Articles

In July 2024, the NLP for Education team were excited to give a presentation at the UK Festival of Education. The festival is a huge professional development event for the UK education sector with over 500 speakers, 5,000+ attendees and around 20 presentations per hour!...

Bees dance, dolphins sing, and humans speak; put it all together and what have you got? Articulate mammals using sophisticated communication systems! And how well do we humans use communication? Hitler was a genius at creating disquiet sufficient to instigate two world wars. Martin Luther King was a genius at creating and articulating a ‘dream’, a message of love and kindness, to which we still aspire today. And the Monty Python team were geniuses at creating some of the best comedy script writing of their time; their Flying Circus is considered an evolutionary moment in TV comedy, with which I would agree, and it still makes me laugh to this day....

Almost everything we as human beings invent in order to create culture has biases. Formal education therefore has biases that affect the way we see and understand certain aspects of ourselves, of others and of life in general....

Retirement brings with it the opportunity to reflect, to take account and above all to ask the question, So, what was that all about? I retired from a career in education that included working as a classroom English teacher, heading up a large department, working as a senior leader and, finally, training teachers. In all that time – nearly 40 years – I worked passionately, with great conviction and ever driven by what I see and understand now to have been an unconscious but unarticulated pro-social intent. However, whether because of lack of time (I’m sure many teachers can understand this one) or just knowing that I was just good at my job, I never took the opportunity to fully...

If you turn on any talk radio station in the morning you hear all sorts of intelligent people raising their concerns about the academic impact that missed schooling has had on children. Yet some children and young people may have flourished in this year of absence from the classroom....

Training to be a teacher can be an emotional roller coaster: lesson triumphs can quickly melt away following classroom car crashes and dismal failures can be rapidly followed by the sunny uplands of success. And of course, a persistent flow of well-intentioned advice from seasoned colleagues, each of whom is operating from their own experientially developed model of learning, can sometimes add to a disintegrating sense of self based on thoughts such as “Now why didn’t I do that? Why didn’t I see that?” and “I must be so stupid not to have thought of that!” Advice implies a better way, a way that, in many trainees’ experience, is understandably absent from their practice. So, what is the alternative? Just...

I waited on the start line, my race number tied to my handlebars, my heart pounding with the nerves as I looked to my right and left, to the riders who I believed outclassed me by a country mile. I looked at the crowd in the arena and found my coach. He drew a circle in the air with his finger and I remembered his training. I took a tiny step forward into my circle of excellence. I felt immediately taller, faster, more capable. The horn sounded and I pushed my pedals hard, making a great start out of the arena....

Imagine if all children could learn NLP just like ABC and 123! What would it be like if children learned, from a very young age, about the connections between their brain, body and feelings? Whether I’m working in a classroom or in a private one-to-one setting, NLP magically slips into my language and methodology. It’s wonderful for the children I teach, and for keeping this grown-up in a mindful, grounded, desired-outcome-focused state!...

When I started my teaching career in the early 2000s in Austrian junior high school, programmes for children with special needs and for those who were less gifted had been around for quite a while. Special courses were also introduced to promote the talented ones, those who needed extra stimulus to stay happy and be the high achievers of tomorrow....

It is interesting to note that more and more families are aware of the importance of emotional intelligence. There is a lot of talk about the need to observe and regulate our emotions, to recognise emotions in others. And yes, it is important! But it’s not enough, especially if you don’t know what and how to work the core of emotional intelligence....

Picture the scene. A small, vocal child. “Waaah, waah, whaaA, whAAAAH, WHAAAAHH, WHAAAHHH!” Crying, screaming, legs thrashing, tears. “I don’t want to!” bellowed loudly, indicating the child is not okay....

Target grades were not treated with the same level of reverence when I started my teaching career. Now, however, it is too often the case that in my first coaching session with a teen, they will introduce themselves as a number. “I am a 4 for English. I need to be a 6,” they sigh....