In many contexts it will be difficult to pace the strategies of each individual — especially in large group situations where time is limited. When addressing groups it is important to gear your presentation to include the three major representational systems. Make sure you can present your ideas through each representational system, so that people can hear it, see it and get a feel for it. Being able to communicate your material through each of these different systems is what we referred to as "redundancy" earlier. It greatly decreases chances of miscommunication as well as assuring that you are presenting the material in a representational form that will pace, at some point, everyone in your audience. Lectures and discussions (Ae), demonstrations, diagrams, written outlines and other visual aids (Ve), and experiential exercises and examples that involve audience participation (Ke), tend to make the most well rounded presentational format. Using anecdotes, questions, examples and directive vocabulary (involving sensory specific predicates) that require an individual to access internal experiences in all of his systems will help to insure that you reach all of the members of your class or audience.
Organizing students into various study groups of different orientations, groups that pace different learning strategies, can accelerate group learning processes. One group with an emphasis on discussion, another using experiential exercises, and another concentrating on observation, would be one way of doing this on a general scale.
4.411 Anchoring and Reinforcement in Education.
Anchoring is important in the learning process. The establishment of bad anchors and negative feedback loops is one of the major problems within institutionalized education. For many students tests become anchors for stress or anxiety, and if these are not utilized positively in recall or creativity strategies, then chances are they will inhibit test performance. Because many people are unable to access their resource strategies in this context tests are not a meaningful indicator of how much they have learned. Teachers who use group relaxation exercises before tests or who establish a group resource anchor that can be fired off at the beginning of the test find that test scores improve for many students.
By pairing learning situations with positive 4–tuples (by incorporating jokes and anecdotes, for instance) teachers can strategically program learning to be a positive experience.
In the example given earlier in this section, the teacher who had her slow student learn braille bypassed any negative anchors that he may have associated with learning algebra visually. For some learners simply sitting in a classroom or looking at a blackboard is an automatic negative anchor. We have known people with excellent strategies for mathematics who, when presented with a "word problem" as opposed to an equation, don't access their most effective strategy, because they process problems in word form with a different strategy.
A person in one of our workshops had taken beginning French a total of five times over a number of years, failing the tests each time. He was not a poor student and did well in his other classes. He kept taking French because he needed a foreign language to graduate, and he figured that surely, because he had taken it so many times before, he would eventually pass the class. Besides, his ability to use it outside the classroom kept improving, and certainly this was an indicator that he was learning. Utilizing the process of transderivational search, we discovered that at the beginning of each of his tests, when he was handed the test sheet, an extremely negative 4–tuple would be anchored up, a memory of his first French teacher, whom he despised. This would, of course, short circuit his strategies for recall. As he grew anxious at the thought of failing the test again, the two negative experiences would form a two point loop, each anchoring the other. The effect snowballed such that he could not adequately complete the test. Because this had happened at every test, it also became a self–fulfilling prophecy. Every time he studied for or took a French test an internal dialogue would be triggered that said something like, "Oh no, what if I fail this test … I probably will". Because this kind of dialogue and his negative feelings were solidly anchored to the test context he was continually blocked from accessing his usually effective resource strategy.
His condition was resolved by integrating the negative 4–tuple and the dialogue with other resource experiences, and by giving him a well conditioned anchor for relaxation and for eliciting his recall strategy.
4.412 Polarity Strategies and Negative Motivation Strategies in Learning.
Negative kinesthetic experiences are not always a block to learning or to accessing resources. Many people access their resources only when the situation makes them grow stressful or anxious. Some become motivated by harsh auditory commands and hard looks. There are students who put off an assignment until they say to themselves, "I'll never be able to do this on time now," to which they immediately have a polarity response and do the assignment easily and well.
People who operate best under pressure may have a difficult time operating where there is no pressure (or "challenge"), because the situation does not access the representations that trigger their most effective resource strategies.
These strategies are not limited, of course, to people in the context of education but occur in many other contexts and tasks. Very often people who have negative motivation or polarity strategies have a high tension level and may end up with stress related physical ailments common in this culture. We will discuss these strategies and how to deal with them in more detail in the Design Section of this book.
4.413 Feedback
It will be important for anyone involved in the process of teaching to tune their sensory channels to pick up feedback from students. Non–verbal cues like head nods, breathing changes and other systematic minor body movements will indicate which people are following the presentation and when. Observing eye movements, tonal shifts and other easily available accessing cues will let you know which systems and strategies students are using.
The typical written test is only one way of getting feedback for how much students are picking up (though probably the most common). It is also, as we have shown previously, limited in both the kind and reliability of the feedback it gives. For example, it reveals nothing about the strategy a student is employing (excepting, in some cases, to an NLP trained teacher, depending on the type of written test). Many students who take foreign language courses are able to pass written exams with A's or B's but learn little of the spoken language. One important task of education is for students to learn to achieve the designated outcomes of learning assignments. Too often what happens is that written test performance becomes the primary measuring process and outcome of the educational institution.
Setting up tests that provide useful, accurate feedback is crucial to the educational process. To do this educators must decide what kind of outcome to test for. One of the initial distinctions in outcomes to make is whether (1) you have a specific set of contents you must teach — that is, do you have to teach X number of people N amount of information or (2) you want to teach learning skills specifically targeted for the subject matter of your courses. In the first case you will want to pace and utilize your students' existing learning strategies and feed in the content you want to teach. In the second case you will want to install in your students the strategy most appropriate for the task or behavior in question. There is a wise saying which states that "If you give a man fish you have fed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish you have fed him for the rest of his life." NLP provides the technology with which to make this generative how process explicit.