet to sit on, and an area for messy learning with water or sand. If you are working with older people, your space may be less defined. However, you can still manage the space. Where do you sit or stand when you are beginning or ending the session? Do you have a particular posture or place for setting homework? Where do you sit when the students are giving a presentation or working in groups?

You might like to create a curiosity corner or quiet thinking space. We’re wondering how creative you can be, so map these onto your new plan and commit to testing it.

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