Acknowledgement
With thanks to Serena Dellantonio and Stephen Giguere who carried out the modelling and the whole of my Pilgrims Class of 2012

What Can NLP Do For Me?

Mike Shreeve, UK

Mike Shreeve has taught NLP for teachers in Pilgrims Summer School since 1993 and is planning a book with Bonnie Tsai to be published in 2013. He also works as a free-lance trainer and EFL teacher in Brighton. E-mail: msmikeds@gmail.com.

NLP as a method in ELT has been around for a long time and has directly and indirectly influenced some of the main teaching approaches. It is twenty years next summer since the first course in Pilgrims called NLP for teachers. So what does learning NLP give to teachers?

I have to admit there is not a snappy answer. I can’t say loads of activities, or lots of course material. In fact the pay -off is sometimes hard to quantify and as the skills are interconnected. In short NLP, as an approach to teaching, is a discipline that requires an investment of time to get results.

My answer to the question is that it helps you improve your relationship with your class. You start to notice small things that indicate the class is off colour or out of tune and with sensitivity you can act to improve the classroom harmony and collective relationships. If a class does not trust each other then activities however well planned and creative do not have as much impact.

The second benefit and perhaps difference from other methods is that it takes into account that you are a player in the drama of the classroom. How you are feeling has an impact on the learning environment. Being able to be more consistently your best is one of the key benefits of learning NLP. This is achieved by activating a psychological trigger (called an anchor) that reminds you of your “peak performance” state. The learning states of both students and teachers are important. Helping students learn to become more confidence, learning, creativity, motivation etc. will have a deep impact on students’ and teachers’ enjoyment of their lessons.

Finally learning NLP gives you the ability to learn from other good teachers by modelling. This is the method of NLP. Broadly, it means capturing and making explicit the unconscious or automatic skill of an expert. The original skills of NLP were taken from excellent communicators who happened to be psychotherapists of one sort or another. Whilst a lot of these skills are still relevant what about skills modelled from teachers?

This summer the class learnt various skills from each other including storytelling, lesson preparation and listening. As an example I have given a broad outline of what I am calling the Serene listening process.

How to listen like Serena - the Serene Method

The belief and attitude Serena adopts is one of kindness and concern for the other person. She identifies with and puts herself in the other person’s shoes.

Serena cuts off any internal dialogue and focuses on the other person by maintaining eye contact. (Like most skills that we model Serena does this unconsciously and is not able to tell us how she does it. We need to find a way to discover what she does specifically. We can do this using the NLP observation skills by working out what she is doing internally from eye movements and the order she does things. Another way is to construct our own method that leads to the same result. Drawing on the literature a simple way of cutting off internal dialogue is to repeat the word” listen” internally several times before the conversation starts. I took this method and adapted it from the Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallway).

Serena builds rapport with her eyes (“dancing eyes”) her posture, her attentiveness and her voice which she softens for listening.

This is the really interesting element. Serena makes a video from the words she is listening to.

Where there are gaps created by the word picture Serena asks questions to fill in the missing information or to make sense. This means the questions are relevant.

At some point the listening is completed and Serena can recall the information when required.

So what are the wider implications of this modelling? My assumption is that teaching a listening method in the way that we teach a reading method (skimming, scanning etc.) could greatly aide our students. My concern is that we don’t treat it as canon set in stone as this will limit as much as it expands. It is important that we teach to the creative possibilities of the class and ensure the benefit of any method is always more awareness, more choice, self- belief and learning.

On reflection this Serene moment has become a break through for me. It made me think that there are many skills for teachers and learners still to be modelled. And this has the potential to revolutionise English Language Teaching in the future.

Ref: The Inner Game of Tennis by W Timothy Gallway Pan Books in association with Jonathan Cape Ltd 1986 London.(Please note this is not an NLP book but shows you how you can use the unconscious mind to learn a skill- in this case tennis. There is a list of recommended NLP books on the Pilgrims website).

Please check the NLP for Teachers course at Pilgrims website.