NLP and Education

NLP is a set of beliefs, attitudes and skills that enable people to achieve more than they could previously conceive. NLP is an educational model, so its application to teaching and learning provides teachers, tutors and parents with a wealth of techniques to help others learn elegantly and effectively.

When people fail to understand or change in some way, it is not that they are broken but that they are uneducated in how to use their brain and often have an impoverished internal world.  By enriching this world people are able to learn faster and more creatively.

Many of us are now aware of research into left and right brain function, learning styles and accelerating learning.  NLP encompasses all of these areas and moves them beyond theory into application in the classroom.  NLP uses language in powerful and elegant ways to ensure students really understand and are motivated to explore and learn more.  Teaching becomes easier and more enjoyable when you have the skills, behaviours, and attitudes of NLP to help you.

Richard Bandler says;
"Our greatest asset for the future is our children.  We are not investing in our greatest asset.  We need to pay our teachers better, train them in learning strategies, and reward them for success.  After all knowledge is developing at an accelerating rate, to the point where people have to be able to learn as fast as they can.  Teachers need to teach children to learn things quickly...  We have to get people into the right state of learning only what works and not worrying about mistakes because there is no time."

The situation is urgent!  In the UK  27% of the population is functionally illiterate, 40 % of people have trouble with numeracy so it's imperative that we find new ways to teach people quickly.  With the right skills we can teach people to spell in less than 20 minutes, figure out what is stopping someone reading well and put it right and find ways to make even so called "boring" subjects fun to learn.  We can also do more than this.  We can change people’s beliefs so they know how brilliant they can become and build confidence as they gain competence in a subject.

There are many skilled and experienced teachers working tirelessly to educate our young people.  It’s not about a group of  "experts" telling them what they should be doing in the classroom but taking the best teachers we have and giving them even more tools to utilise to improve learning.  Teaching is becoming increasingly challenging with disruption in the classroom and increasing emphasis on targets and paperwork.  NLP can really benefit teachers themselves in managing their own state, beliefs and attitudes and most of all maintaining a sense of humour!

As the momentum for NLP in teaching and learning increases, we are developing action research to share good practice and give other teachers and parents the opportunity to learn from the experience of others, just what they can do.  Some of the results are amazing.  Here are a few examples; students who have completed 2 years work in 25 weeks,  pupils who have learning differences such as dyspraxia or dyslexia having reading scores above their so called ‘normal’ peers, and children whose spelling improved by 72% in 3 weeks.  This is what happens when you teach people how to use the rich resources of their own brain!
 

Kate Benson

International Director of Education for the society of NLP