Humanising Language Teaching
Year 6; Issue 1; January 2004

A walk through the NLP Forest- or how NLP has modifed my teaching

Secondary

Maria Cristina Diaz, Spain

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Introduction
Thanks to NLP I have changed the following personal beliefs and feelings so far:
I am not able to become a good teacher. I just can't face a group of teenagers and teach them something,
If they don't understand me there is nothing I can do
There are some things I can't do. I can't be good at everything. I can't change it.
When I feel the class has been a failure it is because I am too critical with myself
They have to read. They will read this book. I liked it a lot.
If I try this, they will think I am crazy.
Conclusion

Introduction

Last night I dreamt I went to a rich and precious walk along a mysterious and magic forest again.

It was summer and I wanted to do a course about something interesting that would be helpful in my classes and I decided to enrol for a two-week NLP course in Pilgrims. The day I arrived at that magic wonderland the heat showed me my body was going to suffer a great change, both mentally and physically, for I considered that excessive heat in England a big omen in itself. Somehow, it felt like a mirage in the desert, where your life is suddenly seen from a completely different angle.

However, the heat was suddenly broken by a burst of cool and refreshing rain as I went down to the garden with my colleagues. Another omen.

I had enrolled in the course without any previous knowledge of it, and, like the fool searching for the Holy Grail, I was a complete ignorant of my internal search for excellence that was going to take place during those two weeks.

For those who know nothing about NLP, I must say that it has personally changed my beliefs and, thus, has turned me into a slightly different person, both in the personal and professional field.

Personally, it has changed some of my beliefs and feelings, thus changing my behaviour as well.

Professionally, after the NLP training I know what to observe in my students and how to interpret the signs in them so that my language reaches them all and how to make “good” classes where all the students are actively involved in the learning process and really learn the language.

Who hasn't perceived in any student an agonising look in the eyes while you are explaining a grammatical point as if you talked a different language? We all have, and I have learnt that we DO speak a different language depending on the senses we tend to use more. That was when I came to the gate of the forest and I felt the vastness and richness beyond.

Anyway, I first learnt about myself so that later it could be applied to others (mostly, my students). I got the theory and some practise but the real practise is performed every time I entered my class and I leave all my worries, anxieties and problems behind. Every time I enter the classroom I prepare myself to get the perfect class. After all, who hasn't longed to get the perfect class? That's the search of excellence NLP teaches us to get.

The NLP EXPERIENCE

Looking back, I remember the turning point of choosing what degree I would study. I was not very sure about my choice. I practically wanted to be anything but a teacher.

Why? Well, I couldn't see myself facing a group of students. That thought would make my heart beat a bit faster. How was I going to face a group of teenagers and control them? I had to wait to know the answer when facing a group of people for the first time and doing it as a kind of personal attempt to see what could I do as a teacher.

I have learnt many things during these years, but I can say the turning point for me has been the NLP coaching I did last summer.

Thanks to NLP, I have changed the following personal beliefs and feelings so far:

“I am not able to become a good teacher. I just can't face a group of teenagers and teach them something.”

It was something about self-confidence and the feeling that I could not teach any subject to anyone. They always say this job is a vocational one, and I just could not hear the call.

Experience showed me I like teaching, I enjoy my classes and the contact with the students. However, at first, my self-confidence was still very weak and poor and my first classes were like an agony for me. I was overcritical with my job and that was a major drawback to get to my students.

The “click” came with experience and confidence in what I was doing. I was really interested in their learning English and I was always preparing communicative activities that made them feel they mastered the language even to a limited extent. Getting their confidence in themselves proved to be a personal gradual getting of self-confidence at the same time.

Now, I face a several groups of students every day and I do not feel I cannot teach them, I love teaching them and I have discovered that my love for the English language makes me try to make as many people as possible feel the same.

“If they do not understand me, there is nothing I can do”.

When I looked at my students and saw a look of anxiety in their eyes, I felt I had failed to enter their world but I just did not know what to do to speak their language. I knew there was a failure in communication somewhere and the gap seemed so open that I felt it was unbridgeable.

Wrong again, I learnt in this course. It is true that we speak different languages but the key is to know them and to be able to speak them as well.

As a visual person, I tend to write everything on the board, tell the whole picture by drawing a diagram and then becoming more specific by giving examples of everything.

Some students got tired of writing everything down from the board and then writing more exercises and so I designed communicative activities so that the atmosphere of boredom so noticeable from them would lessen, but I considered it as the second step after seeing everything written down. I saw it as practise, and never as the first step for some of them in their process of learning. About auditory exercises, well, I am afraid I just knew how to work in this field by making them repeat the words and playing the tape for them so that they answered a few questions about what they heard.

It had never entered my imagination that story-telling would be an incredible way of learning a language. Being a very mediocre story-teller myself I thought it would lead to nothing. However, now I know it is a fantastic way of learning vocabulary and bringing down the walls of shyness or any possible constraints when speaking a different language the students may have.

As a student, I was one of those who really got scared to death whenever the word “listening” was pronounced. It triggered the awful feeling that I was not going to understand a single word on the tape. It created a state of anxiety and somehow was the reason why my results were poor in this kind of exercise.

During the NLP course I experienced the subconscious listening and it was so real I could not believe it!! Or even learning vocabulary through a story.

In one of our workshops, our trainer told us a story about a Greek hen and I still remember some words in Greek. It was incredible. The story made it so real and so much more interesting than copying the words from a board!! Thus, I learnt by personal experience that in the state of subconsciousness we get in touch with our inner selves and that world is what we need to make learning part of ourselves.

“There are some things I cannot do. I cannot be good at everything. I cannot change it”.

As I mentioned before, I had not heard the call (is that because I am not an auditory person?) and I had to experience the fact of being a teacher to realise I love this job.

Thinking back when a class had not been a success, I nearly always reached the conclusion that some aspects of teaching were difficult for me because I am a person with difficulties in getting across, for instance, a difficult point in grammar. I got nervous because I saw it difficult and that was implicit in my explanation, so it was almost impossible that the students would understand me.

Then, I began to make changes and make the big problem into small parts, easier and as a part of an organised process: first you do this, then you change that... especially referring to the passive construction: ”It + is + past participle that + subject + verb...”, so difficult and strange for them. By doing that, the students just had to follow a few steps and would gradually see it at a glance and make the transformation in a more mechanical way.

Another big step for me was when a student wouldn't remember structures like “noun + verb + so + adjective + that” and “such + a/an + adjective + that” and it dawned on me that using coloured cards would be a good help. In that kinaesthetic intuition I had, the student would move the cards to put them in order depending on their colour and then remember them when writing or saying the sentence. I remember that as another big change in my professional experience and I warmly remember the face of that student when she moved the cards, put them in order and then tried to make the sentences. It worked very well and from that moment on, she always remembered the structure she had hated just some days ago. I cannot explain what it meant to both of us.

Now that I know that the use of various and different resources is a helping hand when teaching any subject, I am aware that I have some resources asleep inside of me and all I have to do is wake them up and make them work.

I have to work on my auditory system to become a good teacher for those who learn through hearing things over and over again, and I can use story-telling to help them get involved in the learning process, whether when learning vocabulary or hearing different grammatical structures or expressing their feelings, preferences... so helpful for them when they have to use the language.

By transferring these concepts to my students, they will develop that/those sense(s) they use less and it will hopefully make them more confident in the four skills we ask them to get a certain mastery of. If I had been taught as a student how to develop my auditory side, that fear of the listening exercises and the anxiety I had when I travelled to a foreign country would have been considerably less harmful and stressful.

“When I feel the class has been a failure it is because I am too critical with myself”.

This is not entirely so, for it is true I am very critical with how I do my job, but after the NLP observation and experience of myself, I have discovered that I tend to move between two opposite poles, such as the idealist and the critical ones and I leave the realist one aside.

When I was guided in this experience, I saw a very clearly image of what I wanted to achieve. The pictures were moving, vivid, alive, full of colour, tri-dimensional and real. I felt great and could not help smiling. The idealist in me is visual and kinaesthetic: I could see my dreams come true and the feelings were also very real.

At the point of the realist, I felt an overwhelming sense of not knowing how to organise myself. Everything was chaotic in my mind, the ideas were clear about the outcome but not about the necessary process to achieve my goals efficiently. I kept on breathing deeply at this point, as if I needed more air and anxiety had taken over my breathing rhythm. I felt very stressed. When I had to act the critical part of my mind, it was so clear that it was so connected with the absence of the realist in me that I felt lost. I felt I had missed something so important that my goal would be impossible to achieve, and it was an awful feeling of frustration and failure. I could hear my inner voice telling me off and criticising me.

After this exercise, it was clear that I need to organise myself and control being happy when feeling idealist and dejected when feeling critic. I needed some balance so I had to work in the process of how I do things.

Using the classroom language, I had to organise and plan my lesson in a more detailed way so that at the end of the course I did not have the feeling of having wasted time in small things and being short of it in other more important things.

Sometimes, I finished the class with the bitter flavour of having relied too much in my idealist side and having disregarded completely the organising aspect of the lesson. I knew I had to plan everything to finish the syllabus the Department had fixed, but it was such an stressful job that I just did not know how to handle it and I felt a heavy weight in my forehead whenever I thought about it. Thus, this year I plan every week and day, thinking about what I want them to achieve and what is more relevant, also thinking about the three kind of students I have – that is, visual, auditory and kinaesthetic – and trying to balance the lessons so that all of them learn the same contents in the way they learn best.

How do I know what kind of students they are? I gave them a questionnaire at the beginning of the course, and now I know how to observe them every day and interpret their signs.

“They have to read. They will all read this book. I liked it a lot!”

We usually decide for them in many aspects, and we should integrate their likes and preferences in the process of learning so that they make it a part of themselves as well and do not regard it just as another task from school.

I had never thought about it but, why should I decide what book(s) are good for them? Any reading is good as long as they get to know the beauty of literature and most of the time, when you tell them “This is going to be the compulsory book this year. Read it for 3rd May” by the look upon their faces it is quite clear they do not like the story and their predisposition towards the book is nil. So, most of them will not even buy it.

Fortunately, there are many books to choose from, from different publishing houses and about many different topics. So, I take the list the publishing houses send and first look for any books with cassette or CD so that they can listen to the story as well as read it and thus get the pronunciation of difficult words or just practise their listening.

From the ones I think they may find interesting, I make a selection of four of them, each in a different style: terror, romance, classics... and then I give them the list with a short summary of the story so that they brainstorm what they think the story will be and then they choose.

Was it not because of problems about the distribution of books I would give them the whole list and they would choose without any filter of mine so that each student would read the book he/she wanted, no matter how many people in the class agree with that. That would be perfect, I think.

However, as I have mentioned, it involves a problem with distribution and it is not possible to do it. Also, by letting them choose they get the idea that they also play some role in the learning process and that they are taken into account. It is them who tell me what books I have to prepare and read so that we can exploit them better in the class, and that is a big change, I think.

“If I try this, they will think I am crazy”.

How many times have we thought of changing things and fear of what they might say has made us forget all about it? I had a student who was so shocked with my teaching style that he told me my classes were the most surrealist ones he had ever been to. His conception of an English class was being seated all the time, listening to the teacher or to the tape and writing grammar exercises in his notebook. On the contrary, in my class they had to stand up and walk around the class talking to other classmates, listening to a piece of music and writing down the story they thought the music was telling, and many other activities he just did not consider “a proper class”.

It is for reactions like these that we sometimes avoid doing different things, because people talk and nobody wants to be considered an odd fellow but students tend to like teachers who love their job, who can show them the same grammatical points they have been studying since they started learning English in a completely different way. They love using it for practical situations and seeing they can apply their knowledge to themselves, their lives and preferences and they love it when the teacher is not only someone who is sitting at the biggest desk and the only one who can approach the board.

Letting them know you are there to help them and guide them gives a really good atmosphere in the class and that means breaking the wall in many senses.

Conclusion

The course was only two weeks long but I could catch a glimpse of what NLP is about and I must admit I found it deeply interesting. Firstly, as an individual and then, applied to my job.

Maybe it was the little push I needed to be brave enough to change things in my class. I mean that sometimes I had not tried new things because of what the students or other teachers might think of myself and then my students missed the opportunity of experiencing the many skills and subskills, tendencies and methodologies we can make use of when teaching a language. Now I feel more confident in myself and in what I do, and that has been a major change in me. There is still a long way to go, but I feel very lucky that I was showed its existence.

It was a wonderful and personal experience but I was so lucky I could enter this world with other really great people in my NLP group those two weeks. It was an individual and introspective journey, but the strength I got from my group is something that escapes the limitations and coldness of words.

I liked the course so much and enjoyed it to such an extent that sometimes, my desire to learn more about NLP makes me dream I walk along its pathway once again.