Re-teaching the ‘3rd person ‘s’
Give individual learners cards with words and the letter ‘s’ on them that make a
sentence, eg. ‘She likes pizza.’
Then give one person a card with a question mark on it and another one a card
with ‘Does’.
Tell the person with the question mark to push away the person with the ‘full stop’
and the one with ‘Does’ to push away the ‘s’.
Ask the learners what they feel in this situation.
Then repeat with the ‘full stop’ replacing the ‘question mark’ and the ‘s’ pushing
away the ‘Does’.
This is one way to help primarily kinaesthetic learners to grasp the concept of the ‘s’ being
replaced by the ‘does’ as they experience it with their bodies rather than abstractly.
Re-teaching contractions
Kinaesthetic learners fine it difficult to understand contractions as the ‘disappearing’
letters make very little sense to them.
Write out the words: ‘It is’ on a card.
Fold the card over to hide the ’I’ and add a paper clip to act as the apostrophe.
The card can then be folded and unfolded so that learners can ‘see’ where the missing
letter is.
Re-teaching supply and demand
Give five students in the class cards which say ‘Employer’ on them.
Give the rest cards which say ‘Job seeker’.
Tell the job seekers to try and get a job with one of the employers.
Ask the class what they did and how they felt.
Collect all the cards.
Give the ‘Job seeker’ cards to five students and ‘Employer’ cards to the rest.
Ask them again to find a job.
Analyse what the differences were the students and if their behaviour changed
when the supply and demand was at different levels.
Sensory-acuity exercises
Becoming aware of the less used representational channels can help learners to stretch
out of their comfort zones and develop new learning strategies. It will also increase their
ability to perceive and remember material they have learned in more than one way.
Michael Grinder points out that ‘What we have learned is often not as important as how
we have stored the information in our brains.’ This means that if we can remember
something using a visual, auditory and the kinaesthetic channel, then we have more
chance of accessing it when we need it. These short activities can be incorporated into
any classroom to help learners stretch out of their preferred styles.
Visual acuity
Learners close their eyes and describe another person in the classroom to their partners.
They open their eyes to see how well their description matches the person. This helps
learners practice noticing things around them more accurately.
Auditory acuity
Learners work in pairs. One person makes a sound while walking through the room. The
other, eyes closed, follows their partner’s sounds. In a room full of learners trying this
exercise, it can be a challenge. This teaches learners to listen to one sound in a room filled
with other noises.
Kinaesthetic acuity
Learners work in pairs and write words on each other’s backs with their fingers. To extend
the exercise, have learners then write the word they understood on the back of another
person. This translates kinaesthetic feelings into understanding written language.
Rapport
Rapport in the classroom is one of the most important elements in getting a message
across. NLP has specific techniques to learn how to establish and maintain rapport. These
include strategies such as matching body language and posture, volume and speed of
voice, use of register and slang. Other factors can include distance of speakers and eye
contact. This can be easily demonstrated in the following exercise.
The Three Minute Exercise
Work in groups of three: Person A, Person B and an Observer.
The Observer needs to sit where he/she can easily see Person B.
Person A begins to tell Person B a story.
Person B matches body language and posture until he/she gets a signal (after one
minute) from the Observer.
At this point Person B begins to mismatch.
After a minute of mismatching, the Observer again gives Person B a signal at
which point B begins to match again and Person A continues talking for one more minute.
Discuss what happened in the groups.
The groups in most cases will notice that A will find it more difficult to continue talking
when B has begun to mismatch. It might be that A will look around for someone else to
talk to or simply stop until B begins to match body language again. This activity is
important to show how we can consciously help learners by matching their body
language and distract them when we stop doing this.
These basic techniques can be easily learned. However, they need to be practiced on a
daily basis. In the everyday stressful situation of the classroom, it is easy to forget that our
learners may be experiencing the world differently than we do, or feel we don’t
understand them. For educators who have become used to working with rapport and a
mix of methods, they notice positive results very quickly and gain the motivation to
continue with these strategies. In the end, they find that changing their own behaviour
pays off, as they expend less energy to get the same results. With these strategies,
improvement will be more easily achieved and concepts understood more readily.
