Top NLP tip for teachers

Judy Bartkowiak NLP Master Practitioner

The map is not the territory

We experience the world through our five senses; sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. Every second, two million bits of information bombard our unconscious mind yet our conscious mind can only cope with about 7. So how do we get from 2 million down to 7? What we do is filter the inputs. How we filter them will depend on our beliefs and values, what is important to us individually and where we put our attention. Our filter will also be determined by our life experiences, our social and cultural background and in this context, our teaching experience. So you can imagine that for each one of us, the 7 bits of information that form our own map will reflect the territory (the 2 million available bits of information) very differently.

Your map will be very different from that of the children in your class but their maps will probably be fairly similar to each other which is why when they all laugh at something they find funny in the lesson, you feel excluded.If you’ve had years of teaching the same year group you probably have a very good insight into their map but if you haven’t and you’re teaching a new year group this term, enter their territory by stepping into their shoes and seeing it from their viewpoint. Use metaphors to increase your understanding of their map. As you know, a metaphor is when we describe the problem situation in terms of an unrelated experience and by so doing, see the situation in a different light that enables us to have clarity. Here’s an example of how to use clean questions and metaphors.

Teacher: What’s learning French like?

Child: It’s confusing like when you get lost in the supermarket for a moment and wonder where your mum is.

Teacher: Confusing, like getting lost in the supermarket?

Child: Yes like you don’t know which aisle to go down.

Teacher: You don’t know which aisle to go down?

Child: Well you could go down one but it could be wrong and you’d get more lost. 

Teacher: It could be wrong and you could get more lost?

Child: So you just stand still and hope your mum comes back for you because it’s less scary to do nothing.

Teacher: You hope your mum comes back for you?

Child: Or someone to tell me where my mum is.

Using the metaphor you have a great insight into how this child’s map works and why she doesn’t answer questions in your French lesson. What she needs are some signposts. She needs to feel safe and have some options. Not doing anything seems safer because she wants you to give her the answer and she won’t risk being further confused by giving the wrong one. She needs to know that one of the answers in her head (aisles)is the right one and that if she thinks hard she may remember what you told her about that grammar rule (her mother said she had to buy) and get the answer right (find her in that aisle).

How pleased she would be and how much more confident. Judy Bartkowiak is the author of NLP for teachers available from her website www.nlpkids.com or Lulu.com. Her book Teach Yourself: Be a happier parent with NLP is available on pre-order through Amazon.

You can book teacher or children’s NLP workshops via www.nlp4kids.org where you can find your local NLP Practitioner. 

This article is the 6th in a series of 10 we will be running, to read the other articles click on the link below:

No Failure Only Feedback

If you try, you won’t succeed

You already have the resources to do whatever you want to do

If you always do what you’ve always done then you will always get what you’ve always got

If someone else can do it then you can too