Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) has allowed me to see professional development from a different perspective. I believe teachers by the nature of their position of authority get used to teaching in isolation behind closed doors. However, in this period of major change in the number of students, curriculum, teacher training, and hiring policies, there is a need for teachers to consider new ways of looking at their own teaching in order to adapt to the new conditions. Especially in Japan, where the sensei is generally regarded as the unquestioned embodiment of knowledge and authority, willingness to analyze how one teaches and why one teaches that way can be beneficial.
A key concept which I have found particularly helpful because it is easy to remember and apply is: There is no failure, only feedback. Not only students, but teachers have a fear of failure. We take everything we do so seriously as if it were a matter of life or death. In other words, we take any form of feedback personally, whether it comes in the form of a test score or a colleague's comment. We tend to feel bad about failure and good about success. Since we put such high stakes on how we are evaluated or judged, we often avoid a whole area of learning which may be one of the most effective ways of learning. We are missing opportunities to learn from feedback. Feedback does not tell us that we are good or bad. It simply gives us valuable information. The evaluation or judgment comes from us. What would happen if we simply look at the results whatever they are and consider them as valuable stepping stones on the road to understanding how to adjust and refine what we are doing to get to our goals?
If we develop an attitude of studying results and feedback in general without, or at least delaying, getting emotional, we can not only learn quicker and more efficiently, but we can collaborate with colleagues and make our learning even richer. We can begin by simply sorting out descriptions of what happened during the class from opinions of the value of what happened.
Let me give an example of the typical way we perceive feedback and then describe an alternative way suggested by NLP. Teachers tend to react to new ideas about teaching with a good or bad label. Once I heard a story about a supervisor talking to a student teacher after her lesson. The supervisor said the students enjoyed the lesson as they had enthusiastically participated in the class games. The student teacher immediately felt good and believed her lesson was indeed an overwhelming success. However, the supervisor was not through commenting. The next remark floored the trainee. "What did the students learn in this lesson?" She suddenly felt sick as her instinctive reaction was that the lesson was a miserable failure.
What did she remember about the supervisor's comments after the meeting? The remark which the trainee interpreted to mean her teaching was bad. The student teacher simplistically changed her approach next time due to the emotion tied to that comment. She changed without really understanding the comment. As things turned out, she needed a year to recover from this experience and eventually gave up teaching. Ironically, the question the supervisor posed was not made to spite her, but rather to help her realize that the lesson was all right, but could have been even more effective by establishing a closer connection between the games and learning the target language.
Now if this student teacher had concentrated on what the supervisor was saying instead of quickly (and prematurely) labeling things as positive or negative, she could have had more time to reflect on the remark before taking it personally. "The major key to this process (responding to criticism) is to maintain the distance between yourself and the criticism. This keeps you from automatically feeling bad, and allows you to calmly evaluate the meaning of the criticism before responding to it" (Andreas, C. and Andreas, 5., p.48). Thus, the student teacher would have had more useful information about what the supervisor had observed. Possibly she would have felt less discouraged by the remark which was not intended to be negative. Delaying the desire to evaluate things as good or bad might have led to greater willingness in the future to listen and learn from what others notice and say. Getting multi-perspective views on the same event will not only deepen our understanding, but heighten our awareness.
I have often observed teachers dwelling on their interpretations of comments in pre-service and in-service training, questions and comments during and after presentations, and in informal conversations among teachers. NLP can help teachers become aware of the danger of seeing only failure and ceasing to see the feedback that can help them improve. Each time Edison did an experiment and got something other than what he wanted, he called it simply "the answer to another question." That there is no failure liberates the teacher to look more closely at the feedback and "the more ways you have of understanding, the more possibilities open up for you, and the more your abilities expand" (Bandler, p.91).
References
- Andreas, C. ,& Andreas, S. (1989). Heart of the Mind. Moab, Utah: Real People Press.
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Bandler, R. (1985). Using Your Brain for a Change. Moab, Utah: Real People Press.
- I would like to thank Tim Murphey and Jim Ronald for their insightful comments on earlier drafts.