SEMINAR: "Reaching and teaching students effectively"

Reaching and teaching students effectively.

By Professor James Duncan

This seminar was in charge of Professor James Duncan who is specialized on the study of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP).  His lecture is based on this approach. I could remember some concepts of NLP but I wanted to have a clearer view of it. According to NLP, our mind and body are interconnected and we are responsible for the models of the world that we create. In language teaching, NLP is concerned with the study of how we communicate with others and how we communicate with ourselves.

If we trained ourselves in NLP, we would learn how to get rapport with anybody, we would know how to become flexible in our communication, in fact we would be able to use language effectively.

Jamie said that NLP can help any person who wants to improve the way in which they live and develop an understanding of how to maximize their potential.

  Then we made a quiz to see what kind of teaching practice we carried out and how NLP could help us.  

Jamie also talked about the different ways in which our students may perceive the world through their senses. That is why within the same class we may have students that are visual, auditory or kinaesthetic. Each of them has a physical location in the brain where the experience is sent, processed, and stored. Our assimilation of this input can transform the information into something different from the original. What we later recall is a representation or model of that what our sensory organs transmitted to us.

  We saw the possible ways in which visual, auditory and kinaesthetic students learn. We had to think of suitable activities for those learners´ needs.

   I found this workshop highly interested and I learnt many new things about NLP. It was such a dynamique seminar. I think it is useful for teachers because we need to know what happens in our students´ brains every time we are in front of the classroom. We need to encourage students to become aware of what their own learning style is so as to have a better learning experience when studying a language.