Grapevine – The Blog

First let me wish you a Happy, Successful and Prosperous New Year.

This week I was talking to Kathy, a friend in the village. Since I last saw her, she has taken up teacher training as a mature student. She’s really looking forward to teaching junior school children (8-10 year olds).

I asked her what the course was like. She sighed. She has had to do a long assignment. She didn’t mind the work; it was the writing up that was causing the problem. As an experienced scientist she is used to writing.

However, it seems that her tutor is not happy with her style. It is not ‘academic’ enough. I asked Kathy what her tutor meant by that and my friend said she didn’t know but suspected it might mean ‘use longer words’.

I asked her if she had asked the tutor to give her some more useful information. She had. She had even asked her tutor to give her an example of what she meant. The tutor told her that she couldn’t do this, because if she were to show Kathy a sample she would have to do the same for all her other students or Kathy would have ‘an unfair advantage’.  So she’d have to show the example to all the other students.

I was shocked.

What did this tutor understand her responsibilities to be? Did she think she was there to make it as difficult as possible for Kathy to learn the skills she needs? And what was all that rubbish about an ‘unfair advantage’? My friend had no problem at all with all her peers seeing an example. What was causing Kathy the problem was that the other students had all recently graduated so were much more familiar with an ‘academic style’ than she was (she graduated more like 20 years ago).

(I also wondered what possible use this assignment was going to be in giving her the skills to teach children.)

Why Do People (Teachers) Do This?

I wonder if it’s because they think learning should be hard and people should struggle. Perhaps it’s because they themselves struggled, or perhaps they think people should work it out for themselves.

Or perhaps they see their job more as marking papers and catching people out rather than enabling their students to get the best possible grade.

Working It Out For Yourself

The thing about this is that it is a very nice idea, but not everyone can work everything out by themselves every time (more about how to do this next week). A moment’s thought easily illustrates the point.

Newton worked out his laws of motion himself, but it took him quite a while (many years). Einstein worked out his theory of special relativity himself, but that took him some time too and I think you’ll find both were quite clear that they couldn’t have done it without ’standing on the shoulders’ of others.

We don’t have time to work out all these key things ourselves. The job of a teacher is to give us the tools and information we need to do this. This includes drawing our attention to the relevant specifics.

Helping You To Work It Out

In preparation for my skiing holiday I bought Timothy Gallwey’s book, ‘Inner Skiing’.  I have long admired his approach to learning and coaching. He tackles this topic with great skill. He explains that the coach needs to help the learner focus their attention in the right area (or shine the light on the right area as he puts it) so that the individual can learn.

This narrows down the field but does not rob you of the experience of working it out for yourself. What it does is make learning easier and more fun.

On a personal note, if you are a skier of any level of skill I would highly recommend this book. My friends noticed quite a leap in my skiing skills this year and it was purely as a result of reading this book. (When I say ‘leap’ I don’t mean to say I was making jumps or anything like that….). More on that next week.

The neuroscience I am familiar with (and you will have read about here on many occasions if you have been getting this for a while) backs up his approach completely.

By saying that the report must be more ‘academic’ the tutor has not narrowed the field enough for my friend. (Or for me – I don’t really know what she means.) She needs to give my friend a piece of text, it can be on any subject at all, but needs to be in the correct style (whatever she thinks it is) and then ask my friend a question that will focus her attention in the right direction.

It’s Not That Easy

Of course I’m making it sound easy, but helping others to learn is a great skill. It’s very much about asking the right question. This takes a lot of thought and practice.

But It Works

I once met Timothy Gallwey. I asked him for some advice with a client we’ll call Mike. He had a student working with him for a while. The student had a very poor level of meetings skills and was also very shy. Mike wanted to help him improve his skills, but was concerned about upsetting him.

Tim suggested that Mike ask the student to identify what he thought were effective and ineffective meetings behaviours over the following two weeks.

Two week’s later Mike gave me a ring.  ‘You’ll never believe this,’ He said. ‘That student came to see me this morning and said ‘My meetings skills are really bad, can you help me?”

With not much help the student improved drastically.

As Tim explained to me, all the student needed was for his awareness in the right area to be raised. From the neuroscience we know that this means he was then getting the correct feedback in order to learn.

Poor Teaching

Just telling someone that their writing needs to be ‘more academic’ is sloppy and lazy, or it could just be a very poor level of skill. Whichever it is, it’s a very poor example to set to someone training to be a teacher.

What’s even worse is that, when asked the right question, this tutor did not give any useful information. In other words when asked what the difference was between my friend’s style and the ‘academic’ style, she did not give an answer.

It’s hard not to conclude that she doesn’t know the answer herself.

And that’s the beauty of the questioning style to assist learning. You don’t have to know the answer. Just the question. So all the tutor had to do was to provide an example and ask Kathy what she thought the difference was.

Have you ever been in the same situation as Kathy? Let me know. What did you do about it?

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You may be interested in our:

Teleseminar on Dealing With Poor Performance

12 January (or the recording if you can’t make the date)

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• What poor performance is
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Once you have signed up we’ll send you all the details. If you come along and don’t find it useful, we’ll completely refund your money, just as we will with any product or service you are not happy with.

You will probably remember the experiments carried out by Walter Mischel about 40 years ago at Stanford University. He gave a group of four-year-olds a marshmallow and promised them another one if they had not eaten the first one when he returned 15 minutes later.

About one in three of the children managed the task successfully.

Enron?

My favourite was the boy who was given a biscuit made up of two halves stuck together with some kind of icing. As soon as the experimenter had gone, separated the two halves and licked the icing, then stuck the biscuit back together again. We wonder if he later became a senior manager at Enron.

In follow up studies Mischel discovered that the ability to wait, or to ‘delay gratification’, is about the most effective predictor of success.  It out performs IQ by a long way.

Why Does Waiting For A Marshmallow Predict Success?

In a lecture I attended recently at the NeuroLeadership Summit, Matthew Lieberman, Ph. D, who works in the field Social Neuroscience, looked at these experiments and explained what was going on in the brain as far as his research shows.

Your Options

When you are trying to resist some kind of immediate reward in favour of a long-term benefit you have various options:

Distraction – Focus your attention elsewhere on something that will keep you occupied. This works because you only have a small amount of space in your working memory to think about anything, so using it up with one thing means you have no space for anything else.  Unfortunately, thought, next time you face the same situation you have to do the same thing again so there is no learning. It also impairs your thinking skills at the time (and even later).

Suppression – (The ’stiff upper lip’ here in the UK.) This can be effective, but is quite hard work. It also increases stress.

Reappraisal – This can work well and give you a new insight into a situation. However, it only works if you believe it. If you do, it can work in other situations too.

Detachment – This can have radically positive or negative connotations, depending on what you do and how you do it.

Walter Mischel was able to teach the children a technique that was effective. He got them to imagine a picture frame around the marshmallow and think of it as a picture. At the age of four, your prefrontal cortex has not developed enough to come up with this idea, but is developed enough to learn it and put it into practice.

The Problem You Face

This is the activation of your amygdala. It’s a part of your brain that is activated when you feel a strong emotion. It’s like your personal alarm system. The more activated it is, the stronger the emotion. So the key is to find a technique that somehow reduces the activation (or turns off the alarm), once you have been alerted.

It turns out that the part of your brain able to do this is the Right Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex (RVLPFC). In someone who is good at keeping their emotions under control, the activation of this area and the amygdala behaves rather like a seesaw. As the RVLPFC goes up, so the activation in the amygdala goes down.

It’s something you can learn to do.

What is even more interesting about this area is that it suppresses other things too. It’s the area of the brain affected by Tylanol or Ibuprofen that reduces physical pain.

So what Dr Lieberman and his colleagues found was that if you are suppressing one kind of thing others are also suppressed.

Feeling Worse

It’s also offers and explanation as to why why, when you are ill or in pain, you are more likely to feel lonely or upset. Or conversely when you are lonely or upset, pain is likely to be worse then when you are happy and cheerful.

Your Grandmother Knew This

As is often the case, it’s the kind of thing most of use ‘knew’ anyway, but it’s good to have a scientific explanation that shows us why it’s a good idea to visit someone who is ill or upset and cheer them up.

Inhibiting Your Response

A friend of mine is currently, very bravely, undergoing treatment to get over her fear of going to Tesco’s (a supermarket here in the UK). Now you may be thinking that you don’t like going there either, but for her, it’s a really serious problem. However, she has been going and conquering her fear. What she’s been doing in effect is training her RVLPFC to take control and it should and she’s making excellent progress.

What’s really interesting is that if I got you to inhibit a physical response; that would also inhibit any emotional responses that you have, because these are all run by that same part of your brain. Once it starts inhibiting it acts on everything. So if you inhibit your desire to hit someone, you will start to feel less angry. Hitting them won’t do that. If you reduce your feelings of anger, it will be easier not to hit them.

Labelling Helps

It seems that labelling the emotions you feel activates the RVPRC and prompts it into suppressing unhelpful emotions. Interestingly this is more effective for men than it is for women.

Dr Lieberman thought this might be because women talk about their emotions more than men in general. I think most of us would agree to that. What is particularly interesting is that, when asked, people say that they don’t think talking about how they will feel will help. But when he measured the activation of the amygdala in their brains, it clearly did help.

So come in guys, tell us how you feel! It really does help.