NEURO - LINGUISTIC PROGRAMMING

Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is an approach to communication, personal development, and psychotherapy created by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in California, USA in the 1970s.

NLP, Teaching and Learning

NLP appears to hold much potential for teaching and learning. There are, for example, profound implications of adopting an underlying cybernetic epistemology in the practice of education. There are many possible examples of applications at the level of technique in education and training (e.g. Lyall 2002). NLP is commonly used to offer solutions to problems encountered in teaching, for example to do with classroom management.

Briefly, we might characterise an NLP approach to teaching and learning as follows:

·         The teacher- learner relationship is a cybernetic loop, a dynamic process in which meaning is constructed through reciprocal feedback; not a transmission of information from one individual to another, separate, individual.

·         People act according to the way they understand and represent the world, not according to the way the world `is' (i.e. `the map is not the territory').

·         Of prime interest in NLP are the ways in which people represent the world internally, through sensory imagery (principally visual, auditory and kinaesthetic) and language. NLP is particularly interested in the way internal representations are structured, both in themselves (e.g. the location, size, brightness etc. of visual imagery), and dynamically (e.g. as sequences). NLP assumes that the structure of internal representation shows regularities for, and is unique to, each individual.

·         NLP also assumes that there are systematic relationships between this structuring and that individual's language and behaviour. A learner's internal representations and processing are reflected, in various ways, in their language^ix and their external behaviour (e.g. non-verbal behaviour). (NLP courses train participants to observe and utilise these aspects).

·         Skills, beliefs and behaviours are all learnt (e.g. skills have corresponding sequences of internal representation, often referred to as `strategies'^x). Learning is a process through which such representations and sequences are acquired and modified.

·         An individual's capacity to learn is influenced strongly by their neuro-physiological `state' (e.g. a state of curiosity rather than a state of boredom), and by their beliefs about learning and about themselves as learners (rather obviously, beliefs that one is capable of learning and that learning is worthwhile and fun are considered more useful than their opposites). Such states and beliefs are also learnt and susceptible to change.

·         Such modification happens through communication between teacher and learner, which takes place through verbal and non-verbal channels, both consciously and unconsciously. The functioning of which human beings are conscious, and which can be controlled consciously, represents only a small proportion of total functioning.

·         All communication potentially influences leaning. Crucially, teachers' language and behaviour influence learners on at least two levels simultaneously; both their understanding of the topic in question (e.g. the dynamic structure of their internal representations), and their beliefs about the world, including about learning.^xi

·         It follows that awareness of choice about one's own language patterns and behaviour as a teacher, and sensitivity to and curiosity about their influence on and interaction with learner's internal representations, are crucial to effective teaching and learning.