Neuro-Linguistic Programming in Learning and Education

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Neuro-linguistic programming gives educators the advantage of understanding what motivates students and adapting how they teach to suit them.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming in Learning and Education
Reading time 4 minutes
Reading Time: 4 minutes

Neuro-linguistic programming gives educators the advantage of understanding what motivates students and adapting how they teach to suit them.

What makes the human brain process and understand language? Where in the brain are words we learn stored? Why do words come to mind when we sometimes forget them? People who speak more than one language, what prevents them from interfering with each other? All these processes are thanks to neurolinguistics, studying how language is represented in the brain. This area studies how and where the brain stores language knowledge in its different presentations: spoken, signed, or written. Although intertwined with psycholinguistics, which is the study of understanding and producing language in its spoken, written, and signed forms, neurolinguistics focuses on the brain’s mechanisms.

The brain stores information in neural networks that connect to the parts that control movements, such as speech, and internal and external sensations, such as sound. Knowledge or skill learning occurs when new connections are made, and existing ones are strengthened.

In the 1970s, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, theorized that thought patterns explain successful people’s achievements within these brain connections. For years, Bandler and Grinder analyzed education, business, and whatever successful therapy people had in common, including communication habits. At this last point, they realized that successful people involve body language, and that is how researchers began to create thought models to improve their physical and emotional states. This is known as neuro-linguistic programming (NLP).

What is Neuro-linguistic programming?

Neuro-linguistic programming is a way to change a person’s thoughts and habits to be successful through perception, behavior, and communication techniques. It is a pseudoscientific approach based on neural connections, specifically, on how they process language. It has become popular among alternative approaches to personal development or self-help. According to the NPL Empowerment Partnership page, NLP is “learning the language of your own brain” or “a user manual.” It is based on three parts: “neuro,” which is the neurological system, “linguistics,” which is the message, both verbal as well as non-verbal, that is sent to the brain; and “programming,” which is how the mind processes these messages.

People learn through sensory experiences, so they send a message to the brain that will interpret the information based on these experiences. Neuro-linguistic programming then tries to detect and modify the unconscious limitations of each person within their mental connections. For example, suppose a person has associated broccoli with something unpleasant because, in childhood, his parents forced him to eat it before playing as an adult. In that case, he will avoid eating anything that contains this vegetable. Although this perception does not reflect his current reality or is based on taste, as long as it does not alter the mental connection he has about broccoli, his dislike will persist. Neuro-linguistic programming will help to modify these limitations.

There is currently a debate on whether neuro-linguistic programming is a pseudoscience or not due to the lack of empirical evidence. Its success has been measured only through testimonials from those who experienced it. Part of the debate stems from early attempts to evaluate NLP as the researchers found no link between mental processing, language, and eye movement. This result left a stigma on neuro-linguistic programming, leaving the field with the need to solve this problem by participating more fully in research.

Neuro-linguistic programming in education

Knowing about neuro-linguistic programming gives educators the advantage of understanding what motivates students and adapting how they teach learning to suit them. This area offers learning strategies that help students develop skills for more optimal learning and provides teachers with tools to deal with challenging behaviors.

Two neuro-linguistic programming techniques, perceptual positioning, and presupposition are considered useful in solving various education problems. The first refers to the ability to see things from other people’s point of view. In the classroom, the teacher can perform exercises where students with different opinions are forced to adopt the other’s perspective by changing seats. This exercise generates active participation and physical movement, which triggers a change of thought much more profoundly than just asking them to see the other person’s perspective.

The presupposition, the second technique, relates to unspoken meanings in conversation. For example, when a teacher allows the students to choose between finishing the questions right now or doing another activity first, such as brainstorming. It is understood that both actions must be completed but giving them a choice results in them concentrating more on the job and not defying instructions.

Although they seem like simple things that the teacher may already be using, a deeper understanding of NLP will help them gain more skills to learn better. Although much research lacks neuro-linguistic programming and education, in 2003, two researchers submitted an article entitled “Neuro-linguistic programming: it’s potential for learning and teaching in a formal education,” in which they discussed how it is useful for learning.

For Paul Tosey and Jane Mathison, the authors of the article, neuro-linguistic programming assumes that all teachers influence the way students learn due to their use of space and language, even if they are not aware of it.

Some of the main points of the investigation are:

  • To have a good teacher-student relationship, you need mutual feedback. This must be dynamic, not a transmission of information from one individual to another separate subject.

  • People, including educators, act according to the way they perceive t
    he world.

  • The representation and processing of a student’s information are reflected differently in her language and behavior.

  • Skills, beliefs, and behaviors are learned. Teaching is a process by which such habits are acquired and modified.

All communication potentially influences learning. The teacher’s language and behavior affect the student in two ways, her understanding of the subject itself and her beliefs about the world.

Because the fathers of neuro-linguistic programming, Bandler and Grinder, sought to identify what distinguishes a successful person, the area became a means of studying how people process information, build neural connections and develop skills to get results. According to the researchers, learning about the learning process results in profound teaching methods and being instructed, resulting in successful students.

For Paul Tosey and Jane Mathison, these variations ” involve changes in factors such as the abstractions that people have built which form their beliefs about learning, their vision of their own future, their constructions about themselves as learners, all linking to the images, sounds, bodily sensations, tastes and smells that seem to be such an essential part of human information processing.”

Translation by Daniel Wetta.

Paulette Delgado

This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0