Tag: Teaching

The summary of this report by Kurt Fischer immediately seemed to make sense to me, yet it does attempt to cover an enormous swathe of territory.

“The primary goal of the emerging field of educational neuroscience and the
broader movement called Mind, Brain, and Education is to join biology with cognitive science, development, and education so as to create a sound grounding of education in research on learning and teaching.”

Biology, cognitive science, development … education – those are pretty big areas in themselves and so the name of the area has to be big. Hence, the name Mind, Brain, and Education has emerged.
I have worked as a teacher for about 20 years and was involved in full-time education for a long time before that, so I figure that I know a fair bit about education and the one thing that I can say with certainty is that it is complex and non-homogenous. While there is no doubt that mind and brain are a huge part of education, the social element is so pervasive that I wonder if the name is really suitable. We do not learn as solitary minds or brains, but rather as social beings who are highly influenced by the social context. I’m sure that the discipline of MBE will try to bring in the social element, but the first two words seem to place to emphasis strongly on the individual rather than on the social learning context.

“The field of medicine provides the closest analogy to education, combining
scientific research with practice to improve the long-term well-being of human beings.”

This is an interesting analogy and I would be interested to hear other people’s viewpoints on it. Medicine has traditionally focused on an illness-focused model. Perhaps the same could be said about education? I would like to think that we are focused more on positive growth.
The report calls for more serious research on education (in the classroom) and rightly points out that much of the well-funded research for education has been over-focused on testing.

“Most important, for educational neuroscience to reach its potential, infrastructure must be created to catalyze research on learning and teaching, creating scientific knowledge for education. Then research tools such as brain imaging, analysis of cognitive processing and mental models, and genetics assessment can be used to illuminate the “black box” and uncover underlying learning mechanisms and causal relations (Hinton & Fischer, 2008).”

This quote seems so chunked up and generalized as to be almost pointless. I understand that the report is general in nature, but does this sentence really actually say much?

“Readers find articles more convincing when they contain brain images as opposed to graphs or other illustrations (McCabe & Castel, 2008), and neuroscience information is particularly influential in readers who lack relevant background knowledge (Weisberg et al., 2008).”

So true! A few brain images immediately adds credibility to some quite ludicrous statements. I have admittedly used the same technique myself – flashing an image of a brain scan in order to demonstrate some point which may not truly hold up. There is a long way between pictures/interpretations of momentary brain activity and actual behaviour/learning. As we all know, photoshop can be deceiving, and brain scans are highly subject to interpretation, too
The report authors also note the gap between neural images and behaviour when they say “Moving from knowledge of the brain such as images of brain activity directly to educational application is indeed difficult in many cases.”
I found the slightly chunked-down research goals of the report to be the most useful element.

1. Understanding the Development of Structured Representations
e.g. examining development of phonology in children
2. Understanding Complexity through Models
e.g. Cognitive linguists have analyzed how mental models function in human communication and
learning (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) [One of my favourite books actually)
3. Creation of Longitudinal Databases

The report promotes better teacher education, more interdisciplinary research, and “creating educational engineers.” The last item jumped out at me because I am an ex-engineer now working in education and the way of thinking in engineering and teaching is generally very different, even at the engineering university where I work. I’m not completely convinced that we can apply the same kind of precise mathematical thinking to education, but as a metaphor it may be useful.
The report suggest that “They will have expertise at translating or applying findings from cognitive science and neuroscience to learning in classrooms and other educational settings.”
It’s a nice idea and one that seems worth investigating.
A useful suggestion in this report is ” Asking Grant Holders to Use Shared Measures in their Studies”. There is such wastage and replication within all areas of research because of a lack of standardization. Of course, academic and research freedom is useful, but so too is standardization!

***

Overall, I didn’t find this report to be useful. It seems to be written as a consensus report trying to bring together researchers in different areas under a common banner of MBE. Perhaps this is useful in sharing research findings and combining different findings. At this point in my reading in this area, it wasn’t really a useful article. Perhaps if it could be chunked into smaller bites, it might be better.

Dynamic Learning
by Robert B. Dilts & Todd A. Epstein
Because I have been a teacher for almost 20 years, Dynamic Learning is an NLP book that I have been meaning to read for a long time. Such a great title! That’s exactly what every teacher wants to see in their own classroom – dynamic learning happening as the students are engaged and learning content and strategies that will enrich their lives. Like many NLP books, Dynamic Learning is the transcript of a seminar and while this does add a certain sense that the reader can experience the ‘feeling’ of the seminar, this is one book that I felt could have done with a lot of editing. In some sections, the demonstrations seem to go on far longer than useful and they were clearly more useful in the shared physical space than they appear on the written page.
The blurb on the back of the book says that “The authors describe a multitude of ways to make learning fun, easy, and effective.”  That’s a big goal and while the authors have provided some extremely useful advice in some areas, the book would have benefited from some more background information and statistical support as well as cutting down of the long demonstration transcripts.
Chapter 1 (The Fundamentals of Dynamic Learning) is essentially a short summary of NLP from the authors’ perspective including Dilts’ neurological levels model, a good introduction to strategies, and a kinesthetic approach to creating good learning states in the classroom through posture, gestures, and eye movements. For people already familiar with NLP, it seems brief, but undoubtedly it will be not enough for people who are not familiar with NLP, highlighting one of the difficulties of targeting an NLP-based book at a more generally area such as education.
Chapter 2 (Remembering Names) and Chapter 3 (Memory Strategies) offer some useful strategies, but they could have been greatly reduced in length. On the other hand, the long elicitation of these strategies given in the transcripts of the demonstrations may be interesting to NLP modellers or even teachers who are interested in modelling other skills important in learning. Chapter 4 explores how people can improve their senses (Visual, auditory, and kinesthetic) through simple exercises and also briefly examines submodalities.
Chapter 5 provides one of the better ideas in this book. It details how effective strategies can be transferred between two people. For example, two teachers or two students may have different strategies for achieving a task. By eliciting and sharing the goals of each person, and looking at their evidence procedures and operations, it potentially becomes possible to learn a strategy from a more effective learner. Combined with the sensory distinctions of NLP, this simple idea is very powerful.
Chapter 6 is an overly long account of the spelling strategy. The long transcriptions which bring the chapter to 57 pages (!) would have been better presented in the form of standard prose. Perhaps the core question that I kept asking myself is whether this book is about modelling or about the sharing of the results of modelling. From the point of view of the teacher who wants to use the spelling strategy, all the detail is unnecessary. For the dedicated NLP modeller, it certainly provides insight, but still seems far overpresented. The book seems to wander between modelling (which can be seen to be the core of NLP) and presenting useful things for teachers (the trail of techniques which results from this modelling).
As a language teacher and language learner, I was particularly interested in Chapter 7 (Learning Language). It introduces the NLP idea of second position modelling, stepping into the shoes of an expert speaker of the language and beginning to take on their gestures, beliefs and eventually language. In my own classrooms in Japan, this is something that would be very beneficial to students since their own highly-defined (if unconscious) Japanese identity is so strong that it tends to stop students from modelling non-Japanese. I found the rest of the chapter to be less useful. The obstacle course and other activities can be viewed as a repackaging of the classic TPR (total physical response) methodology introduced by Asher in the 1970s. The activities are useful, but this chapter adds little new to language teaching.
Chapter 8 provides some useful tips for increasing reading speed including the use of peripheral vision and the reduction of subvocalization.
Chapter 9 (Creative Writing) was my favourite in the book, and it provides some excellent ideas for using connectives (e.g. because, therefore, after, while …) as prompts for writing. On page 308, the authors do something that I always see as one of Robert Dilts’ great strengths – they combine several tools to create a more powerful tool or model. In the table below, they combine connectives with perceptual positions, representational systems and time frames to create a series of prompts that will help any stalled creative writer, or even an already active writer!

For example, the writer can start off with any sentence such as:

I read a book today.

and then use one item from each column to continue something like the following:

I read a book today because I saw that it was raining outside. Therefore, we heard the sound of the mice as they ran through the ceiling like little robots gone haywire. After they had sufficiently un-nerved us, you turned to me and felt my heart, how it was beating much too fast. etc.

Chapter 10 offers some useful tips on assessment and how to deal with ‘resistance to learning’. The book also has some appendices which offer worksheets and some more background on Dilts’ neurological levels model and how it relates to Batesons’ levels of learning. This latter material could probably have been usefully presented at the beginning of the book to frame the authors’ important underlying idea that the most important thing is to learn is ‘how to learn’. When students can learn to learn and to take control of that learning, that is when we could truly get Dynamic Learning. While this book has some good ideas, there may be too much unessential material and too little signalling for the average busy teacher to get much out of it, and someday I would like to see a new Robert Dilts book where he refines the ideas of this book for an audience of teachers who could really use it to create dynamic learning in their classrooms and beyond.
 
 

From Coach to Awakener
by Robert Dilts

In this book, Robert Dilts uses his model of Neurological Levels as a comprehensive base for advice and exercises for personal and business coaches. The book is structured around this model, so I have shown a brief outline in the table below.

As can be seen from the rightmost column in the table, the book is structured completely around the neurological levels. While the model has been criticized by some as not being a true NLP model (e.g. Andrew Bradbury in this post and in various other articles on his site; also John Grinder in his book, Whispering in the Wind; also see Michael Hall’s article for more details on the tricky and rather sensitive area of ‘logical levels’), this does not detract from the fact that thousands of NLP practitioners use Dilts’ model very effectively in working with clients. Logically, I do agree with Bradbury and Grinder that the model does not follow the classical mathematical idea of sets and levels, but I have found it extremely useful in my own work. At the very least, the Neurological Levels model provides a series of valuable filters or maps with which to view the territory. More importantly for the purpose of this book, the model also provides a very useful way of analyzing the different ways that a coach can help a client. Or perhaps, I should say Coach with a capital ‘C’ because this is a useful distinction that Dilts maintains throughout the book. A ‘coach’ helps a client to improve at the level of behaviours, whereas a ‘Coach’ works with the client on all levels.

While there are useful exercises and advice for all of the Coach levels, the ones that stood out for me most were those at the level of Mentor (Beliefs and Values) and Awakener (Spirit). Having read quite a few of Dilts’ books recently, it seems to me that he is making the greatest contributions to NLP in the two areas of belief change (Mentor) and awakening people to the wider community of which they are a part (Awakener).

Chapter 4 (Mentoring) offers useful processes for role modelling, aligning values with vision and actions, and putting values into actions. It also supports the important idea that establishing good practices or habits is an important part of the formation of positive long term beliefs and values. This chapter also links coaching to important NLP techniques such as reframing and  uses this to introduce useful processes such as “Helping Critics to Be Advisors.”

Chapter 6 (Awakening) is a valuable contribution to Coaching. For Dilts, awakening is at the level of Spirit, a response to questions such as “what is bigger than you that you are part of” and he describes awakening in the following manner:

The results of awakening are frequently a renewed sense of purpose and meaning, expanded awareness, clear perception and emotional and physical revitalization…. Awakening frequently has to do with reconnecting with our motivations at the deepest level. Consequently, awakenings usually accompany significant transitions in our personal and professional lives.

He ties this idea well to older NLP ideas such as uptime and downtime and the importance of having good communication with the unconscious mind. Similarly, he uses Gregory Bateson’s idea of double binds to show how a Coach can set up positive double binds in which the client can move up to a higher level of learning. In a double bind, the client effectively receives a message such as “If you change, you are a good person… if you don’t change, you are a good person.” By setting up the positive double bind at the Identity level, the client tries to resolve the bind by moving to a higher level of learning and can thus solve their own problem. The chapter finishes with a nice exercise which walks through Bateson’s levels of learning (from Level 0 up to Level III, and Dilts’ additional Level IV).

In the conclusion to the book, there is also a fine exercise for the Coach himself or herself to develop and align their skills at all six levels.

There is an awful lot of material in this book and although I have tried many of the exercises, there is much much more to be returned to, and this book would make a good reference book on the shelf of any coach – a volume to be returned to occasionally when a client’s issue was proving difficult to resolve. By using Dilts Neurological Levels model, it is possible to understand what ‘level’ the issue is stuck at, and to possibly use some of the processes in the book or variants of them to achieve a breakthrough at that level and beyond.