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NLP in education

How to make a difference in a teaching environment.

NLP has a range of tools that can be applied to teaching. Learn how, with the following top tips, the application of NLP in education can take teaching to the next level.

1. Re-organising the classroom

And it’s all about eye patterns, eye patterns are important! How so? Well, for example, we can tell by the position of someone’s eyes if they are recalling something or if they are creating something (i.e. using their imagination).

By moving a whiteboard for example to the left of the front of the classroom it is placing it in the area where people look when they are recalling information. Perfect for making sure any information on display is really going in!

A screen in the centre of the classroom will confuse the unconscious mind AND on a more practical level the students will be focussed on the screen and not the teacher!

2. The basis of all communication is rapport

By utilising some NLP presentation skills it is easy to ensure that rapport is gained and maintained and that information is really getting across.

3. All learning, behaviour and change is done at the unconscious level

Getting info across is so much more effective when the mind is in a relaxed and receptive state. To do this we can employ metaphors. Short stories delivered at the beginning of a session that have a message in them relevant to the topic at hand. They are a great way of doing some pre-teaching with students. They get to relax when hearing a short story that is relevant to what they are about to learn. But it goes a little deeper than that. Have you ever been engrossed in a story? You are in fact in a trance state, when the unconscious becomes more receptive to suggestion. So by telling a little story you can calm the students, get them into a learning frame of mind and also pre-deliver a summary of what you are going to teach, some of the learning done even before starting the formal instruction!

4. Using the 4 Mat system

Which is in fact not originally from NLP but came from someone called Bernice McCarthy who was researching how people learn. Some people have a preference for the ‘why they should learn/listen’, some the ‘what it is’, some the ‘how it works’ and some the ‘what if I did it’. In the world of NLP, we have found that any presentation or lesson structured in this system pulls in the whole audience and not just some of them. Most lessons/presentations are a mish-mash of all of these things with no particular structure leading to confusion for the listener. She paid particular attention to the “why” section too. This is the section of a lesson that ‘sells’ it. This is the bit that creates relevance to the listener. No-one will listen if they do not feel a subject is relevant to them.

5. Representational systems.

Working out if your students are predominantly visual, auditory, kinaesthetic or auditory digital learners and structuring your language accordingly depending on who you are talking too. A great way of rapport building on the one to one level.

6. The NLP spelling strategy.

This is a simple way of installing a visual spelling strategy for a person. The problem that poor spellers have is that they try and spell words as they sound (phonetic spelling will lead to about 50% of the words being spelt incorrectly) or how they feel (which will lead to most words being spelt incorrectly). As per normal, when this process is used with poor spellers (for example those who have been labelled with dyslexia) the results are tremendous with the recipient going from being a poor speller to a great speller in 3 months (15 minutes a day).

7. Listen to the language beyond the language

Using the language skills of NLP it is possible to understand what is behind the ‘talk’ of communications. Is it all surface talk (in other words generalisations), or is it all very detail focused? Understanding the level of a communication gives a great starting point to understanding when to use Milton or Meta model approaches of communication to build rapport and get to the core information of what is being said or needs to be related.

8. Avoid labelling students.

Labels are not useful. Telling a child that he or she is dyslexic or is ADHD affects the child’s self-esteem and belief system and, they will take on those behaviours.

9. Bad anchors

An anchor is the process of stimulus-response. For example, from previous experience, a child might see a classroom and immediately get a bad feeling. It is possible to work with students who you feel have set up bad anchors unconsciously, and using the process of collapse anchoring from NLP help them remove the negative anchor.

On a side note, we cover all of the skills mentioned here on our NLP Practitioner course. Why not come along and see how many of these tips our trainers use on our courses?

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